Thursday, 4 August 2022

THURSDAY, 4 AUGUST 2022

THURSDAY, 4 AUGUST 2022

The Deputy Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.

karakia/prayers

karakia/prayers

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Te Atua mana, te ‘akameitaki atu nei matou iākoe no te tākinga meitaki ta‘au i riringi mai ki runga ia matou. Te ‘akaruke nei matou i to matou tu tangata. Te ‘akamā‘ara nei matou i te Ariki Vaine, e te pure nei matou kia arataki koe i ta matou ‘uri‘uri‘anga manako, kia rave matou i ta matou ‘anga‘anga i roto i teia ngutu‘are, na roto i te pakari, te tuatua tika, e te ‘ākono‘anga meitaki no te ao, e to matou basileia Nūtirēni, na roto i te ingoa o Iesu Mesia, ‘Āmene.

Business Statement

Business Statement

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Leader of the House): Kia orana, Mr Speaker. Legislation to be considered next week will include the remaining stages of the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill and the Overseas Investment (Forestry) Amendment Bill; the second reading of the Maniapoto Claims Settlement Bill; the committee stage of the Oversight of Oranga Tamariki System and Children and Young People’s Commission Bill; and the third reading of the Three Strikes Legislation Repeal Bill. The Estimates debate will begin, and there will be an extended sitting on the morning of Thursday, 4 August.

CHRIS BISHOP (National): I thank the Leader of the House for his update. I notice that the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary Bill has now been reduced to No. 24 on the Order Paper, and it’s just hit its six-year anniversary of being reported back from what was then the Local Government and Environment Committee. I wonder if he has an update on passage of that bill through the House.

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I can indeed confirm that there is a lot of legislation on the Order Paper at the moment because it’s a very busy and very productive Government with a busy programme for New Zealand. I can confirm, though, that the Kermadecs are nowhere near Te Puke.

Petitions, Papers, Select Committee Reports, and Introduction of Bills

Petitions, Papers, Select Committee Reports, and Introduction of Bills

DEPUTY SPEAKER: A petition has been delivered to the Clerk for presentation.

CLERK: Petition of Brian Borland, requesting that the House repeal drug prohibition, take responsibility for supplying drugs to users, and decriminalise drug use.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: That petition stands referred to the Petitions Committee. Ministers have delivered papers.

CLERK:

Te Māngai Pāho statement of performance expectations 2022-23

Te Hiringa Mahara statement of performance expectations 2022-23 and statement of intent 2022-26, and

Takeovers Panel annual report 2021.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Those papers are published under the authority of the House. Select committee reports have been delivered for presentation.

CLERK:

Report of the Primary Production Committee on the petition of Shengjun Jin, and

report of the Regulations Review Committee on the examination of COVID-19 Orders presented between 1 and 14 July 2022.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: The report of the Regulations Review Committee is set down for consideration. The Clerk has been informed of the introduction of bills.

CLERK:

Housing Infrastructure (GST-sharing) Bill, introduction.

Prohibition on Seabed Mining Legislation Amendment Bill, introduction.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Those bills are set down for first reading.

Oral Questions

Questions to Ministers

Question No. 1—Building and Construction

1. GREG O’CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu) to the Minister for Building and Construction: What recent reports has she received on competition in the market for residential building supplies?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister for Building and Construction): Mr Speaker, kia orana. This morning, the Commerce Commission released their draft market study into residential building supplies. The report indicates New Zealanders are not getting a fair deal on some key residential building supplies. While the Government has already driven improvements in the sector, the Commerce Commission’s draft review finds that changes are needed to make it more competitive. The commission has pointed to a few areas of specific concern that may be impeding competition, including the building regulatory system, the use of quantity-forcing rebates by building suppliers, and restrictive land covenants. The report ties in very well with both the plasterboard task force work and the building consent system review currently under way to modernise the system by ensuring it is faster, more efficient, and flexible.

Greg O’Connor: Why did the Government ask for this market study from the Commerce Commission?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: We asked the Commerce Commission to undertake the market study because of longstanding concerns about potential competition issues, and the draft report confirms there are issues that need to be addressed and explored further. With warm, dry, affordable housing underpinning so many other social, economic, and health outcomes, and given population growth and an increase in building consents over the last decade to over 50,000 houses per year, it’s vital consumers get the best deal. We had a sense that there was work to be done to improve competition and outcomes for New Zealanders, and that’s why we committed to delivering this building supplies market study as a key Labour Party manifesto commitment.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Before the next supplementary, that was actually enough answer for two questions but—a bit more concise.

Greg O’Connor: What is the remaining process for the Commerce Commission’s market study into the residential building supplies?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: The process from here is the commission will be seeking feedback on those preliminary recommendations, and I encourage everybody to input into the process via the Commerce Commission’s website. Consultation on the draft report is open for four weeks and closes on Thursday, 1 September. The commission’s final report will be released by 6 December 2022, with final recommendations informed via the consultation process. The Government will then consider those final recommendations.

Question No. 2—Revenue

2. NICOLA WILLIS (Deputy Leader—National) to the Minister of Revenue: Can he confirm that the reason overseas New Zealanders have received the cost of living payment is that “the Inland Revenue Department has a New Zealand address for that taxpayer rather than an overseas one”; if so, how many people does he estimate fail to change their address with Inland Revenue when they leave the country?

Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister of Revenue): At the risk of putting Herald political editor Claire Trevett to sleep, yes, the eligibility assessment for presence in New Zealand is based on the principal physical address held by Inland Revenue for an individual taxpayer. To the second part of the question, there is no requirement to gain tax clearance when a person leaves New Zealand. Inland Revenue does not know the number of people who don’t change their address when they leave New Zealand.

Nicola Willis: Well, in light of that answer, isn’t it potentially the case that hundreds of thousands of temporary migrants and New Zealanders have left the country without updating their address details with IRD and, therefore, hundreds of thousands of people have received the cost of living payment in error?

Hon DAVID PARKER: As I have said on a number of occasions, we’ll never know the exact number of people who were paid the payment. We do know that the New Zealand tax data is very robust. I have personally said I think the number of wrong payments will be around 1 percent, and I have repeatedly said to the House, which I think is correct, that the alternative application system for 2 million people would have cost a lot more than the money saved; the 1.3 million people who received a cost of living payment this week would not have received it; and the policy is better than the alternatives of tax cuts for CEOs and overseas landlords.

Nicola Willis: Will New Zealanders ever know how many ineligible people living overseas have been paid the cost of living payment, or is it the Government’s position that they should instead rely on the wishful thinking of a Minister who freely admits his numbers are picked from the sky?

Hon DAVID PARKER: As I have also repeatedly said, Inland Revenue increasingly rely upon sophisticated software to automate previously manual transactions. This saves the Government and taxpayers millions and millions of dollars every year on administration, and has cut staff numbers at Inland Revenue by about 2,000 people. The benefits to taxpayers include automated assessments and refunds and other payments worth hundreds of millions of dollars every year. The use of automated data sets, which we continually strive to improve, is wise, saves money, and will continue, and, I will add, is what was used throughout for COVID support payments.

Nicola Willis: Well, isn’t it the case that despite sophisticated data systems, at the heart of his Government’s cost of living payment policy is a fatal flaw: that it rested on the assumption that New Zealanders ring the IRD to change their address when they leave the country?

Hon DAVID PARKER: In answer to the first part of the question, no; and it’s plainly no.

Nicola Willis: Can he be confident that no deceased people have been paid the cost of living payment?

Hon DAVID PARKER: In response to that, I would quote James K. Baxter:

Alone we are born

And die alone;

Yet see the red-gold cirrus

Over snow-mountains shine.

Upon the upland road

Ride easy, stranger:

Surrender to the sky

Your heart of anger.

In other words: after someone has died, they can’t update their details to Inland Revenue. What Inland Revenue relies upon is periodic information that comes through from Internal Affairs, which is itself imperfect but the best that the country has.

Nicola Willis: How many deceased people have been paid the cost of living payment?

Hon DAVID PARKER: Probably around the same number as deceased people’s bank accounts that get superannuation or unemployment or other payments—or perhaps even National Party pamphlets—after they die.

Nicola Willis: Has he sought advice on how many prisoners have been paid the cost of living payment despite being ineligible?

Hon DAVID PARKER: No, I haven’t and I haven’t received a report as to any. They are ineligible to receive the payment.

Nicola Willis: Is he concerned that intentional misinformation has been spread about the number of people who’ve been paid the cost of living payment, including by the Labour Party in a fund-raising email, which stated that more than 2 million people had received the payment?

Hon DAVID PARKER: I have no ministerial responsibility for that email.

Question No. 3—Education

3. CAMILLA BELICH (Labour) to the Minister of Education: What support has the Government contributed to help schools to provide learning environments for their students that are warm, dry, and fit for purpose?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Since 2018, the Government has committed $3.8 billion in new capital funding to improve school property up and down the country. That includes funding for the National Education Growth Plan to build new schools and classrooms to keep up with the growing population, the National School Redevelopment Programme to address the very poor conditions some school buildings were in when we inherited them, and the school investment programme, which provided funding to nearly every State school in New Zealand to bring forward and complete much-needed property projects. To provide a comparison, over $5.7 billion has been spent on upgrading and expanding school properties between 2018 and 2022, compared to $2.9 billion in the five years preceding that.

Camilla Belich: How many property projects managed by the Ministry of Education are currently being undertaken across New Zealand?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Heaps. As of August, there are 313 Ministry of Education - led property projects in construction across New Zealand. That includes 77 learning-support property modifications, nine new schools, eight new school expansions, 124 redevelopments, 38 redevelopments that also involve roll-growth projects, and 57 roll-growth projects. We’ve invested in the capability of the Ministry of Education to manage these projects and, as a result, schools up and down the country are getting a better deal and better property.

Camilla Belich: What has been delivered in terms of redevelopments and additional student places from this spending?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: When we became the Government, we had a serious issue with school overcrowding in some areas because the investment in capital had not kept up with the roll growth. Through the National Education Growth Plan, 27,298 additional student places have already been delivered through the building of schools and classrooms, and that’s as of June of this year—1,926 of those were delivered in the last quarter alone. One of the highlights was the opening of the new Scott Point School in Auckland for 650 students. That was funded in Budget 2018. Since 2019, we’ve fully completed 62 major redevelopment projects worth over $460 million—around half of these were in the last year. We are making really good progress in making sure that schools have the classrooms they need and they have the facilities they need to provide kids with the education they deserve.

Question No. 4—Justice

4. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National) to the Minister of Justice: Does she stand by all her statements and policies?

Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN (Minister of Justice) (remote): Mr Speaker? Yes, in particular, I stand by the—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Oh, sorry. I didn’t realise you were on Zoom. Sorry about that. The Hon Kiritapu Allan.

Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN: Yes. in particular, I stand by the package of measures Minister Hipkins and I announced on 13 July to help reduce the harm caused by gangs and make communities safer, which included a targeted new warrant and additional search powers to find and seize weapons from gang members during a gang conflict; expanding the range of offences where police can seize and impound cars, motorbikes, and other vehicles; a new offence of discharging a gun with intent to intimidate; the ability for police and other enforcement agencies to seize cash over $10,000 when found in suspicious circumstances; and the expansion of the list of high-value goods prohibited for sale for cash over a specified value to include watches, jewellery, precious metals and stones, motor vehicles, and boats.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: Does her statement on Tuesday that it’s not contradictory to believe equal voting rights are critically fundamental to New Zealand’s democracy, while, at the same time, supporting the Canterbury Regional Council (Ngāi Tahu Representation) Bill, mean that, in her view, Cantabrians will still have equal voting rights after the bill takes effect?

Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN: Yes, I do stand by that statement.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: Will Cantabrians have equal voting rights after the Canterbury Regional Council (Ngāi Tahu Representation) Bill takes effect?

Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN: Yes, Cantabrians do retain equal voting rights, and as the former National Government showed to us—both in 2010 and again in 2016 when they established the position for Ngāi Tahu to be appointed to Environment Canterbury—this bill continues with that practice.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: When she said this week, “I think we have to keep things in perspective, it feels like there is more crime, I think it’s being reported more, I think there is a bit of a spike, I don’t think it’s a trend”, does it mean she thinks shop keepers, like Harry Luther of Hamilton, are just reporting crime more and what they are actually experiencing is a reduction in youth crime?

Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN: I think that people like Mr Tam are experiencing an increased level of crime. There is that spike that we’ve been mentioning and it’s been very concerning for all of us, hence the measures that myself and Minister Hipkins announced earlier this month or last month, with respect to the powers that we’re providing to police, hence the targeted package that we are providing to those shop owners that have been impacted and targeted by youth ram raids. It is an issue for all of us on our side, the Government. We continue to be focused on how we can eliminate, or reduce radically, any of the trends in these spikes in crime.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: Regarding her statement in the Electoral Amendment Bill debate that “Seventy percent of respondents of a recent Victoria University of Wellington survey indicated [that] they did not trust the political funding framework”, does she think it’s building trust in the funding framework for a party to send an email stating that an inflation payment of $116 was going to 2 million people while asking for a donation of $10?

Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN: Whilst I have no ministerial responsibilities for any political party’s statements, what I do think is that closing any gaps that relate to political party donations and electoral law reform is something that we committed to and it’s something that we are cracking on with. I think that enabling greater transparency for political party donations to all parties is something that New Zealanders have sought. It’s something that the Labour Party—in our manifesto, we went out to the electorate and sought that mandate. An overwhelming majority of New Zealanders supported us to crack down on political party donations. So it’s measures like that that our side of the House is committed to, to increasing that trust and transparency for all New Zealanders in our democratic system.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: A point of order, Mr Speaker. I seek leave to table an email from the Labour Party saying that $116 had gone to 2 million people and asking for $10.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Can I ask who the email is to and if they given permission? Have they given consent?

Hon Paul Goldsmith: No, they haven’t given consent. It’s been given to multiple people. I could give you many examples. Some were actually asked for $150, but—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I just want the one.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: Yes.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you. Leave has been sought for that purpose.

Hon Chris Hipkins: A point of order, Mr Speaker. The email has been published by the media. There are clear rulings—I mean, I have no problem with it being tabled, but there are rulings that suggest that stuff that’s freely available in the media shouldn’t be tabled, and it’s disorderly to attempt to do so.

Chris Bishop: Speaking to the point of order. The interesting thing is, there are multiple versions of the email, sir. Some people have received emails asking for $10; other people have received emails asking for $20, $30, $40, $50—there seems to be any number of amounts. It’s a very interesting little scam the Labour Party is running here, and I think the public deserve to see it.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member knows that’s out of order. It’s up to the House, really—and I’m on my feet, so I don’t need a commentary. It’s up to the House: be careful, all I say is that you are not opening yourselves up—and I say all parties up—to have emails tabled in the House for the same purpose.

Hon Chris Hipkins: Point of order, Mr Speaker.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: A point of order—well, you’ll speak to this point.

Hon Chris Hipkins: The member can’t accuse another party of being engaged in a scam, no matter how superior his knowledge on the topic is.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: So what do you suggest I do about that? And then I’ll ask the Opposition what they—

Nicola Willis: A point of order, Mr Speaker.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, I’ll just deal with this issue first, because otherwise—we’re coming to have multiple issues on top of the original issue. So I’m going to deal with this one first—

Nicola Willis: A bit like the cost of living payment.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: —and I’ll deal with that breach right there, as well. So that’s one, two, three, four; I’m dealing with number one first, OK? Everyone clear about that? Good.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: The question is, can I seek leave? I’m seeking leave.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’m about to put the leave. Leave has been sought for the purpose of tabling an email. Is there any objection? There is none; it may be dealt with. Issue number two: Chris Bishop will stand, withdraw, and apologise for the statement he made that was out of order.

Chris Bishop: Speaking to the ruling—point of order. What was out of order about what I said?

DEPUTY SPEAKER: No.

Chris Bishop: What was out of order about it?

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I just made a ruling that you will withdraw and apologise for making the statement that you made. You know which one.

Chris Bishop: I withdraw and apologise. Point of order.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’ll deal with my next ruling—will be number two: the Hon Chris Hipkins will stand, withdraw, and apologise.

Hon Chris Hipkins: I withdraw and apologise.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you. Number four: Nicola Willis will stand, withdraw, and apologise.

Nicola Willis: I stand, withdraw, and apologise.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: And that was for interrupting me while I was making a ruling on my feet. Right, are there any more points of order?

Nicola Willis: Yes, point of order. I seek your clarification, Mr Speaker—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: No. No clarifications.

Nicola Willis: Can I ask about—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: There is no such thing as seeking a point of order of—you either seek a point of order or not.

Nicola Willis: Point of order.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: What is it?

Nicola Willis: I understand that the word “scam” has been questioned—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: No. You can deal with that at another time. There are ways to deal with that; that is not the way to do it.

Question No. 5—Education

5. CHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central) to the Minister of Education: Does he agree with the Prime Minister’s statement that “education is the greatest enabler in society”; if so, has he seen the People’s Inquiry into Student Wellbeing, which found thousands of tertiary students are living in poverty?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Yes, and yes, although I won’t claim to have read it from cover to cover.

Chlöe Swarbrick: Is he concerned at our inquiry finding that 64 percent of students sacrifice time in class in order to work, and, if so, does he think that that demonstrates a barrier-free access to education?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I am concerned if students are working overly long hours that are preventing them from study. I’m not concerned that students are, necessarily, working—that’s always been the case; students have often worked whilst they’ve been studying. But where students are working over and above what would be a reasonable number of hours to work and study at the same time, yes, that is a concern.

Chlöe Swarbrick: Does he think it’s a barrier to education that students pay, on average, 56 percent of their income towards their rent and also have some of the most insecure, run-down housing in the country, with many reporting damp, cold, and mould?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I absolutely accept that the state of some student accommodation has not been what it should be. We’ve been working hard to address that. I don’t think that work is finished yet. I think we’ve still got more work to do to make sure students are living in a higher standard of accommodation than they have been. I would note that it has always been the case that, compared to others, the proportion of students’ income that goes towards accommodation does tend to be higher for the period that they’re studying. That’s not new. That is a long-term situation, and you’ll find that situation is the same almost everywhere else in the world.

Chlöe Swarbrick: Is he concerned by the finding that two-thirds of students don’t have enough money for food, healthcare, bills, or other basics, and, if so, will he make the student allowance universal and raise it so that students have enough support to eat while studying?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I am of course concerned if students are finding the cost of living is biting for them, as I am concerned for other New Zealanders who are finding themselves in that situation as well. We have not made a commitment to a universal student allowance, because there are significant financial pressures on the New Zealand taxpayer at the moment and we’re not in a position to do that.

Chlöe Swarbrick: Why have no tertiary institutions fully implemented the pastoral care code, which came into effect eight months ago?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: That is ultimately a question for them and for the code administrator, which, as the member will be aware, is the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA). I do know that NZQA is working closely with Universities New Zealand. The universities, through Universities New Zealand, have undertaken a gap analysis to identify the areas where they still need to make sure they’re fully complying with the code. NZQA has been working with them to make sure they’re doing that.

Chlöe Swarbrick: Does he agree with the statement of former Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association president Chris Hipkins that if “the Government are serious about providing tertiary education opportunity to all New Zealanders, then urgent attention will need to be given to bringing down tuition fees and boosting financial support for all students”, and, if so, does he think that the results of this survey show that he and the Government are doing enough to support students now?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Yes, I do agree with that far-sighted and visionary quote that the member just mentioned. In fact, I have, throughout my working life, continued to be dedicated to ensuring that we get a better deal for students. If you look right the way across the term of this Labour Government—and, in fact, the one that came before it—we have continued to seek to remove the financial barriers that students face.

Question No. 6—Māori Development

6. TĀMATI COFFEY (Labour) to the Minister for Māori Development: What recent reports has the Minister seen on the Māori economy?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON (Minister for Māori Development): I recently launched Te Matapaeroa 2020, which is Te Puni Kōkiri’s published research on Māori business. The latest research identified 23,300 Māori-owned businesses, representing 8.8 percent of all businesses that there is data for in New Zealand for the year ending March 2020. This compares with about 10,200 Māori-owned businesses in the earlier Te Matapaeroa 2019 report. The research also identified 38,200 Māori sole traders, representing 14.7 percent of all sole traders.

Tāmati Coffey: According to the research, what was the share of Māori-owned businesses with wāhine owners?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Very encouraging results here: 39 percent of Māori-owned businesses had women—wāhine Māori—involved as an active shareholder, compared to 1 percent of non - Māori-owned businesses. Māori-owned businesses were more diverse, with 61 percent having at least one female owner of any ethnicity, compared to 53 percent of non - Māori-owned businesses. Regardless of ethnicity, Māori-owned businesses were more likely to have women, both Māori and non-Māori, as active shareholders.

Tāmati Coffey: Were Māori-owned business with wāhine owners more likely to employ Māori?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Overall, Māori-owned businesses employ a higher percentage of Māori than non - Māori-owned businesses. When wāhine Māori were involved as shareholders, this difference was amplified. In non - Māori-owned businesses, Māori represent 14 percent of the workforce, but in Māori-owned businesses with wāhine Māori owners, Māori comprise 43 percent of the workforce. These results are very encouraging for Māori women, because although Māori women are dragging in some of the statistics, they’re really coming to the fore in leadership areas—in the business area, in the tribal area. It’s a really good thing to see and I’m sure all parties would support that.

Tāmati Coffey: What does Te Matapaeroa tell us about the importance of the Māori economy?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Te Matapaeroa 2020 highlights the important role Māori-owned businesses play in the economy, the rohe, and in communities. This research has identified the importance of wāhine Māori talent, as I said earlier, in Māori-owned businesses, and demonstrated how significant employers of Māori play an important role in employment in the regions. The new report reflects some encouraging trends in the wider contribution made by many Māori-owned businesses. Sharpening our understanding of the scale and make-up of the Māori economy will help us identify the untapped opportunities and need. In turn, this will help improve equitable outcomes for Māori and enable whānau to thrive.

Question No. 7—Housing

7. BROOKE VAN VELDEN (Deputy Leader—ACT) to the Minister of Housing: How many KiwiBuild houses were built in June 2022, if any, and was this more or less than the number of KiwiBuild houses built in January 2022?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Housing): Kia orana, Mr Speaker. So far, 1,380 New Zealand families are in KiwiBuild homes, and 1,223 homes are currently under construction. In the two months the member mentioned, as is publicly available on the housing dashboard, is zero and the same.

Brooke van Velden: Does she stand by her statement “I note that January is always the quietest month in the building sector.”; if so, how does she reconcile that with zero new KiwiBuild homes being built in June?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: I reconcile that with the fact that in 2021 Auckland had a number of lockdown periods. This, in turn, had an impact on building projects, particularly groundworks getting under way, which typically start in June. I do note, of the 1,200-odd that are currently under construction, we are expected to see some of those flow through more towards the end of this year, which is consistent with the time line that I’ve just sketched out.

Brooke van Velden: Does she stand by her statement that “KiwiBuild hasn’t delivered the numbers we initially set out to do.”, and did she mean zero new homes built in June or one new home being built in April?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: When we reset KiwiBuild, back in 2019, what we said was that we would build as many as homes as quickly as we could. So far, we have over 1,300 people that are living in KiwiBuild homes; a further 1,200-odd homes that are under construction. But I do note, and point to, the fact that when we made the adjustments to the KiwiBuild price caps and income caps, only a matter of two hours after we made that announcement New Zealand Mortgages & Securities (NZMS), the developer financer, immediately made $600 million available for KiwiBuild projects. They realised that, in the face of strong market headwinds, actually, a Government-backed lever to de-risk projects was exactly what is required to ensure we don’t see a post - GFC-type collapse of the housing market.

Brooke van Velden: How can the Minister guarantee that KiwiBuild will be able to deliver the 1,454 homes currently in the pipeline for delivery between 2022 and 2026, when it couldn’t deliver any homes for the months of January and June?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: As I have outlined in previous answers to the member, obviously the shutdown in Auckland last year—the COVID lockdowns in Auckland—had flow-on impacts to construction projects, not just KiwiBuild projects. I think, if the member wants to talk to anybody in the construction industry, she’d see that there have been significant delays. The 1,223 homes are already currently under construction, and I think that’s one of the critical things: that we do not announce KiwiBuild homes until they already have financing approved for them and they are under construction. I think, for reasons obvious to every member in this House, we’re conservative with our forecasts on KiwiBuild.

Brooke van Velden: When will the Government drop KiwiBuild and adopt ACT’s policy of sharing the GST from new builds with consent-issuing local councils, allowing them to develop vital infrastructure needed for more housing development?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: As I’ve outlined to the member in an answer to a previous question, we won’t be dropping a Government underwrite to de-risk properties in the face of significant market headwinds. I pointed to the fact that, only a couple of hours after we raised the income and price caps for KiwiBuild, we saw NZMS, the developer financer, come out and announce $600 million worth of funding that would be made available to developers for KiwiBuild projects because of that de-risking element. I see a number of flaws in the GST proposal from the ACT Party. For many of them, if you were to refund the whole GST back on, say, an $800,000 house, that would be refunding $120,000 back to a council, which is way more than if we look, for example, to the Infrastructure Acceleration Fund. Some of the projects that we have funded have been as little as $6,000 per dwelling that have gone for the infrastructure upgrades required to make them. I think ACT’s proposal is untargeted. There is no guarantee that we will see houses, and, actually, I think it is paying too much per dwelling.

Question No. 8—Social Development and Employment

8. Hon LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō) to the Minister for Social Development and Employment: Does she agree with the Prime Minister that “it does matter to us as a Labour Government that we have people in the dignity of work”; if so, why are over 50,000 more people receiving the jobseeker support as at June 2022 quarter compared to the September 2017 quarter?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON (Minister for Broadcasting and Media) on behalf of the Minister for Social Development and Employment: As she said yesterday, she agrees absolutely with the Prime Minister. What we are seeing is record numbers of people moving off jobseeker and into work. In the year ending June 2022, 95,583 people on jobseeker exited into work. This is a 62 percent increase on the same period in 2017. This is because of this Government’s successful investments in employment programmes—for example, today we announced that our effective employment and training programme Mana in Mahi has supported over 5,000 participants.

Hon Member: Great work.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Magnificent, really—great work from this Government. That is what it looks like when a Government is successful at getting people back into the dignity of work.

Hon Louise Upston: Can she explain why, when businesses around New Zealand are crying out for workers, the number of 18- to 24-year-olds on the jobseeker benefit has increased by 49 percent under her watch?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: On behalf of the Minister, exit into work has been at record levels for the past two years. In the year ending June 2022, 113,427 people have exited into work.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: He doesn’t believe in accountability.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: That is a 44 percent increase—Mr Goldsmith—from the same time in 2017. Some people, they have complex lives. That means they might need extra help. It’s not always easy. For example, sometimes there’s a lack of suitable housing, there are transport difficulties, they have physical requirements, they need some attention, they need some support, they need some investment—investment they never got for nine years under a National Government. That’s why we’re breaking down barriers to work by building more houses, investing in businesses, and supporting people to get a driver’s licence. We’re reinstating the Training Incentive Allowance so people can upskill, and we’re working with those people. This is not a punitive Government; it’s a Government that works in tandem with the community, and I’m proud to work with our Minister in supporting our different communities.

Hon Louise Upston: Why, when the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) has hired an additional 2,300 staff under this Government, are more people on welfare for longer?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Oh, I don’t accept that—I don’t accept that. We don’t accept that position. We’re getting more and more people into employment and training—5,091 placements through Mana in Mahi since 2018, despite criticism from the other side about Mana in Mahi, who thought that the programme was going to collapse and fall over; 3,869 young people have been supported into employment, education, or training through He Poutama Rangatahi. I was lucky enough to have been Minister of Employment during this time, and I saw firsthand how targeted programmes helped these people. Our MSD—and our Minister Carmel Sepuloni—has taken up the challenge and is doing brilliant work. Today, with our Prime Minister, it was a magnificent announcement with regards to Mana in Mahi, and I would ask the Opposition to think about that.

Hon Louise Upston: Why did her Mana in Mahi press release saying that 75 percent of participants who had been on benefit for two or more consecutive years hadn’t gone back on to benefit omit the fact that of the 75 percent, only 5 percent had been on benefit for two years or more?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Well, you’ll have to take that up with the Minister when she comes back. All I know is Mana in Mahi has been an overwhelming success, and I have been—actually, I’ll say today, very humbly, that I gave Mana in Mahi the name. So I gave that the name, and I was very proud to give it the name, and great work has continued with the Minister and the Prime Minister. The Opposition would have been calling it working for the dole; we talk about dignity in work. We talk about: there is mana in mahi. Even if you’re cleaning the kitchen at the local marae, that’s all part of dignity and looking after people—something that that Opposition forgot for nine years.

Hon Louise Upston: Should people on the jobseeker benefit who decline formal job offers face sanctions?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Oh, we’ve been very good in the sanctions area. There haven’t been a lot of changes in terms of work-related sanctions under this Government. What the change has been has been the change of attitude—that’s the change. We are not a punitive Government. This is a kind Government. Our Prime Minister always talks about kindness; not punishing people who have a few problems in their lives.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Bring out the footlights—it’s a great show.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Gerry Brownlee and the rest of the Opposition need to learn about aroha and kindness, and talk with our Prime Minister. Shame on you. [Interruption]

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! We come to question No. 10, in the name of Erica Stanford—oh, sorry. Sorry, I’ve jumped ahead.

Question No. 9—Health

9. SHANAN HALBERT (Labour—Northcote) to the Associate Minister of Health: What announcement has the Government recently made about HIV?

Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Associate Minister of Health): On Saturday, the Prime Minister and I launched the HIV Action Plan for consultation alongside $18 million of funding for the work. The HIV Action Plan outlines our plan to eliminate HIV transmission in Aotearoa New Zealand and ensure that people living with HIV enjoy lives that are healthy lives that are free from stigma and discrimination. HIV is a preventable infection, and Aotearoa New Zealand is in a strong position to drastically reduce case numbers and eliminate HIV transmission by 2032. This is an ambitious but achievable aim.

Shanan Halbert: How will the additional funding support the plan to eliminate HIV transmission?

SHANAN HALBERT: The $18 million over four years from Budget 2022 for the HIV Action Plan gives us a very strong start towards the elimination of HIV. The draft action plan outlines four areas where we need to focus: surveillance systems to understand risk factors and populations; prevention and health promotion, including greater use of pre-exposure prophylaxis, enabled by the recent Pharmac decision to widen eligibility criteria; better access to testing and to care; and support for people living with HIV, including addressing stigma and discrimination.

Shanan Halbert: How will the HIV Action Plan deliver against Government objectives?

Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL: This Government is committed to support our diversity and to creating a New Zealand where all people feel safe, have equal access to opportunities, and do not experience discrimination, yet one-third of people living with HIV have experienced stigma and discrimination as a result of their diagnosis. To eliminate HIV, we need to fight this by targeting the disease, not the individual. We will do this with our Te Tiriti obligations at the centre of our response to HIV and with a focus on human rights. This initiative builds on the Government’s wider work to support rainbow communities, like banning conversion therapy or making the health system more responsive to transgender people.

Question No. 10—Immigration

10. ERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays) to the Minister of Immigration: Does he stand by the former Minister’s target of 10 working days for job checks for Accredited Employer Work Visas; if so, can he confirm that only 20 percent have been processed in that time frame?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs) on behalf of the Minister of Immigration: In response to the first part of the question, yes. I acknowledge there have been some initial issues raised by employers in the job-check process, which are being identified and ironed out as a priority, but, on the whole, the process is working as intended. To date, 3,807 job-check applications have been received and 1,179 have been approved, totalling 8,868 positions. Job-check processing times are showing improvement, increasing to 32 percent being completed within the expected time frame. I continue to regularly reinforce my expectations that processing times are met and that processing issues are identified and resolved as quickly as possible.

Erica Stanford: If, as he says, the visa is working as intended, can he confirm that as of Thursday last week, only one accredited employer work visa had been approved around four weeks after applications opened, according to a key messages update from Immigration New Zealand?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: I have an update for the member, but I do think the context here is really important. To date, 3,807 job-check applications have been received and 1,179 have been approved, meaning that 8,868 positions are able to be recruited for now, and that is quite some progress. The member will know, of course, that COVID has presented a challenge in the Immigration New Zealand workforce as well, and also, the further context—that the visa application stage has only been open for 24 days, and with a 20-working-day processing time frame, we are early days in the programme. They’re working with employers to try and facilitate that process. Where applications are not meeting expectations, they’re working with employers and that takes extra time, and we would expect to see numbers increase over the coming weeks. So four days past that initial deadline, the number is up to seven, and I’d expect to see that continue to grow.

Erica Stanford: Well done! Is the reason so few employer accredited work visas have been submitted and approved because, as of last week—Thursday—Immigration New Zealand had only processed 14 percent of the job-check applications that they’d received since 20 June, which are required before a migrant can apply for a work visa?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: As I have said to the member, the system is showing improvement. We are seeing each stage as it comes in new. These are new processes, and I think it’s absolutely right that Immigration New Zealand should be working with employers where the applications are not up to scratch. To work with the employers—this is a new process, and it’s completely understandable if they haven’t got it right, in some cases, first time. That will have a long-term benefit for New Zealand and for those employers, and I think we should be congratulating them on the work that they’re doing.

Erica Stanford: Is he seriously suggesting that employers are the reason that only seven employer accredited work visas have been approved in nearly four weeks?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: I refer the member to my previous answers. I did not say it in that way, and I think the member is seeking to misrepresent—

Hon Andrew Little: Disingenuous.

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: —what I’ve been saying—unfortunate and disingenuous. I want to thank employers who are working hard in the system to make it work, and I want to thank Immigration New Zealand for making this new system work for the benefit of all of us.

Erica Stanford: What does he say to Sean Wood of Creative Kitchens in Tauranga, who has turned down over $100,000 of work yesterday because his job-check applications have not been processed seven weeks after he applied, while three skilled employees sit in the UK waiting to apply for a visa to come to New Zealand and join his team?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: Obviously—on behalf of the Minister—while I won’t speak to individual applications, I do understand that the issue raised by Mr Wood relates to the checking of individual employment contracts. It is good practice to carry out basic checks of employment contracts, ensuring that the employment contracts pass the sniff test.

Question No. 11—Education (Pacific Peoples)

11. TANGI UTIKERE (Labour—Palmerston North) to the Associate Minister of Education (Pacific Peoples): Meitaki maata e te Vaa Tuatua. What recent work has the Government done to enhance Pacific languages and bilingual learning in Aotearoa?

Hon AUPITO WILLIAM SIO (Associate Minister of Education (Pacific Peoples)): Meitaki maata e te Vaa Tuatua. As we celebrate te ‘Epetoma o te reo Māori Kūki ‘Āirani, I look to the Cook Islands proverb which says, “E ‘ama rāi to te vaka”—the vaka cannot sail the ocean without the ama to give it balance, working together to carry us all on that vaka across the moana to new horizons. This Cook Islands proverb underpins the work of this Government and the Pacific Languages Strategy. It paints the picture of sailing together, bound together, and one outrigger providing balance to the other, describing the work done by Government to support Pacific languages in Aotearoa, with the Minister of Education working alongside the Minister for Pacific Peoples, Pacific educators and learners, and Pacific communities, and why this Government in Budget 2022 has invested $13 million to support the growth of the Pacific bilingual and immersion schooling workforce and the retention of the current workforce.

Tangi Utikere: How is the Government supporting Pacific languages and bilingual teaching in schools?

Hon AUPITO WILLIAM SIO: Meitaki maata e te Vaa Tuatua. Last Sunday, I opened te ‘Epetoma o te reo Māori Kūki ‘Āirani, Cook Islands Language Week 2022, at the Enuamanu Hall in Māngere. There I spoke of the challenges for the Cook Islands language, classified as vulnerable by UNESCO, with 9 percent of Cook Islands people speaking the language in Aotearoa, which is why te ‘Epetoma o te reo Māori Kūki ‘Āirani and the Pacific language weeks are essential to raise awareness and breathe life into the mataora of te reo Māori Kūki ‘Āirani, its people, and their identity as Cook Islanders across Aotearoa New Zealand and the vast blue Pacific continent. Our nine Pacific language weeks will allow our Pacific people to walk in two worlds, and demonstrates how this Government is building cultural capacity and bilingualism and for the next generation of Pacific learners.

Tangi Utikere: What do educators say about having these Pacific resources available for their students?

Hon AUPITO WILLIAM SIO: Meitaki maata e te Vaa Tuatua. A 2019 report on Pacific bilingual education highlighted that the New Zealand school roll is more ethnically diverse than it has ever been, and there are now more Pacific students at school when compared with the Pacific population in Aotearoa. As of 2018, about 79,000 students identified themselves as Pacific, or nearly 11 percent of the national school roll. A bilingual teacher in that same 2019 report captured the work of Government well when they said, referring to Pacific languages and cultures, “If you know from where you come, there is no limit to where you can go. If learners can connect and know who they are and celebrate those things that make them unique, then we have a better chance to raise the achievement levels referring to Pacific languages skills and cultural intelligence.”

Question No. 12—Education

12. PENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill) to the Minister of Education: Does Te Pūkenga have a detailed plan focused on the underlying financial issues facing some of its subsidiaries; if not, why not?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): I’m advised that Te Pūkenga has a programme of action to reduce the deficit. Of course, addressing the underlying financial viability of the vocational education sector is the purpose of the reform programme.

Penny Simmonds: Does the Minister consider it is good practice that the financial sustainability of the Te Pūkenga operating model being consulted on from 15 August has not yet been determined?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: You generally determine something before you start to consult on it.

Penny Simmonds: Thank you. Does the Minister think it is a fair tool or a blunt tool for the head office of Te Pūkenga to ask each subsidiary polytechnic for a 3 percent saving, when some polytechnics will already be operating more efficiently than others?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: That is, of course, a matter for Te Pūkenga as to how it achieves financial viability and returns to surplus. I would note that almost all of the subsidiaries have experienced a decline in enrolments and particularly a decline in international students, such that even those that were previously doing better financially are not in that same position now.

Penny Simmonds: What concerns, if any, does the Minister have with the head office of Te Pūkenga asking subsidiary polytechnics to use high staff turnover as a cost-saving approach, and isn’t this approach high risk, with the potential to leave polytechnics without essential key skills?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I reject the assertion in the member’s question. It’s not unusual for an organisation that is facing a significant deficit to, effectively, put in place a hiring freeze, which is what Te Pūkenga has done.

Penny Simmonds: Has the Minister signed off on Te Pūkenga paying for a chief executive, an acting chief executive, and an acting-acting chief executive when the acting chief executive travels overseas next month, bearing in mind that the organisation is seeking to claw back a $110 million forecast deficit?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I think that’s a somewhat cheap question, as the member is well aware, because she was told at the select committee yesterday, the acting chief executive took on the role on the basis that he would take leave to attend the wedding of one of his children in the UK. I think attacking him for doing so, when he was very clear when he took on the role that that’s what he was going to do, is pretty cheap.

Bills

Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill

Second Reading

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Police): I move that the Firearms Prohibition Orders—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Sorry, is there a legislative statement?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Oh, sorry—I do. I present a legislative statement on the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website, and I would ask members who are on their feet having conversations to please leave, if you’re leaving, or sit down if you’re staying.

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Thank you, Mr Speaker. I move, That the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill be now read a second time.

It is good to be at this point, as the House progresses this important legislation ahead of schedule, so that we can get this law into force so that it provides the additional tools to the New Zealand Police and others, so that they can ensure that we are dealing with the escalating range of violent activity that we have seen and so that we can make sure that guns are being kept out of the hands of those who might do harm to others with them. I want to thank the Justice Committee for their intelligent work in bringing this bill back before the House before it was due so that we can pass it ahead of schedule. We’re intending to complete the remaining stages of the bill early next week. I understand that the committee received a range of submissions on the bill and that they have made some proposed revisions to that, and I thank them for the work that they have done on that.

There is broad support for the idea that we should have firearms prohibition orders. I’m very pleased to be part of a Government that’s actually delivering on something that was first promised in 2014, and then promised again in 2016 and never actually delivered, but this Government is getting on and delivering it, and I am very pleased to be part of that.

There are a couple of amendments to the bill that I do want to touch on. One is the change that’s being made to add to the bill section 189A of the Crimes Act, which is strangulation and suffocation as a qualifying offence. What that means is that a person convicted of the offence of strangulation or suffocation could now have a firearms prohibition order imposed upon them, and that would mean that they would be unable to legally buy, possess, use, or access a firearm or a related item for 10 years after their release from custody. I think that that is a welcome addition.

I thank the select committee for their careful consideration of issues around domestic and family violence. That is an addition made as a result of those deliberations, and I think that that is a good one. There is evidence of a link between family violence at that more extreme end and firearms use, and, particularly, there are well-established links between non-fatal strangulation and subsequent homicide and family harm situations. So there’s a very clear evidence base for including that.

The committee considered a number of other potential changes, and there was significant debate at the committee around the issue of warrantless search powers. I would point out that this bill does expand the range of circumstances in which the police can use the existing warrantless search powers that they already have under the search and surveillance legislation that’s already in place. If they have reason to suspect that somebody who has a firearms prohibition order against them has firearms in their possession, then they can search them without a warrant. But we also balanced it up and we did consider whether that should be expanded further so that they no longer had to suspect that somebody would have a firearm. The most likely outcome of that is that we would see more instances where law-abiding firearms owners who have done nothing wrong—

Hon Mark Mitchell: Where’s the evidence?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: —could be subject to a warrantless search, and there is international evidence—there is international evidence—to suggest that where those sorts of powers have been put in place, those broad, sweeping powers with a lack of accountability around them, it’s actually law-abiding firearms owners that end up being the ones who are unfairly targeted and subjected to that.

I’ll give the member an example. If, let’s say, a grandfather, who is a law-abiding firearms owner who has firearms safely stored and does everything right, has the family around for Christmas dinner, and, unbeknownst to them, the granddaughter brings the new boyfriend, who, unbeknownst to the rest of the family, has a firearms prohibition order against him, then the grandfather could be subjected to a warrantless search. He could absolutely be subject to a warrantless search under the proposal put forward by the National Party. That would happen. That would be a legal, law-abiding firearms owner being subjected to a warrantless search under the proposal put forward by the National Party, and that is not something this Government is willing to adopt.

So we have carefully balanced the issues around search and surveillance, as the last National Government did. They carefully worked their way through the circumstances under which police should be allowed a warrantless search power and the conditions under which they should have to go and get a warrant in order to undertake a search. Those rules were actually put in place under the last National Government. They worked through those issues and they stopped short of giving the police warrantless search powers where there weren’t reasonable grounds for suspicion. That was a decision of the National Government of the day. That’s not a decision reached by this Government. That is the position that was agreed by the last National Government, and it is the one that we are continuing to uphold. The last National Government made the decision that in order to conduct a warrantless search, the police should have to have reasonable grounds for suspicion. That is the position of this Government as well.

I would almost bet money that it will be the position of the next National Government whenever that happens, because regularly they talk tough in Opposition, and then when they get into Government and they consider the issues and the interconnection between issues, suddenly their position changes—suddenly their position changes. I suspect that’s exactly what is going to happen again, because if it was simple and it was easy, why didn’t they pass firearms prohibition orders when they first thought about them in 2014? Why didn’t they pass firearms prohibition orders the second time they decided to do it in 2016? They didn’t do it. They had nine years to do it and they didn’t do it. Our Government has actually done it, and we are—or not quite yet. Not quite yet. We will do it early next week.

We will pass that into law, and we’ve worked through all of the ins and outs of it carefully to get the balance right to make sure that people who are following the law and who are not doing anything wrong are not unfairly targeted by this law. The people that should be targeted are the people who are convicted of violent offences and who the courts determine should not hold firearms. They are the people that should be targeted, not others, and, unfortunately, the clear message from the National Party is that anyone could be targeted, because that’s, effectively, what warrantless search powers do if there aren’t some parameters around when they can and cannot be used.

National wants to have warrantless search powers with very few—very few—restrictions in order to ensure that the rights of law-abiding New Zealanders are not infringed by the use of those. That is not something that this Government will do. Ultimately, the law as proposed in this bill reaches the right balance, and I commend it to the House.

Hon Mark Mitchell: Mr Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): Oh, the Hon Mark Mitchell—you’ve used a few minutes already!

Hon MARK MITCHELL (National—Whangaparāoa): Thank you, Mr Speaker. While the Minister of Police is in the House, let’s address the first point about warrantless search powers, because it’s certainly no secret that our view on this side of the House—and the views are shared with the Police Association also—is that for this bill to be effective, it needed an expansion of warrantless search powers to allow police to actually take guns out of the hands of gang members.

So let’s talk about those warrantless search powers. The Minister just stood up and he used an example where a grandfather was hosting a family doo at his home, and he has a licence and he has his firearm safely tucked away in a safe, and his granddaughter brings along a new boyfriend that has a Firearms Prohibition Order (FPO), which means that he’s committed some sort of violent offending—one of the qualifying offences: they’re all violence-related offences, and we’re adding strangulation; I hope that the granddaughter’s actually being treated and looked after properly—and he arrives at the house. I just wonder, Minister, whether or not the grandfather even wants someone with an FPO inside his house where he’s got his own firearms, where he’s a law-abiding citizen. But—

Hon Members: He wouldn’t know!

Hon MARK MITCHELL: Just wait.

So, Minister, let’s look for a compromise—let’s look for a compromise. As the Police Association put forward in a very good submission, as we’ve spoken about on the Justice Committee before this was reported back, let’s go for a compromise: let’s remove an extended warrantless search power from a premise, but let’s keep it for a person with an FPO in a vehicle. I think that would be a very good compromise, Minister, and that’s been put to you. So I’d like whoever’s going to take a call next to stand and explain to us why you wouldn’t embrace that, because you give me a scenario, Minister—

Hon Chris Hipkins: Someone picking up a hitchhiker to be the subject to a—

Hon MARK MITCHELL: Oh, pick up a hitchhiker. Now, these guys are the biggest apologists for gang members that I have ever come across, and, you know, the Minister, the “Mr Fix-it Minister”, comes in. It’s blimmin “Mr Wrecking Ball Minister”, ruining the tertiary education sector, massive chronic truancy in our education system. The guy’s come into police—I’d hate to see if he can do a worse job than Poto Williams, but now I’m starting to wonder. Actually, I think he’s up to it—I think he’s up to the job. What’s he doing? He’s sitting there making apologies and excuses for gang members. He’s looking for reasons why our front-line police officers are unable to stop a gang member with an FPO as they’re driving round our communities. And searching their vehicle—the trigger, the test, should quite simply be the existence of a firearms prohibition order.

I’m telling you now, Minister—and you’ve just done your tour around the country, which I’m sure went very well; I hope that you got feedback, and I hope that the front-line staff that are actually dealing with gangs provided you with the feedback that I get. That is the fact that they’d like to have the ability to stop gang members that are driving around their community. They’re fearful of actually having firearms, using firearms, carrying firearms, having firearms concealed in their vehicles. This FPO would have actually been quite effective, as the Police Association highlighted.

They said that this FPO will be effective if their front-line police officers—and by the way, just in case the Minister was wondering, the Police Association, and I’m a member of it myself, they get quite a bit of feedback; they get quite a bit of feedback from their members in the front line. They carefully consider this stuff. They’re heavily invested in the safety of our police officers. And if they come to you and they make a submission, you should put some weight behind that. If you don’t want to listen to us, if you don’t want to listen to the Opposition, when we’re telling you that if you want to make this an effective firearms prohibition order that’s actually going to be useful—because I’m telling you now, and I’m making a prediction right now: the test of time on this firearms prohibition order, it is not going to stand up. It’s going to be useless. It’s going to be ineffective. It’s going to be used very little. It’s applied by a judge. And then the police have to try and police it without the warrantless search powers. They’ve already got the powers—they’ve got powers under the Search and Surveillance Act around reasonable cause. That’s good; that’s a good test.

But if you want to be effective, if you actually want to take guns out of the hands of gang members—how many drive-by shootings, Minister? How many drive-by shootings by gang members this year? He doesn’t know. He won’t know. But I can tell you, Minister, there’s been over 140 drive-by shootings or firearms-related incidents, right? That’s atrocious for us in New Zealand. We should be the safest country in the world, without a doubt. We’re not. We’re heading the wrong way on every measure. You had a chance. You had a chance to bring this bill to the House and you had a chance to put the powers in it that the police need to actually be effective and to make communities safer. Of course you’re going to ignore us—I accept that. But to ignore the Police Association, to ignore the one group that is heavily invested and is actually there to make sure that their members are looked after—to ignore them is atrocious.

And, by the way, I want to come back to your point and I want to ask the Minister and say: will he make a concession? Will he make a concession, because regardless of the politics—and we are on opposite ends of the spectrum on this, there’s no doubt about that, but let’s just for one minute park up the politics, let the Minister sit down, and actually go back and have another look at what’s being proposed around a compromise. And the compromise is quite simply this—

Hon Chris Hipkins: So he wants to slow the bill down now? He wanted to speed it up and now he wants to slow it down.

Hon MARK MITCHELL: No, no, I don’t want to slow the bill down. So the Minister is saying that because I’m saying, “Let’s try and work out the compromise that’s been put forward.”, that’s going to slow the bill down. He knows that that’s rubbish. Have you not heard of a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP), Minister? Do you not understand what an SOP is? Through committee stage, we can actually introduce an SOP. If you agree to it and you support it, then it’ll be adopted in the bill. It doesn’t slow anything down; it doesn’t change the process. I’m surprised, as the Leader of the House, that he didn’t know that.

Harete Hipango: He does know.

Hon MARK MITCHELL: Yeah, he does know; that’s dead right. What I’m saying to you is this: let’s sit down and let’s have a genuine conversation about reaching a compromise. If we accept and say that you feel that it’s a step too far that the police can have a warrantless search power to search a premises that an offender with an FPO is in, and you think there’s too much risk around that, then I’ll accept that—I’ll accept that argument here in the House today. But let’s have a compromise and give our front-line police officers who are out there trying to keep our community safe, who are dealing with firearms incidents every day—six of them are being assaulted at the moment, on a daily basis—let’s give them the warrantless search power that they need to be able to stop a gang member that has an FPO and search them, and search their vehicles, and make sure—

Hon Chris Hipkins: They already can.

Hon MARK MITCHELL: Minister, do you not understand? What’s the test for reasonableness, for them to be able to do that? I’d like the Minister to take another call, if we give leave, and actually explain to me what that test is. I don’t think he understands. He doesn’t understand the bill and the way that it works, and he’s brought it to this House—they cannot do that with this bill, Minister. The thing that really disappoints me is we had two new senior officers from Police National Headquarters (PNHQ), who I put the same question to, in front of the select committee, and they gave different answers.

Arena Williams: No, they didn’t.

Hon MARK MITCHELL: Oh, yes they did. Yes, they did. They gave very different answers. We got a great big long, completely different example given by one, and then we had the other one turn around and say, “Actually, no, that’s not right.” And we said to them, “Can you come back and can you, with clarity, brief the committee on what you’re actually asking.” I’m disappointed—I’m disappointed that the commissioner and whoever was working on this in PNHQ weren’t brave enough to come out and say, “Our staff need some expanded powers to make sure that this bill would work.”

So I put it to the Minister—I put it to the Minister today—let’s sit down, let’s look for a compromise. Let’s actually give them some powers that will make this bill meaningful, otherwise it’s meaningless, it’s not going to achieve anything, and we can come back here in 12 months and we can have a look at how effective it’s been and what a great tool it’s been to the police in terms of trying to get on top of the massive gun crime that we’re seeing in New Zealand at the moment. And there is a compromise there to be had, and it’s quite simply this: give them a warrantless search power, use the FPO as the trigger, and allow them to search gang members or offenders or those people with an FPO—if they’re in public, allow them to search the vehicle or the person to ensure that they’re not in breach of the FPO, because let’s just remember: the reason why the court has actually applied an FPO to them is because they’ve offended against one of those qualifying—serious violent offending.

Just very quickly—I’ve run out of time—I did want to say that the select committee did support and thought it was important to include the offence of strangulation, because in the last couple of weeks in Auckland, we’ve seen two firearms-related homicide, gang-related also, and domestic-related, and I can almost guarantee you that there was an escalation of violence that led towards those women being killed. So I think this was a good recommendation, a good move by the committee. Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.

GINNY ANDERSEN (Labour—Hutt South): Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Look, it’s a pleasure to take a call on the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill, a bill that’s taken a long time to get this far. And I guess my comment from that last speech was that’s the biggest lot of “Nat-splaining” I’ve ever heard in a really long time. It’s absolutely typical to hear after nine years of utter inaction from that side of the House, to then have a lecture on how we don’t get it quite right. I fail to accept that, because that member opposite—the Hon Mark Mitchell—has even failed to be able to ask the Minister of Police a question in question time for over six weeks. So I’m pleased that he’s finally fronted up and given some sort of commentary on what they believe to be the point of view.

But let’s be clear that this is a bill about improving public safety. It’s about improving the safety of New Zealand communities by preventing those people who are deemed to be high risk to not be able to access firearms, and that’s the purpose of this bill. We do that by amending the Arms Act. The way it will work—which hasn’t been covered in that previous speech, and it’s important for people to know—is that if someone has been convicted of a specified offence that’s listed within the Act, that that will then be issued by the court and not issued by police, which was a previous suggestion from some of the many failed members’ bills from the Opposition. It’ll be issued by the court. If a person is serving a term of imprisonment, it will come into action once they’re released, and it will apply for a period of 10 years’ time. An FPO, a firearms prohibition order, will set out criteria or conditions that someone must comply with. Those are, essentially, not to be around or with firearms at any point in time. And if someone breaches those conditions, then some strict penalties will come into play.

In terms of doing that—and that’s been part of the debate—it will invoke section 18 of the current Search and Surveillance Act. So that means if someone who has a firearms prohibition order placed upon them and there is any reasonable suspicion that that person is breaking the terms of that order, then that enables a warrantless search to take place. So that member opposite is quite wrong—this bill does enable warrantless searches for the specific purpose of firearms that have got into the hands of high-risk individuals in New Zealand. This is a targeted piece of legislation that is specifically honed at those who are high risk, and not unnecessarily penalising or causing obstruction in the life of law-abiding New Zealanders who have a firearms licence and who are going about their normal daily business.

The submissions that we received to the Justice Committee were really good, and it gave us a really good point to take a look at. It’s nice to see in select committee when you hear strong voices coming back from organisations and people that result in a bill being strengthened, and that’s exactly what happened here.

One thing that frequently came up during the select committee process was family violence. Nearly half of the submissions that we received, and that was a good amount—we received a total of 51 submissions at committee, and nearly half of those made by the public pointed to a connection between family violence and firearms. As a response to this, an important change is the addition in the bill of section 189A of the Crimes Act, which is strangulation or suffocation as a qualifying offence for a firearms prohibition order, which means that it will be added to that list that qualifies someone to have a firearms prohibition order placed upon them. Reports of family violence incidents show that those who have been strangled by a partner are seven times more likely to be killed by an intimate partner. Therefore, the inclusion of strangulation and suffocation as a qualifying offence will help make those situations of serious family violence safer from the threat of firearms violence. It’s really pleasing to see that while this is targeted at reducing firearms and improving safety, it will also act as a protection for the safety of whānau in the wider community. I’m pleased to see that change.

It’s been a long time coming in terms of how we reached that, but I guess I would like to conclude today by saying that we hear so much talk from those members opposite. National quite often talks such a big game in terms of what they’re attempting to achieve, yet when it comes to delivery, it is zero. I think back over times when they’ve tried to talk tough on crime—whether it’s crushing cars, which resulted in two or less being actually crushed, or whether it’s talking about firearms prohibition orders for nine years, yet failing to implement any legislation. And I look to this Government with 1,800 more police out there on the streets, keeping our people safe. We’re having $92 million additional funding in this year’s Budget specifically for organised crime and combatting organised crime syndicates. We have never seen that level of investment previously in Government before.

I think about the recent announcements made by the Minister of Police and Minister of Justice to specifically target gangs, organised crime, and firearms. That legislation is yet to come before the House. So this bill, along with the others yet to come, puts us in a really strong position that we will not tolerate intimidation from organised criminal networks in New Zealand, that we will take action to make sure that firearms are out of the hands of risky and dangerous people, and that our communities in New Zealand can go in their homes and know they are safe, because that is the aim of what this Government is attempting to achieve. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I live in Auckland, as about a third of New Zealanders do, and I think anybody who lives in that city at the moment will be very conscious of the almost constant sound of sirens somewhere in the distance, and the ever-present noise of the chopper flying around trying to find somebody, and a sense that something is going down in the city and there is a big crime wave under way.

I’m just looking at a map of the shootings in Auckland during 2022 and there were a few yellow dots for earlier in the year and a very large number of dots from May to July. I’ve counted 36, I think, so far, but there may be more—they are just dots on the screen, most of them around West Auckland and South Auckland, but also some in central Auckland and on the North Shore. Each of these shootings—more than thirty; near, probably, about 40 this year, but a particular spate of them in the last couple of months—are frightening Aucklanders, frightening many people in their homes. Obviously, the shootings are the top end of the scare in terms of the sense of lawlessness that is creeping across our city. There’s the smash-and-grabs, the ram raids. I was visiting a shop just last week just around the corner, in the Epsom electorate, where the shop had been attacked and the person who attacked it wielded an axe. You can just imagine the fear involved in being in a shop, going to work, minding your own business—we hear from this Government, you know, it’s a lot about safety at work and all that sort of thing; you go to work and somebody attacks your workplace with an axe. How terrifying that would be. That’s just happening day in, day out—attacks everywhere you go, and we’re talking about shooting.

So, finally, after this very significant increase in violent crime and gang membership in this country in the last four years, it’s time the Government responded. Now, they’ve voted down a couple of member’s bills trying to deal with this issue of firearm prohibition orders (FPOs) that have been put forward. They voted them down over the last few years; they’ve said, “No, we’re not going to do that.” And finally now, we are grateful that the Government has finally appreciated that there is an issue here and we need to do something more effective to deal with what is a major concern of many New Zealanders, which is—you know, the first duty of any Government is to try to keep New Zealanders safe and to enforce the law and make sure people aren’t running around shooting each other. It’s pretty basic.

So the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill, we are supporting, but we just wish it would go further so that it was more effective. So the bill, as introduced, brings in this new firearms prohibition order that would be placed on somebody who had carried out specified offences under the Arms Act, or a serious violent offence, or an offence which relates to a particular organised criminal group, or another one related to the Terrorism Suppression Act. So if you’ve committed a serious crime in those areas, you could have a firearms prohibition order placed on you, and when that’s placed on you, the person who has the FPO is not allowed to be around certain places—not allowed to go to places where firearms are, be around firearms, not to reside in the premises where firearms are located, not to join a shooting club, not to attend an activity that uses firearms, or visit places where firearms are manufactured. And this FPO would be introduced after a court has imposed it, and will last for 10 years. So far, so good.

The issue is, of course, that is based on an Australian piece of legislation, and the big difference there was that they came with more effective search powers for the police. Nobody in an open society likes the idea of unreasonable search and seizure. We’re not, sort of, running around excited at the prospect of impinging on New Zealanders’ rights in this way. No one is excited about that prospect at all. But what we are deeply concerned about is a sense of lawlessness in our city, and that has changed dramatically in the last few years under this Government’s soft-on-crime approach, and also its inadequate response to the increase in gang membership and 501s coming into this country, which has made a bad situation more difficult. So we need to have an effective response, and what we haven’t seen is an effective response so far.

So the question and debate is about whether or not—and the Police Association came out saying that to give it teeth you need to expand the search powers, because at the moment you can only search if you have reason to expect that something is going wrong. But remember, we’re talking about people with firearms prohibition orders against them. I would have thought there was reasonable grounds, if you’ve been given one of those prohibition orders, that you might be up to no good with firearms. And our suggestion is—at the moment under the bill, if you’re driving along in a car and you’re pulled over by the cops for a traffic violation or something like that, you’ve got an FPO, the police cannot search the car unless they, you know, presumably see one on the back seat and that gives them reasonable grounds. So we believe that it would be more effective to give them those extra abilities so as to more effectively harass those people who are causing mayhem in our country.

Members on the other side seem to, sort of, operate as if nothing’s changed and there isn’t an issue. I’ve just been debating with the Minister of Justice, who, in relation to the very significant increase in ram raids and smash-and-grab incidents, suggests that “Well, perhaps it’s just because people are reporting them more.”, and tries to argue that youth crime has decreased. Well, I’m sure some elements of youth crime may have decreased, but ram raids, for example, have clearly increased on a colossal scale. They’re mainly done by young people, and they’re mainly done because people in that age group know that there are no consequences for their actions. So it must be, I would have thought, so infuriating for the people who are on the front line, on the receiving end of this violence and harassment by criminals, to be told, “Oh, well, actually, what you are experiencing is part of a reduction in crime and there’s nothing to worry about, and maybe it is just because you are reporting things more often.” They can see and hear what’s going on, just like Aucklanders can see and hear what’s going on in their city. They see it; they hear it. They know that there has been well over 35 shootings in our city this year. They know that we’ve lost control of firearms crime and they want to see a more effective response from the Government.

So we support this bill; we just wish it was doing more to be more effective. It will go so far to make a difference: it will provide the police with an extra tool to deal with some of our worst firearm offenders. But it could have been more and it is a missed opportunity, mainly because, I think, a combination of complacency and a tendency on that side of the House to have, and send, mixed messages around gang members and violent criminals in this country. Where in the past, Governments have been unequivocal in their condemnation of violent crime and the impact that gangs have had on our community, this Government, of course, is much more mixed in its views, and it, you know, in fact, hires gang members to do drug rehab and pays them millions of dollars. That confuses everybody, sends a very confusing signal. Allied with that is the message that this culture of excuses that exists in this Government, where there’s an excuse for every action under the sun, and maybe it’s not your fault, and that message percolates through and I think has added to this sense of imperviousness to the law. And so—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): The member’s time has expired.

VANUSHI WALTERS (Labour—Upper Harbour): Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call in relation to this very important bill, the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill. I did just want to address Mr Goldsmith’s assertion that this is a Government behaving like nothing has changed. This is precisely a Government who is acting on the fact that things have changed.

After the horrific events of March 15, something I’ll always be proud of is how quickly our Labour Government moved to ban most assault weapons and make it harder to acquire guns. That’s this Government. This is the Government who’s been taking a number of steps to grow the accountability framework in terms of the acquisition and monitoring, as well as respond to unlawful guns, including a dedicated firearms unit. It is under this Government that we have a police force who have launched Operation Tauwhiro, which has been incredibly successful and is now being rolled out into Operation Cobalt. This is a Government focused on preventing and addressing violent crime.

I do want to speak briefly to the search and surveillance issues, because there are a number of problems in terms of what the Opposition have proposed. They are problems with legal principle, they are practical problems, and they are problems with evidence. In terms of the first, I note that the Opposition haven’t quite engaged with the fundamental nexus in a democracy between reasonable cause and search and seizure. To allow a search and seizure without reasonable cause is to give a power to search when, at the time, the individual may be suspected of nothing. That is a problem with legal principle. If there is indeed a suspicion of an offence, as many prior speakers have noted, there are existing search powers within sections 18 and 6 of the Search and Surveillance Act. At the Justice Committee, the police themselves told us that these powers achieve the balance that they should: that they could do the job they needed to do with these existing powers.

The proposals from the Opposition also present a practical problem. For me, looking at the experience of New South Wales, it is alarming that the number of people searched who weren’t subject to firearms prohibition orders (FPOs) was so high. The Minister raised this issue before. Essentially, they’d been subject to the illegal use of a search power. Again, should we adopt the Opposition’s view, that would be the same in New Zealand. Some, particularly those from the Opposition benches, might say, “Well, what does it matter if we’re removing reasonable suspicion, because if it works in terms of getting lots of guns off the street, surely it doesn’t matter?” And that’s the third problem: the evidence gap.

When the Ombudsman in New South Wales looked at the use of many of these search powers, including search powers that don’t attach to reasonable suspicion, what they found was that, of the 1,300 searches conducted under their regime, 1 percent of the searches had resulted in a charge. Essentially, there were only three search events which were related to FPO-related offences. The evidence simply isn’t there that to execute the search powers that the Opposition would have us do would result in a greater seizure of arms in that part.

So this is a fantastic bill that actually does have significant search powers within it, including in clause 19, which amends section 45 of the Search and Surveillance Act. Those powers, which include the power to conduct trespass surveillance—that, essentially, allows the police to search and surveil people to monitor compliance with FPOs as well. So those powers do exist. They’re inserted through this bill. This is a bill all about protecting community safety, and I commend it to the House.

GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise in support of this bill, another in line with the suite of firearms changes that came through—as others have pointed out—after the tragic terror attack on March 15th, which was last term. I do remember it, as most New Zealanders, as a time of deep distress, where at least—at that moment—we had one promise, and that was to fix our gun laws.

The Green Party has called for gun law reform for quite some time, and I do want to acknowledge past leaders of our party and our movement for pointing out that violence is something that is a concern to us and something that New Zealand shouldn’t really ascribe to the American-style laissez-faire approach to gun regulation.

We found ourselves, in a way, over the years and decades, more and more going down that road, whereby the Green Party policy began to align with what New Zealand Police was asking for, which was an uncomfortable and strange position for us to be in. It was only after the attack on March 15th that the Government of the day—and I do commend our previous Government for actually taking action, but I do note as well that successive Governments of both parties had not.

So this is one of the other reforms that comes—and there’s been other, different legislation that’s come through. We were concerned, initially, when we, last term, began our work with the previous Minister on this about the issue of association and how that was going to be defined. In the end, we feel that the balance has been reached that’s OK and that’s safe.

But I do want to just raise the issue of taking away rights or access based on association that we’re seeing pop up increasingly in our criminal justice reforms and the way that that does degrade the rule of law, and so we do need to look at it carefully. Where we’ve landed here is association between people who’ve had bans or who’ve had breaches of firearms law and where firearms are stored. So it’s kind of, at least, going precisely to the problem that we’re trying to solve, rather than to say, for example, as we’ve seen in this House regularly—and I’ve seen in the courts, as someone who worked in criminal justice for about a decade before coming in here—where we do things like oppose people’s housing and State housing or being able to access bail based on an associate that’s unproved or unrelated to the problem that we’re trying to solve, which is the safety of the community.

I want to just briefly touch on some of the search and surveillance stuff. It’s about the power to search, the power to take away the fundamental rights of us all to privacy, which then leads to searches of homes, of cars, of phones, but also of our person, eventually. To say that that can be done ad hoc and without a judicial oversight mechanism where there’s an objective standard being imposed; objective being, for example, where there is cause for—suspicion is the standard adopted here, but we also go to reasonable belief, where we have more stringent rules in our search and seizure arms in legislation. To say that we can take that away and to leave it to the discretion of, for example, a police officer is anarchy, actually—to say that there is no legislative measure that we would impose where we have an actual evidential burden on police before they can enter a home, take things away, search our bodies, for example.

It’s pretty wild to say that there are political parties in Parliament in New Zealand, where we have a very high standard of the rule of law, who actually think that that might be OK, especially looking at the statistics that we have in our police force, that’s been repeatedly proven, over and over again, to say that police, without judicial oversight or legislative standards being imposed on their actions are far more likely—far, far more likely, to the point of being double—to search people, to stop people, to charge people based on race. So that’s been proven—that’s already been proven. The Prime Minister’s previous Chief Science Advisor found that to be proven. So people’s opinions don’t come into things that have been proven; you can hold an opinion about how pretty a picture is, but you can’t hold an opinion about fact—scientific fact—that’s been proven, right?

So for lawmakers in this House, to say we want to take away any measures of oversight over a policing body, with the mighty force of the State, weighing down on communities is to say that we don’t care so much about law and order or crime, but we care about making ourselves look tough on crime, and we don’t support that. We support evidence, we support safety, and we support the types of justice measures that, in fact, prevent crime. I’ve heard Government members talk about preventing crime; yes, better, more accessible, more enforceable firearms laws do prevent violence, but that’s not where it ends. That’s a small measure. So we do want to see the Government’s justice agenda look properly and invest properly—that means resource—actual measures that, again, we know prevent crime.

I do commend this bill, but I would like to see us actually focus on what keeps our communities inclusive, what addresses addiction, what addresses mental health issues—because we know most people in prison are also suffering from undiagnosed mental health challenges, but also brain injury—things like actual healthcare, things that actually keep our communities safe. Commending this bill, but looking forward to actual resource and actual crime prevention as well.

NICOLE McKEE (ACT): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak on the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill, and I may start my commentary addressing some of the comments that have been made by others, including those that have just been made by the Green member who’s quickly leaving the Chamber, where she actually made a comment about—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): Order!

Golriz Ghahraman: Point of order, Mr Speaker. I believe that was fairly obviously an out-of-order comment by the member just now, so I ask you to address that.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): Well, with due respect, I did address it and I pulled her up on that.

Stuart Smith: Now she can go.

Tim van de Molen: Where are you going?

NICOLE McKEE: When the comment was made by the Green Party delegate that there were—

Golriz Ghahraman: Mr Speaker, point of order—sorry. I consider the very loud interjections by National Party members there clearly out of order and actually making a mockery of your action, sir.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): No, it’s certainly not out of order.

NICOLE McKEE: Third time lucky. When the Green member just made comments about legislation that she said, actually, she finds—I don’t recall the exact words, but it’s something that the Green Party would never do. I’d just like to remind everybody that when it came to search and surveillance, it’s exactly what every party in this House apart from ACT voted for. The difference is that we have legislation in place at the moment that allows the search of licensed firearm owners’ homes and not the criminals’. Part of what the firearms prohibition orders (FPOs) are looking to do is to weigh up and balance some of that so that the licensed firearm owners are not the target.

The ACT Party will be supporting the firearms prohibition orders as they progress through today and also next week. We support the bill and the minor changes that have been made within it, specifically the bill’s purpose. The purpose of the bill is to improve public safety by prohibition of high-risk people from accessing firearms. That’s really important. From our perspective, sitting on this side of the House, regardless of whether National introduced it or talked about it in 2014 or whether Labour are doing it now, the fact that it’s actually happening now is very important, because we have a 47 percent increase in gun crime in New Zealand since 2018, and a lot of it has come since the firearms reforms that occurred in 2019. So, regardless, it is urgent.

The thing that actually disappoints me is that when National brought their firearms prohibition orders bill before the House, we could have got that changed and we could have had this implemented already, making a big difference. So taking the time to ensure that the bill goes through under a particular party’s name is actually not doing the best we can to keep our communities safe from gun crime.

What I do like about this bill is that it is court ordered. It’s not police who will make the decisions on whether an FPO should be placed on a person. That means evidence has to be produced. It’s not just ad hoc, that anybody can have an FPO slapped on them. I really do like the point that we now have the strangulation clause added to the specified violent offences. I think that’s very important and I will address that a little bit later on.

I also like the idea of the changes in the broad definition that allows the court to define what is necessary when setting the conditions of an FPO to being what is “reasonably necessary”. At this point, we’ll just go to the scenario that the Minister talked about, where he suggested that if you have a nephew or a son that turns up at a father or uncle’s place for Christmas and they have a firearms licence, the search and seizure would be occurring on that father or uncle’s home. In actual fact, the bill itself says that that person can be there as long as the firearms are secured in the police-approved secure facility. So I don’t quite understand where the Minister was coming from with that, because there’s a whole lot of other things that need to occur in the home for that to actually happen.

I do have a couple of concerns, though. The explanation for the distance a person must be from a firing range—this was brought up at the Justice Committee, and the answer from Police, or answer from the officials, was that they were waiting for Police to finish their regulations on clubs and ranges, which is overdue at the moment, and that their idea was that the court can determine whether or not a person was close to a firing range. I think that’s quite unacceptable, because we have ranges in facilities where there is more than one activity taking place, and that’s all over the country. We should make sure that we actually have a reasonable understanding of what is determined to be a firing range when we put this law into place.

I also question clause 12, which inserts section 69(1A), where we were talking about how the convicting court must order the forfeiture of any firearms or parts thereof to the Crown. I had quite a few concerns about whether or not a person with an FPO was found with a stolen firearm and whether or not that firearm could be identified and returned to its owner instead of having to be seized. The Police did assure us at the time that they would make all endeavours to return firearms to the legal owners if indeed they were being illegally held or stolen, so I just want to put that on the record as well.

There were submissions made by the likes of the Council of Licensed Firearm Owners (COLFO), who had queries about residing, and whether or not a person is defined as being two days in any 12 months residing at one particular place. This was raised by COLFO because when we talked about tangi and the fact that people could be in a place for three days, the answer that we got back was that a person may actually apply to the courts for a variation to their order. So I’d like to keep that on the record as well.

Gun Control New Zealand—well, they made a raft of public statements most recently, saying that firearms in criminal hands have come from the licensed firearm community. That’s misinformation, and it continues, and it is detrimental in the rebuilding of relationships which have fallen by the wayside. The 2016 and 2017 inquiry into the illegal possession of firearms actually showed that there were several ways that gangs were getting hold of firearms, and this includes illegal manufacture and illegal importation. In fact, as recently as 21 July, Radio New Zealand had pointed out that drug intersections are up from 452 in the first quarter of 2011 to more than 1,000 in the first quarters of 2016 onward in regard to Customs seizures at the border. They find drugs, they find cash, and they find firearms.

Between 2014 and September 2020, 5,887 firearms were found at the border, and that was only with 2 to 5 percent of containers being checked. That tells me that if we were able to check more containers, we might actually be able to find the real source and stop attacking the licensed firearm owners as being the only source of illegal firearms. For a bunch of academics, they really do run their narrative on a lot of hyperbole. So, you know, just make sure that we can build relationships so that we can move forward to keep our country safe together from the illegal use of harmful firearms when they are used by those criminals.

Rural Women New Zealand and victim advocacy groups spoke about domestic violence and their wish that FPOs were put on to protection orders as well. What it means now is that we have these new specified violent offences, which are 40 offences—they have been increased to 41, including strangulation. That’s in response to those victim advocacy groups and Rural Women New Zealand coming and saying to us as a select committee that they have real concerns. I hope that this goes some way to addressing the concerns that they have.

With the National Party, they did put in a differing view, and it was regarding warrantless search powers for the police, and there’s been quite a bit of discussion about that across the House. I’ve been really concerned. Licensed firearm owners have been the target of warrantless searches already. They still are. I understand that the Labour Party are wanting to make sure that they’re not giving them the ability to do that more, but we also need to give police the teeth. So if we can have some sort of way where a person with an FPO is able to be targeted specifically and not their families, then I think we should look to consider it.

Further, and in closing, the ACT Party have a gang control order in the ballot box under my name, and I think that this will go hand in hand with the firearms prohibition orders. The Labour Party have already said that this is one of many things that we need to do. There is no one answer. ACT’s gang control orders will specifically target the gang members that are also using illegal firearms, and I hope that you can support that. ACT supports this bill.

Dr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei): Kia orana, Mr Speaker. It is a real pleasure to stand up and help to progress the next bit of the tranche of work that this Government is doing to make New Zealand a safer place. We’ve already had speakers reference the tragedy that brought us to this place where we have now got a defined work stream, and I am really pleased to be here as a member of the Justice Committee to discuss this particular part of that work. As a wider scheme within what we have done, we have already seen 60,000 semi-automatic military-style assault guns removed from the community.

Nicole McKee: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The current speaker, Emily, just referred to 60,000 military-style semi-automatics that have been removed.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): That’s not a point of order; that’s a debating point.

Nicole McKee: Well, it’s incorrect.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): None the less, not a point of order.

Dr EMILY HENDERSON: I stand corrected. Many, many military-style semi-automatic and bad, bad guns have been removed from the community, alongside, I believe, over 1,000 guns removed by Operation Tauwhiro as part of this Government’s extra resourcing of organised crime police units in this country, alongside the fact that we now have more police on the street, through this Government, than there have ever been before.

This bill enables us to get guns out of the hands of those whose criminal history shows a serious risk of further violent offending. It is a real matter of pleasure to me that we were able to recommend, and the Government has adopted, the inclusion of the domestic violence offense of strangulation, which, of course, was brought into the law by this Government—another instance of Labour doing the work—in 2018, and that has been recognised in this bill as yet another serious violent offence raising the risk of public safety, and thus it is in. At the same time, we have clarified and strengthened the protections in making sure that courts have to be careful when they impose additional conditions, and we were extremely grateful for the advice of New Zealand Police that there is no need in this bill to extend to warrantless search powers.

It is also a matter of concern, when you are talking about this sort of legislation, that we get the balance between rights and protection for the community correct. In this case, I believe we have done that, and I commend this bill to the House with the one further comment that I believe the Dickens novel of the day, for Mr Mitchell in particular, is Miss Havisham—the person who was always the bridesmaid and never the bride, because they tried three times and we got it done. Thank you.

SAM UFFINDELL (National—Tauranga): Thank you. It’s good to hear such animated debate on this topic. We know that crime around this country has increased significantly and we know gun crime has increased significantly. It’s a real blight on society that that is where we’re at and it’s good to see that, through this bill, there is an attempt to address that.

However, we would like to see this go further, and I think that that point has been reasonably well traversed today and something that I will also continue to talk on. But we have seen crime and gun crime, in particular, increase a lot over the past several years. It was not so long ago where it was quite uncommon to hear of a shooting in New Zealand. I was flicking through the New Zealand Herald the other day and I saw that for the previous month there were over three shootings a day. That is the sort of stuff that was completely incomprehensible when I was younger or even just several years ago. As a society, we need to be working together to ensure that that sort of stuff is not happening.

There was one sensible comment made by the Green Party today, and that was in relation to the mental health implications that can give rise to this and addiction that can give rise to crime. It would be good to see more focused in on this area. But that doesn’t take away from what this bill intends to do, and that is to improve the safety of our communities by making sure that people who are high risk do not get access to firearms.

So what we have been calling for is to give the police, as the Police Association has asked for, more powers to prevent people who we don’t want having guns from having guns. That is why we need to go further on the firearms protection order (FPO) and we need to allow police to search people who are subject to it, because without that, it is quite a toothless system, and the Police Association have called that out. They have said that without the ability to conduct searches without this warrant, the order is effectively useless. That’s not the intent of what we’re trying to do here. We are trying to put forward a bill that will improve the safety of New Zealand communities. I know, on both sides of the House, we don’t want to see these shootings keep taking place. We are up against a rise in gang membership, a rise in assaults, a rise in hopelessness as well, and hopefulness. We need to address the key parts of that and giving the police the powers they need is incredibly important.

Now, the Government was aware of this when they came into power. It was well known in 2017 and recommended, in fact. It’s good to see that we’re finally at this point where this bill is coming forward. But as our police spokesperson said today to the Minister in charge of police, let’s work together a little bit more to make sure that, when this bill goes through, it is fit for purpose and it does actually address the key issue here, and that is people having guns who shouldn’t have guns. Now, in my community, I see a lot of gang numbers around the place, as we do throughout the country. You know, they’re up over 40 percent over the past five years. We have seen violent crime and assaults up over 20 percent. We have seen a significant increase in gun crime. I think the ACT Party pointed out that it was a 47 percent increase.

I do again want to commend the Government on putting forward this bill, but I will continue to stress that we need to ensure that it is where it needs to be. There were some concerns raised about the warrantless nature of it, but there is a test in that there does have to be an FPO in place. There does have to be someone subject to an FPO to allow the search to take place on that person without a warrant. As our police spokesperson said, we could come to a compromise where it isn’t their place of residence, but when they’re in public it is their person and it is their vehicle.

So I would just like to, again, commend that we do proceed on this. The National Party does support this bill, but we do want to see it enhanced to ensure that people who are subject to an FPO can be searched by the police without a warrant. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

GREG O’CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Listening to the debate today, there is one thing that everyone agrees with, even though they haven’t said it, and that is about behavioural change. Now, criminals will always want firearms. From time immemorial, whether it was knives, whether it was clubs, if you were on that side of society, you always wanted to back up your position with as strong a piece of machinery, firearm—any weapon—that you could. Criminals will do that. So, to make any meaningful change, we’ve got to change the behaviour of criminals.

Now, this is not the first time New Zealand has been awash with firearms. New Zealand was awash with firearms after the Second World War, when soldiers came home with them. It was a real problem. Many of our laws now, quite strict laws, are based on what happened then. What we’ve now got is a situation where New Zealand is awash with firearms. I have to say now that police need to take a lot of responsibility for that. Because of the restrictions that used to be placed, particularly when firearms were registered, not the owners, anyone who ended up with a firearm, police could trace it, and there was going to be some responsibility put back on the people that owned it. The previous speaker, Nicole McKee, has said that, yes, there are some firearms that come in from outside New Zealand in containers, but, actually, most don’t. Most start their lives as legal pieces of machinery, legal weapons owned by people that end up—now, to change the behaviour of criminals, we’ve got to make sure we restrict the supply.

In my early days in police, I was an undercover police officer. A lot of criminals had guns, but they didn’t used to bring them out, because they were hard won; they were status symbols, and the last thing you wanted to do was lose it, because you couldn’t replace it. Police would often use the leverage of that to get firearms back—to get people bail, to get other favours that criminals needed. That all stopped when, all of a sudden, firearms became so easy to replace that either they no longer became a status symbol or they no longer became a commodity to trade. So what we’ve got to do is actually stop the supply of firearms to those criminals. Again, I know that, although we’ve been together till now, with Ms Nicole McKee, registering firearms is an absolutely logical thing to do, because any criminal found with a firearm—we’ve got good modern techniques. Someone will be responsible for actually how they ended up there.

But there’s a second part, and that comes in this legislation. When I look at this legislation, one of the most important behavioural changes that will take place in this is new section 42B, and that puts the onus on other people around criminals, who will be subject to seven years’ and five years’ imprisonment if their actions result in someone under one of these orders getting a firearm. What that means is you’re actually empowering people, family members often, certainly associates, mates, who have pressure put on them now to get these firearms—these very people, good people, hunters, people we want in this country to control pests in this country, because, underlying this, this is a country where we do need people with firearms out there, because we’ve got a massive pest problem and hunting is an important part of it. We are always going to need firearms. So breaking the nexus between firearms, legal firearms, and criminals is what any good piece of legislation should be about. No one piece of legislation will do it, but this one—go to new section 42B, where we’re putting responsibility on those who are likely supplying these firearms to criminals.

I’m reasonably confident that in about 10 years’ time, the large numbers of firearms around this country will reduce. They don’t store well. In about 10 years’ time, I think we’ll get back to the situation we were probably in in about the late 1980s, early 1990s, where firearms were actually reasonably hard to get hold of and the right people tended to end up with them. But, in the meantime, we’re going to end up with criminals. As a result of the Australian gangs arriving here from about 2008-09 on—it’s no one’s fault. It’s the Australians’ fault! In fact, I spoke to the Australian police officer who brought the idea up to Immigration and who takes pride in it. That’s why we’ve got a problem in this country. Instead of blaming each other, we’ve got to actually get the firearms off these people, look at legislation, look at whatever we can do to stop the flow to the criminals. This legislation, particularly new section 42B, among those other provisions, will be effective in doing that.

So this is a good piece of legislation. It’s good to see, I think, the good speeches around the House tonight. The only thing I would say to our Green colleagues is: remember where all the victims are, because the victims are living in the same places where the people who have the firearms are. They are the victims, and that’s never to be forgotten in any debate around victimisation. I commend this bill to the House.

ARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe. Meitaki maata, Mr Speaker. Let me first start by acknowledging my colleague Greg O’Connor but also the Hon Mark Mitchell; it’s always good to have the contributions of the retired police officers in this House on these police matters. In the hurly-burly of the debate between them and between other members, we might have forgotten what they said—my colleague Greg made the point very clearly, and if you listened to the Hon Mark Mitchell, he made it too—that this House agrees and there is consensus around a great deal of this legislation.

But for the punters at home, they might have missed it, let me tell you what we do agree on. These firearms prohibition orders (FPOs) will be court orders that are designed to prohibit those who have been convicted and sentenced of previous, serious criminal offences from possessing, accessing, or using firearms and related items like ammunition. Those remain in force for 10 years after sentences are served. I put stress on that because something that’s been lost in this debate is how tough those measures are. There’s a balance to be struck here by this Government and we have landed here, but those provisions that require warrantless searches—and the Government is introducing warrantless search measures here—for people who have already served their sentences for offences 10 years ago it’s a really stringent measure for getting more powers to the police when they’ve said they need them.

Why we have had some hurly-burly in the debate is around this point. We’ve called it warrantless searches but, actually, on both sides of the House we agree that warrantless search is required here. On this side, we say that police should have a reasonable suspicion that someone who is subject to these orders up to 10 years after they have served their sentence should be reasonably expected to be associating with someone or be in a property or be in a car with firearms, which they are not allowed to be. In that situation, we would expect that police actually carrying out these warrantless searches would also probably expect that they needed to have some reasonable suspicion, that they’re not out there searching every single person they see who is subject to a firearms protection order. Police, at the Justice Committee, made that point very clearly. When the Hon Mark Mitchell said that officials didn’t give us a clear answer, there was a very clear discussion at the committee about that being the appropriate balance that police were recommending from a policy perspective.

I thank everyone around the House for what has been a very charged and interesting debate. I’m glad that we’ve reached consensus on this, and I commend the bill to the House.

TIM VAN DE MOLEN (National—Waikato): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Look, it’s a privilege to take the final call for the National Party on this debate, and I think it’s been interesting to follow the last few speeches that we’ve heard and some of the contributions. I just want to touch on a few of those highlights for me. I do agree with previous speaker here, Arena Williams, that there has been a little bit of hurly-burly. That’s not a term I’ve heard particularly often—but perhaps hullabaloo or whatever reference you might make. There have been some differences in opinions, and I think the contribution from the Green Party just highlighted to me a large part of why we’re seeing such a level of lawlessness. Criminals are emboldened because that sort of response that just puts no regard whatsoever on victims and, indeed, tries to shelter offenders and suggests there should be no consequences. This response is just frankly disgusting and totally out of place.

Now, I can understand the Government’s finally coming to the table and putting this forward with their view. Unfortunately, we don’t share that, and I want to read just one excerpt from our differing view—our minority view—that we put into the select committee report, and that is that “The National Party is disappointed that the Police Commissioner, the Police Minister, and the current Government have not sought or recommended that stronger warrantless search powers be included in the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill, noting that the Police Association shares our view that these are critical to disrupting the dangerous people who will be subject [to these] firearms protection orders (FPOs).”

And for me that was really disappointing to hear from Mr O’Connor as a former president of the Police Association, perhaps being a little bit out of touch now with the front-line personnel who are desperately calling out for stronger measures to enable them to get on and do the job of protecting New Zealanders. And, quite frankly, this Government is letting them down time after time. It’s no wonder we’re seeing a 47 percent increase in firearms-related offences. It’s no wonder we’re seeing ram raids and thefts increasing all around the country, and, sadly, the mighty Waikato is not immune from that either. When you have a Government that is sending all the wrong signals, emboldening gang members and criminal activity in general, you end up with these sorts of consequences. This legislation was a prime opportunity for the Government to say, “No. No, we’ve had enough. This is it. We’re putting this in place. We’re giving the power back to Police to help improve the safety of New Zealanders in their daily lives.” Sadly, they’ve missed that opportunity.

We’ve made it clear that we will be introducing a Supplementary Order Paper in the committee of the whole House stage to look at introducing those warrantless search powers, I’d encourage the Government to reconsider their stance in the intervening time, and I would hope that Mr O’Connor in particular might go some way to helping to sway that discussion and actually getting something meaningful in this legislation, because we heard from the Police Association, quite clearly, that without the warrantless search powers in this FPO bill, then effectively you’re not achieving much at all.

I know that’s the modus operandi for this Government in terms of effectively making an announcement but delivering nothing, but, actually, this sort of stuff matters. We have, sadly, seen a Government that has dropped the ball on police, on law and order, for five years. Frankly, I was disappointed that this has been the case for what is such an important issue for New Zealanders around the country who are feeling threatened or unsafe, or being harmed in their homes, their businesses, their areas of recreation, and their communities. The Government have politicised this issue, and that, quite frankly, is disgusting. We all come into this place to try and make New Zealand better, and of course we have different views around how we might achieve that, and that’s all well and good. But, fundamentally, for big issues like safety and security of New Zealanders—one of the key reasons we are here—you would expect that this House would come together and make the appropriate legislation to ensure that safety can be protected.

And yet, even now, we hear the Government trying to say, “No, we don’t need that sort of thing.” The Green Party’s laughing away, because, well, as we know from their contribution they actually don’t care about victims at all. So it’s been really disappointing to see some of the debate as we’ve gone through with this—

Hon Andrew Little: They say, “We don’t want to politicise it; let’s not politicise it.” What an outrageous speech. What a hopeless, hopeless speech.

TIM VAN DE MOLEN: There’s the Minister over the back there who’s now barking away as he does every time he gets hauled up and found to be wrong, yet again, as he is in health time and time again.

We’re seeing from this Government that they get their backs up when they realise they’ve got it wrong. Instead of just acknowledging that and saying “Hey, we’ll fix it.”, for example, in health, all we do is see people lashing out with silly comments like “forked tongue” and so on.

So in terms of this particular piece of legislation, really what we need to see is a bill that gives the police more teeth—right? We need the ability to have some sort of pre-emptive option in there as well, because ultimately, if we’re sitting back waiting for someone to offend and to cause harm before we actually acknowledge the risks that they have presented—and in most cases expected to present because of their affiliations or their backgrounds or whatever it may be—we’re letting our victims down. Unfortunately, as we heard actually from the ACT member, we already have the ability for police to come and conduct warrantless search powers of law-abiding New Zealand firearms licence holders. Yet here we have a Government saying, “No, no, you can’t do that to criminals, but it’s fine to do it to law-abiding people.” That just sends the wrong signals. It’s really disappointing.

For me, I trust police. I trust that they will use the legislation appropriately. I trust that they will protect New Zealanders if they are given the support from a Government to actually get on and do that. In the Waikato, I have had many phone calls from police officers who are frustrated that they are not being given the tools to do their job—to protect our communities and to keep us all safe. This was an opportunity to do that. The Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill could have helped to keep our community safer, but the key aspect of those warrantless search powers was missed. Now, as I said, we’ll be bringing that up as a Supplementary Order Paper, and we want to see that supported.

We’re not politicising this issue, because we’re prepared to support the bill today—all right?

Hon Andrew Little: No, of course not!

TIM VAN DE MOLEN: And that’s the appropriate thing to do. We come to this House to make laws for the safety of New Zealanders—

Ingrid Leary: Sanctimonious.

TIM VAN DE MOLEN: —and some Labour members might not like that. They might have wanted us to oppose this just for the politicisation of it, and Mr Little is always up for something like that. But actually the rest of us who are prepared to be a bit more reasonable understand that any step that helps to give a little bit more power, or sends even the right signals to police and to the criminal fraternity, is the right way to go. And so on that basis, we are supporting this piece of legislation.

Ingrid Leary: Oh, finally; doesn’t sound like it.

TIM VAN DE MOLEN: Yeah, the member says it doesn’t sound like it. Well, I would encourage her to go and talk to some of the people in my community who are suffering from these sorts of criminal offending instances—

Hon Andrew Little: Because they want a better MP.

TIM VAN DE MOLEN: —people who understand that this Government has let them down time and time again. Now, Mr Little wouldn’t understand that because, as a list MP, he’s clearly not engaging with the community. He’s certainly not doing it in health and I suspect that no other steps would be taken with the rest of his constituency or people in his area. But we do connect with our communities, and around the Waikato I hear time and again that people are not feeling safe now, they want to see more support for the police, and they don’t feel like they have it at the moment. I just met on Monday with our district commander, as I regularly do, and also with our area commanders, to talk through some of the issues that they’re seeing, where they want support, what’s happening in our region. It’s part of being connected with the community, Mr Little; you might like to try it. What we’re hearing, though, in general is that there are concerns around that level of support. FPOs are a good opportunity. We haven’t taken it up. We’re really disappointed by that.

Now, we’ve sent some pretty clear signals around our views on helping to reduce the impact of gang offending as well, because we see a lot of gang-related firearms offences as well and we need to crack down on those gangs to help, again, send the right signals. I do agree with Mr O’Connor’s comment that there is no single solution to some of these challenges. They can be complex and they take time to fix. But making the right signals and putting incremental steps in place is really important. This bill doesn’t go nearly far enough to achieve that, but we will support it because it at least takes a baby step.

Coming to another comment that Mr O’Connor made about the implementation of the firearms registry, now, that is an area where, yeah, I understand his logic. Hey, if you’ve got firearms registered and you find them in an offender’s hands, then you can track that back to where it came from. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t stop the offending that led to the police discovering that firearm. Generally, some offence has occurred and that’s led to police being there, because we know they don’t have warrantless search powers to go and proactively find it from anyone with one of these FPOs in place. And of course, the idea of a registry—any time we’re creating law, you’re only going to impact law-abiding New Zealanders, and this simply is not targeting the right people.

ANGELA ROBERTS (Labour): Kia orana, Mr Speaker. It is my privilege to stand and take the final call on the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill this afternoon. I just want to start by acknowledging the work of the Justice Committee, and in acknowledging that work—noting that we aren’t delivering nothing, as has been suggested by the other side of the House—we’re actually delivering more than went to the select committee.

I love the select committee process. There is an opportunity for people who will be affected by legislation or by bills to come and share their views and their knowledge with the members of the select committee and to have an impact, and this is a bill that has been impacted.

The select committee heard the support from advocates for people who support those who are vulnerable to family and intimate partner violence—organisations such as Business and Professional Women New Zealand, Women’s Refuge, and Rural Women New Zealand. They have an obvious view about the potential to improve protection for these people, and they were heard. Of course, we’ve already heard today in the House about the most significant change, with the addition to the bill of the 41st qualifying offence, with the strangulation and suffocation acknowledgment. I think it’s significant.

We’ve heard a lot about shootings and all of the stuff that hits the headlines, and I just want to acknowledge the gun violence that doesn’t hit the headlines, which is that which is tangled up with our family and intimate partner violence. I just want to reflect for a moment on the Rural Women’s submission, and they talked about our rural women. I live in a rural community—I don’t live in Auckland. I live in a rural community, and my neighbours quite legitimately have guns because they use them in their daily working lives and they use them for recreational purposes. We are surrounded by guns, but we are also isolated, and our rural women are more vulnerable than most when we have incidents of gun violence.

Our rural women are also the ones who step in to our communities to support or organise support for those who are impacted. So I just want to acknowledge the additional complexities for my neighbours, and how this bill, especially as it has come back to the House, will strengthen the support for those vulnerable people.

It is great to hear from the other side of the House that, actually, we do have support for this bill, and I think that’s really important. Voices of our vulnerable New Zealanders have been heard, and it is because of this that I commend this bill to the House.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is, That the amendments recommended by the Justice Committee by majority be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Bills

Overseas Investment (Forestry) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): I present a legislative statement on the Overseas Investment (Forestry) Amendment Bill.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon DAVID PARKER: Thank you, Mr Speaker. I move, That the Overseas Investment (Forestry) Bill be now read a second time.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: It’s the “(Forestry) Amendment Bill”—can you just read that again.

Hon DAVID PARKER: The Overseas Investment (Forestry) Amendment Bill.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yeah.

Hon DAVID PARKER: Sorry if I misread that to the House. Do you want me to repeat that, or is that OK?

DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, that’s good.

Hon DAVID PARKER: Thank you. First, can I thank the Finance and Expenditure Committee for their efficient and effective deliberation over the bill. I’d also like to thank the 25 submitters who took the time to consider the bill within a shorter window than normal, and I’m sure those submissions assisted the committee in its deliberation.

Before I get into those submissions, some context. In 2018, changes were made to rules relating to overseas investment in production forestry. Those changes struck a balance, we wanted to facilitate investment in the forestry sector by minimising the regulatory burden while ensuring we closed gaps in the screening regime for investment forestry. That’s why, on the one hand, we required overseas investors acquiring forestry via forest registration rights to apply for consent under the Act.

Forest registration rights allow an overseas investor to plant and harvest forestry on someone else’s land, sometimes for multiple rotations lasting many, many years. They can have very similar effects to long-term leases or freehold purchases which are controlled under the Act, but forest registration rights weren’t. So until we made that change, overseas investors could acquire forest registration rights without any screening, which is a clear way around the rules and, effectively, made them ineffective. That way around the regulation was increasingly being used, and if we hadn’t made that change urgently before the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership came into effect, we could never have made the change in the future because of the rules in that agreement.

On the other hand, we recognised that overseas investment is important to support the sustainable growth of the private sector, so we, at the same time, introduced a special forestry test—a streamlined test for overseas investment in production forestry—because we wanted to stimulate that, in part because forest planting rates had dropped under the prior Government with the drop in the price of carbon, which had stayed at low levels for a long time. We knew that these changes were a delicate balance and that’s why we included in the legislation the requirement that the 2018 changes be reviewed. The review found that in the period since, much has changed because the carbon price has risen and the Overseas Investment Act has more generally been simplified. For that and other reasons, afforestation has taken off.

So in this new context, the special streamlined process for investment in forestry conversions is no longer needed, which is why we have this bill. Again, it seeks to strike a balance reflecting this new context by increasing the oversight of forestry conversions by applying the more stringent general “benefit to New Zealand” test in place of the special forestry test, and by maintaining the special forestry test for investment in existing production forests.

As mentioned, 25 submissions were received on the bill, and submitters fell into three camps. Some thought we were restricting investment too much and that this could be to the detriment of our economy and our climate change goals. Others thought we should be doing more to restrict the amount of overseas investment in forestry. Those in support, who were the third group, thought that the bill was an appropriate way to balance managing the risks of the forestation with supporting investment that brings benefits to New Zealand. Submissions also identified areas where further clarification was needed and I thank submitters and the committee for progressing these changes.

So, turning to the key issues raised, some submitters were concerned that the bill could discourage investment, negatively impacting forestry investment and our climate change goals. However, the bill isn’t about stopping investment in forestry; rather, it’s making sure that the investments demonstrate benefits to New Zealand. Productive investment is and remains welcome. To achieve this, the bill requires investors to pass the “benefit to New Zealand” test. This allows consideration of a wide range of factors, including the economy, the environment, historic heritage, and public access to the land. In respect of the environment, I should say that it is deliberately limited, because it’s not the Resource Management Act and it should not be primarily an environmental test under the Overseas Investment Act. That is for environmental legislation that applies to overseas investors and New Zealand and visitors alike.

Anyway, applying this broader test, the bill creates incentives for investors to invest in a way that delivers benefits against these factors. This helps channel overseas investment into areas that will result in productive development of the forestry sector to support our economy and to achieve our climate change goals. I do recognise that any change to any law creates some uncertainty. To help with that, the regulator will have initial guidance online at the bill’s commencement. More detailed guidance as to how the “benefit to New Zealand” test will consider forestry related investment will follow once the changes have had time to bed in.

Federated Farmers and some individuals were concerned that the bill did not go far enough to prevent overseas investors converting land into forestry. I’m confident that the risks posed by overseas investment into our most productive farmland can be properly managed in the way that this bill provides. Investors will need to show that the benefits of their land are proportionate to the sensitivity of the land. This proportionality element is appropriate. In practice, this means that there will be a higher bar for any investor who wants to convert any of our most sensitive land into forestry. The high bar will apply, for example, to the most productive farmland, the land of the highest conservation value, or the land of the highest cultural value.

In the alternative, in practice, a lower threshold applies to lower quality of land—I don’t want to criticise the land, but different productivity classes of land—where forestry has a range of benefits to New Zealand. This flexibility is baked into the Act, and it will mean that investors now have incentives to target their investment into land that is best suited to forestry and to avoid land with high productive, environmental, or cultural values. The alternative would have been to apply the Act’s more restrictive “farmland benefit test”. The Government considers the “farmland benefit test” would have not been appropriate for forestry investments. It would have had a negative impact on the forestry sector’s access to foreign capital and could have posed, and would have posed, a disproportionate burden in some cases. The approach taken in the bill is like other exemptions from the farmland benefit test, which the Act provides for, when that test would provide an undue burden.

Finally, I briefly note that the Government is also investigating broader regulatory settings. We’re considering changes to the emissions trading scheme. The climate commission has recently reported on that, and, in addition, we’re considering improvements to the planning and environmental regulation of forests. I acknowledge members of the select committee who are concerned about the monitoring of the 1,000-hectare exemption for forestry rights. I’ve asked officials to report back to me on this matter, and I will ensure the committee is updated in due course. I commend the bill to the House.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that be motion be agreed to.

IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s with a degree of trepidation that I take the first National call on the Overseas Investment (Forestry) Amendment Bill, and I’ll explain this as I go through it. But I want to digress for a minute and just go into a little of what’s going on in the industry at the moment and in the sector at the moment, because it is an extraordinary, complex, and difficult area for us to manage, I think, in the future.

As I said, we’re supporting this bill, which received a range of submissions, from those who thought it had gone too far to those who thought it hadn’t gone nearly far enough. I think we’ve reached the right balance with this, and the Minister did a very good job explaining it a moment ago. But what a week it’s been in the forestry, emissions trading scheme (ETS), and the carbon investors sector, with Ministers Shaw and Nash coming out with their response to the consultation on the permanent forestry sink and the potential exclusion from the ETS of so-called exotic forests, effectively saying, “There’s nothing to see here.”

Then we have the Climate Change Commission’s recommendations to the Government on the auctioning of carbon credits in the period 2023 to 2027. The Climate Change Commission is, effectively, wanting to lower auction volumes of carbon, limit minimum prices, and impose a higher minimum before the cost containment reserves come into play. This has the effect of creating a moneyfest for hill country landowners—or potentially a moneyfest for hill country landowners and carbon farmers; albeit, a somewhat uncertain one, as politicians are involved here. And I think that the Minister almost said the same thing himself.

Against all this backdrop of the great unknown, we need to understand how will forestry harvesting techniques evolve in the next few years and how diverse will the tree become? In other words, what will it be used for, because it won’t just be used for the stuff we see in this building; it’ll be used for all sorts of things. There’s just such a diverse potential with our tree industry. How many jobs it will create, how much it’ll be worth to the manufacturing sector, what impact will this have on New Zealand’s red meat sector income of some $12 billion, and if some of that’s lost, what percentage of this will be replaced by the forestry sector? One certainty is this will not happen in the next 25 years, because trees’ only value to that point is as a carbon sink. So it’s, effectively, going to be 25 to 30 years before the trees we’ve seen planted today are available to the manufacturing sector. At present, the volumes involved and logs available in New Zealand are starting to drop, as the great planting spree of the 1990s comes to an end. So there’s so much uncertainty in this sector, and that’s a little bit of background information that I want to just put context around why this is necessary, and why I think it adds a little bit to the puzzle.

Now, Government influence on land use in New Zealand has almost always ended up in tears. And one only needs to go back to supplementary minimum prices of the 1970s or for deer of the early 2000s to see the damage it can do. The matters I’ve mentioned have the potential to be more contentious than the wool acquisition debates of the 1960s. And I only hope that we collectively can have a constructive debate on these issues, and pretty urgently before it’s too late.

So with that broad outline of, perhaps, what is one of the greatest challenges facing our traditional land use in New Zealand in my lifetime, I return to the bill in front of us today. And in doing so, I acknowledge Minister Parker, who’s brought the bill to the House, and also the select committee, who I thought was one of the more collegial, I guess, and interesting select committee discussions that I’ve had—certainly Finance and Expenditure Committee in my time here. But the other thing that really complemented that was the value I thought that the officials added to the discussion, because they gave us some very good explanations of how the Overseas Investment Office works, how they see it working in this case. And it’s quite interesting, because one of the great challenges that we’ve, I guess, been given by some farming organisations, particularly in New Zealand, is the fact that this is just mass planting going on, and we’re going to see the end of farming as we know it—some have gone that far. I think the officials satisfied us to a large extent in that respect, in that when applications are made, they explained the process. So when an application’s made for a purchase of land under this right, the application will contain all sorts of things.

And one of those things that’s most important to us is what happens to the better classes of land in that body of land that’s been acquired for forestry. I think the Overseas Investment Office will look very favourably on applications that are made where they intend to extract the better classes of land from forestry use and either sell them off or put them into other forms of agricultural use. I think we got some satisfaction from that, and the discussion, I thought, was well worthwhile. We’ve got to remember that this is not affecting a large amount of land in New Zealand to date, but the issues I raised earlier in this discussion certainly could change that and change it very quickly, and so it is a discussion that we need to have as a Parliament and as a country, and do it fairly quickly.

I just want to go back to the forestry industry. I don’t think there’s anyone more enthusiastic about the forestry industry than I am, and I certainly think it’s got great potential for New Zealand in the future. But I just do want to touch on the issue I raised with respect to what happens as we transition from one land-use type to another, particularly a land-use type where there’s no income for many, many years. That could be very challenging for New Zealand if we don’t get the balance of this right in the short term; long term, it might be quite different.

So the bill, as the Minister explained, really changes the application process. It amends the Overseas Investment Act to ensure that overseas investments that result in the conversion of farmland or other land of forestry benefits New Zealand, and that any risks can be better managed. It also means that overseas investors can no longer acquire land for forestry conversion or for the acquisition or establishment of permanent carbon forests. These applications will be considered under the standard “benefit to New Zealand” test as opposed to under the forestry test, and the interesting thing about the forestry test is it’s still available to overseas investors who wish to buy what I suppose you’d call existing forestry or plantations in New Zealand. I think that’s quite an acceptable position for the Finance and Expenditure Committee to have arrived at.

The forestry test is simpler by far than the tests that we’re now applying, which is the “benefit to New Zealand” test, but it’s also different than the test for farmland in New Zealand. One of the questions that was raised with the select committee, and quite legitimately, I think, is why there is a difference between acquiring land to plant a pine tree on and acquiring land to plant a walnut tree on, for example, or an oak tree—because there is a difference—or a grapevine, for that matter. So I think that it’s pointed to some interesting anomalies in the Overseas Investment Office legislation in New Zealand, and I think we need to review that in the future, because, as the Minister said himself, we do rely heavily on overseas investment in New Zealand and we’ll continue to rely on that. It’s a very essential part of certainly our productive sector. Our primary sector relies hugely on overseas investment for its future development.

One of the issues that was quite interesting in this whole exercise, as well, was we were given some statistics that, historically, we’ve been informed that almost 80 percent of New Zealand forests, standing plantation forest, is owned by overseas investors. In the course of this discussion, we were given some information that—and I think I’ve got the figure right—56 percent of it is owned by overseas investors. So there is some great uncertainty in the stats that we understand around that type of investment. I don’t have any issue, and I’m sure the National Party has no issue, with foreign investment in New Zealand forestry—it’s of a great value to us. The interesting thing will be how we can, in the future, extract more value from that forestry investment by those international investors, because it would be very good if we could get a sound base for a manufacturing sector in New Zealand that has a surety of supply of logs in the future.

So just back to the carbon issue—which I think is going to be extremely challenging for us—it is a threat to some extent to our traditional farming types in New Zealand and our traditional use of farmland in New Zealand. Whether that’s a threat that we can’t handle or not is something I think, as I said earlier, this Parliament needs to get to a consensus on and to do it very quickly.

We certainly support this piece of legislation. I think it opens up, and, certainly, the activities in that sector in the last few days have opened up, the need for some much greater and more urgent discussion on this whole topic. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

BARBARA EDMONDS (Labour—Mana): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise as the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, who examines the Overseas Investment (Forestry) Amendment Bill, and support the amendments on this side of the House. This bill seeks to amend the Overseas Investment Act 2005 and it is quite narrowly focused. The main change would be to remove the ability for overseas investors to rely on a simplified and more permissive consent process under the Act when they seek to convert land into productive forestry land.

Again, like the Minister David Parker and the previous speaker, Ian McKelvie, I’d like to thank the 25 submitters for their time on the bill. They were very varied in content, but they were all considered greatly. I’d like to thank the officials for their time and their advice. There was never a question that was unanswered. To the member that just spoke, I’d like to thank him, in particular, for his collegiality—that is, Ian McKelvie. He spoke about the collegiality that was at the select committee, and I think very much part of it is because he was the lead on it. His expertise was actually well used through the membership, so I’d also like to thank our other members on the Finance and Expenditure Committee.

As the Minister set out previously, the Overseas Investment Act is New Zealand’s principal tool for regulating foreign investment. It seeks to balance supporting high-quality investment with ensuring that the Government has the tools to be able to manage the risks. Right throughout the submission process and the committee deliberations, the word “balance” continued to be raised. Ultimately, that was the policy question before the select committee: is the shifting of the current test for forestry conversion from here to here right, or do we need to go further?

The Minister set out the background to the changes and the context, and it was a very good lesson on why statutory reviews—so reviews that are put in new bills and new tests—are a good mechanism for checking in further down the line. So the previous bill in 2018 had a statutory review, and five years later, that’s how we’ve gotten to this bill.

So, anyway, back to the bill and the balance the committee was required to consider. The bill ensures that the forestry conversions by overseas investors continue to bring broad benefits to New Zealand. These investments will now be considered under the same rules as other investments in sensitive land, known as the “benefit to New Zealand” test, rather than under the streamlined special forestry test. The removal of the special forestry test only means that conversions are now treated the same as other overseas investment in non-urban land. This will channel overseas investment into the right forests in the right place for the right reasons. As the member for Tukituki, who will probably speak on the bill later—that was a key consideration for the select committee. It was making sure that we will channel overseas investments in the right forests in the right place for the right reasons—hence my emphasis.

There were some changes that were recommended by the select committee. Generally, they were to address minor and technical concerns that were either raised in submissions or by officials. I’ll just go through a couple of them. One of them was that applicants of forestry standing consents must demonstrate a strong record of compliance with the Act, or corresponding laws in other jurisdictions. However, the common practice of creating a local special purpose vehicle for investment can also be a barrier to demonstrating a record of compliance, so the select committee suggested that the bill clarify that when considering an application for a forestry standing consent, the regulator can also consider the compliance record of the applicant’s wider group of associates and individuals with control.

Another amendment that the select committee has recommended is amending the special forestry test’s existing restriction on using the land for residential purposes other than for forestry workers, by replacing this restriction with a non-occupation outcome. One submitter—who was a very good submitter and raised such a good point, which is why the select committee came to this agreement to amend it—raised that this change may create outcomes inconsistent with policy intent by restricting the ability for forestry workers to reside on the land, because what’s not unusual with these pieces of land is for there to be, say, some sort of temporary housing or some sort of infrastructure, some improvement, for the forestry workers to be able to live on. So the select committee agreed with that submitter, and the bill now clarifies that forestry workers may continue to occupy land acquired via the Act’s forestry provisions on the same terms as allowed under the Act’s current restrictions on residential use.

The Minister touched upon the 1,000 hectares threshold, and also there was probably the last amendment that the select committee suggested—and which I’ll raise today—which is to access the special forestry test or the general “benefit to New Zealand” test for conversion, the relevant land must be used and will continue to be used exclusively, or near exclusively, for forestry activities. There was a lot of debate around the words “exclusively” and “not exclusively”, and officials assured us that there was quite a bit of precedent throughout the current Overseas Investment Act regime for them to lean on to be able to apply that test. One submitter, though, indicated that plantings might be staggered, meaning parts of the land may, at times, sit outside of the cycle of “establishing, maintaining, or harvesting a crop of trees” in the definition of “forestry activities”. To ensure these scenarios are captured, the bill and the select committee recommended that we widen the definition of “forestry activities” to include maintaining the land between harvesting and establishing a new crop of trees.

It was a very interesting bill to consider. I’d like to again thank the Finance and Expenditure Committee members for their work on it, and again acknowledge Ian McKelvie, the member of Parliament for Rangitīkei, for his expertise and his collegiality at the table. I believe that we’ve struck the right balance, and therefore I commend this bill to the House.

TIM VAN DE MOLEN (National—Waikato): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s lovely to see collegiality breaking out at this late hour on a House sitting on a Thursday afternoon. It wasn’t here, perhaps, earlier on—but that’s all right; nevertheless, it is encouraging to see, and I thank all members for it.

Look, it is a pleasure to talk a call on the Overseas Investment (Forestry) Amendment Bill second reading, coming back from select committee. For me, this is one of the prime examples of why it’s so important to get rules right. When you think about the impact that legislation has from the effect of Government meddling in the market, you see unintended consequences, and submitters came to the select committee with some very clear views.

When we think that, actually, this rule came in primarily through the last term of Parliament, when the New Zealand First Party, at that point, held the Government to ransom, effectively, to say, “Hey, we need to get this in place”, it skews the playing field. I think that’s one of the key challenges here, and we see this in legislation when you create a set of rules that makes for an uneven playing field, you can get some dangerous consequences. We’ve heard that consistently over the last few years.

Part of the carbon credits aspect, part of the special forestry test impact has resulted in a significant increase in the volume of the land going into forestry from sheep and beef or other land uses. There have been a number of concerns raised about that, in terms of the impact on those local communities, especially, but also the longer-term impacts from having that sort of significant change in land use around the countryside, as well, and whether or not that is the right outcome, whether it was the intended outcome, and what we might do about it. So that is encouraging to see that that is being wound back a bit, through this bill.

We do support the bill, as I suspect listeners will be aware by now, because, ultimately, having a level of foreign direct investment in our country is important. We are a small nation, we do rely on overseas investment, and it contributes greatly to our prosperity. It enables people to invest, to set up businesses, to take on opportunities when there may not be that capital available domestically, and yet the creation of jobs that can come about from that sort of foreign direct investment—it can be significant for our communities.

So these sorts of things are really important. Of course, having the right rules around it is the key aspect, and that’s where, I think, we’ve strayed a bit over the last few years, with where the legislation sat in regards to the special forestry test, but now that’s been tidied up somewhat and will start bringing that uneven playing field back on to a more even keel—as I mix metaphors all over the show.

I think one of the key things that we look at, and I’ll come back to that land use, because that is one that is really important for me, coming from a rural community, as well. Any time we are setting legislation here, we need to be really mindful of the unintended consequences that can arise from it. In this situation, I heard consistently over the last few years that there were some real impacts happening around our rural communities; I’ve seen some of that playing out and, on that basis, I’m really encouraged to see the changes put forward here.

Now, I notice, Mr Speaker, you are getting somewhat restless, so I’m happy to bring my contribution to a close as we near the end of play for this session of the House, just noting that we are in support of this. Ultimately, having a level playing field, enabling everyone to participate or to compete on the same basis is appropriate, having a level of foreign direct investment is important and helps to boost our economy here in New Zealand, and so National supports this bill. Thank you.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Members, this debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 9 August 2022. Kia manuia. ‘Aere rā.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 4.56 p.m.