Wall LouisaLOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o te Whare. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Sorry I've lost my voice after last night I'm not sure why. Anyway on this the Maritime Extension Bill on this the first reading—and I do so as a member of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee. Like my colleague Harete Hipango I too want to talk about the context and the need for this piece of legislation. It really does stem from a 2015 Cabinet paper and then a 2018 Cabinet paper that essentially has highlighted that it's true—that 17000 kilometres of New Zealand's coastline is providing a bit of a highway for drugs to come into our country.Just a bit of context out there: so in 2015 we intercepted meth—258 kilograms. It had a street value of $219.8 million and ephedrine at that time was the other big player—761 kilograms valued at $87.8 million. As Harete Hipango pointed out in June 2016 448 kilograms of meth valued at $438 million was found in a campervan in Northland. So this trade is growing and expanding and it's growing and expanding here because we have the highest prices for cocaine and ecstasy in the world which I find fascinating. So a gram of cocaine in New Zealand based on the Global Drug Survey in 2018—it's outrageous—is $360. One pill of ecstasy costs $35. So wow what an amazingly lucrative business.So where are these drugs coming from? Well we know they're coming from Hong Kong from Zhangzhou. They're also coming from Myanmar Laos and Cambodia. These are based on reports from the United Nations and other international monitoring agencies. So the other interesting part of all of this—and I didn't realise this and I do and I should reference that this bill also incorporates New Zealand's rights and obligations under article 108 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and article 17 of the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances into our domestic legislation. In international shipping law actually vessels can seek shelter in New Zealand waters and bays and inlets without clearing customs. So that's a really interesting situation I guess that we find ourselves in.So the intention of this piece of legislation is to make sure that our agencies and namely—as my colleague the Hon Ron Mark has highlighted—those agencies our Defence Force and our Customs Service who will provide the vehicles that will patrol our waters are going to help detect these illicit drugs. I also neglected to contribute the actual harm to New Zealand of these illicit drugs. We're talking about a social cost that's estimated at $1.8 billion in social harm annually. The Drug Foundation have said that that involves 45000 New Zealanders who receive support for their drug and alcohol addiction. So that combined cost also looks at the investment by the police by our courts and by our prison beds. These illicit drugs actually are costing us a lot of money. So this legislation I believe and we obviously believe is part of a solution to detecting these drugs while hopefully not just detecting but providing some sort of—you know with increased patrols maybe not so many people will get into the trade. So who knows? It may prove to be a deterrent. Time will tell. The reality of us having the vehicles out there on our waters patrolling an extension of our borders to make sure that these drugs do not enter our territory is incredibly important.I don't really want to speak for much longer. I don't think it's going to be valuable for the House's time for me to do that but can I just say I look forward to hearing from the submitters and actually us quantifying a bit more the actual damage to our country through this trade and us all working together to stop these drugs coming into New Zealand. I do have to read this because I did do a bit of research but heroin apparently is coming mostly out of Afghanistan; cocaine from South America; and amphetamines from China South-east Asia West Africa and the Americas. And the other context that we should all be really interested in is that drugs are also coming to New Zealand via the Pacific and from New Zealand to the Pacific and to Australia but the countries where we we've detected these illicit drugs have been Fiji Samoa Tonga Papua New Guinea Vanuatu and Timor-Leste. So obviously if we can stop the flow of those drugs we're also going to stop the impact on our Pacific brothers and sisters. We know that there is an increasing drug problem in the Pacific. So this legislation isn't only relevant for us but it's also relevant for our Pacific Islands Forum nation partners I'll call them and I also want to highlight that. This also provides a really good opportunity for us to work with our Australian colleagues and other colleagues around our Asia-Pacific area so that we can work collectively to get this rubbish off our streets. Kia ora.