SpeechVANUSHI 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 1300 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."