SpeechSIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I'm very happy to support this bill the Foreign Affairs (Consular Loans) Amendment Bill. Obviously we're only at the second reading at the moment. We have the committee stage and the third reading to go but as we intimated on this side of the House during the first reading we support the legislation. This is a really good example of a practice which has been going for a long long time. There were some statutory changes—and I might just highlight a little bit of that—which changed the legality of the process. So I think one of my first themes from this side of the House is to say that the idea of consular loans to support New Zealand citizens and occasionally permanent residents—and I might elaborate on that slightly—is a positive thing. There is absolutely no dispute I suspect from any side of the House that New Zealanders overseas in distress are able to go to our consulates and embassies and get assistance and consular loans are just one of the aspects that can be provided. The Minister who has just resumed his seat Minister Webb has pointed out that family members can be assisted as well.The context to this is that it's something that has happened for a long time. Consular loans have been a pretty standard activity. I think it was back in 1989 that there was some legislation—part of the Public Finance Act—which authorised this but Parliament made changes in 2013 to that Act and it was unknown at the time that the change to that Act meant that actually legally speaking—not morally or ethically but legally speaking—the giving of consular loans was no longer legal. So again for listeners at home it's not to stress that anything wrong was happening; it's just that all of a sudden it became illegal and in effect the new Public Finance Act 2013 or rather the new expression of it said a very specific delegation must be given. So this is a bill which is in effect doing two things. One is making it absolutely abundantly clear in a new piece of legislation this Foreign Affairs (Consular Loans) Amendment Bill that a permanent delegation is given to the chief executive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to exercise that authority to give consular loans and it's also retrospective to make it clear in respect of the loans that have been given in the past. I just want to make one very brief comment. The Minister touched a few times on the exceptional nature of assisting New Zealand permanent residents. I don't want to give particular examples here. People are welcome to go and read the New Zealand Herald. There are occasions when New Zealand permanent residents do need more assistance than we currently give and I want to acknowledge through the Speaker that this is not precisely within the bill but it's an encouragement to the Government and future Governments to perhaps look at how our consulates and embassies not only help New Zealand citizens but New Zealand permanent residents as well to get further and fuller assistance. I really want to make that clear. Some assistance is given but I feel that in many ways our permanent residents have pretty much all the rights of a citizen and certainly those overseas require that as well. But with that I would like to commend the bill to the House.