Williamson Maurice: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill Tariff Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Williamson Maurice: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill Tariff Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8232. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister of Customs) 
: 
 I move  
That the Customs and Excise Amendment Bill and the Tariff Amendment Bill be now read a third time 
. Given that it is only a few minutes since I gave my second reading speech on this legislation I have decided to bail out of my prepared third reading speech save the House a lot of pain and misery and just cover again what I think are two or three key points. 
The biggest part of this legislation is the implementation of the SmartGate technology which I am proud to announce. I have seen the kiosks at Auckland Airport. They are in we have been testing them and they are done in lovely black and grey with the silver fern on them. New Zealand and Australian e-passport holders will be able to come through the gates from 3 December when we launch this stuff at Auckland Airport and early in the new year we will be implementing them at the airports in Christchurch and Wellington. It means that ordinary citizens—good-quality people; New Zealanders and Australians with nothing to worry about—who are travelling across the Tasman Sea with their families and so on will be able to walk up to these machines bang their passport on and get their facial recognitions confirmed. The gates will open through they will go and they are down straight to the customs hall that much quicker. The reason for that is these machines can work quicker than humans. As I said in the Committee of the whole House they have a lesser error rate. But more important we want to free up the very very good customs officers who I am terribly proud to be the Minister of to go about and do their job that they do so well; that is to find where the really serious offenders are where stuff is being hidden and go after it. 
I never cease to be amazed at just how under attack we are at our border. I was at the mail centre the other day with customs and I saw something that literally took my breath away. It was a beautiful little pack for a baby. It had beautiful baby toys some baby oil some baby powder bottles and it was all decked out beautifully. It was sealed and had a lovely card from a grandmother to her loving granddaughter wishing her well. I looked at it and said: “So what?”. The customs officer said that one bottle was talcum powder and the one beside it which was absolutely exactly the same was pseudoephedrine. Somebody had completely replaced the entire contents and resealed it. If one looked at it one just could not tell. But we had a particularly vigilant customs officer who after having looked at scans and X-rays and so on thought the powder densities were slightly different. After some checking was done he or she got it. That war goes on every day. We just finished a big operation that they were dealing with. That is what I want customs officers to be freed up to do and that is what this legislation will do by allowing electronic machinery to process people. 
There are quite a lot of minor amendments to provisions that were really quite silly. One example is that a person could not be arrested if he or she were not still on the aircraft or the ship. It is quite silly; if a person makes a jump customs officers have to get the police to do the arresting. The amendments tidy up some quite silly stuff such as giving customs a 7-day period to track and trace somebody. It is a good bill. I again thank all members of the Government Administration Committee for being as cooperative as they were and for doing a very good job of tidying it up. I think we clarified earlier on the reason for one of my Supplementary Order Papers. It was to make sure that some technology did not have to have a human equivalent for example back-office processing but a passenger coming through will always have that alternative if he or she chooses. I commend the bill to the House.