Adams AmyHon AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. I want to join too in speaking in support of this arms amendment legislation and join with other members of the House in recording both our thanks to the New Zealand Police and also our condolences to all of the victims and their families.When I spoke in this House on the condolence motion on Wednesday of the week following the attack I said there were two questions that really continue to occupy our thinking. One was: how did this happen? And the second was: how do we stop it happening again? This bill is very much around the second of those questions—how we stop an event like this of this scale and a tragedy of this scale happening again.I think it's fair to say that over the last 18 days in the wake of the Christchurch terrorist attack a lot of us have learnt so much more around gun rules in New Zealand: what is possible what is practical what is legal and what can be done quite easily. One of the things that we have learnt in the most awful of ways is the utter and devastating lethality of these fast-firing self-loading weapons. The ability of the gunman to go into Al Noor Mosque and in a matter of just a small number of minutes shoot more than 70 people before getting in his car and heading off to attack the Linwood mosque tells us so much about the damage that can be done by any gun admittedly but by these military-style semi-automatics and semi-automatics that can be amended adapted and loaded to create such devastating strike force.For those of us who hadn't previously been deeply involved in gun legislation when we started to understand the I would say failings in the current law that came about after Aramoana and the way they were eventually amended before being passed into law we saw that there are so many gaps and deficiencies that allow a person with a category A gun licence—so that's a normal garden-variety gun licence—to buy a weapon without any of the oversight and checks that would go with the category E licence and to buy equally lawfully high-capacity magazines and the like and yet put them together in a way that creates a gun that frankly has no place on the streets of New Zealand and can cause the damages that it's caused. Now knowing that no one in this House can ever now unknow those problems and none of us can sit here I believe and continue to allow the sales of the weaponry of the capacity and the ability that can be created from it with the system we currently have.I want to just take a moment to reflect on one of the challenges that is raised a lot which is Well that's fine. You're going to make it tougher for law-abiding gun owners but you'll never do anything about the illegal guns in society." To a point that may well be true. There will continue to be illegal and illegally owned guns I'm sure. But it doesn't in any way lessen the requirement and the obligation on us and on this House to ensure that our gun laws are fit for purpose. So we may not be able to guarantee that no gun will ever be used in a way that hurts someone or that every gun will be lawful but we can absolutely make sure that our gun laws require a standard of care of our police and of our gun dealers and of our gun owners that we expect. That's certainly what this legislation sets out to do.Now I do obviously have some concerns that as we are taking it through in a very truncated period of time there isn't going to be the ability to as the last speaker Kelvin Davis commented finesse the law in the way that a select committee normally would. However I think the circumstances and the urgency that we're facing means that in this case we should none the less proceed with what have been well-signalled changes to the gun legislation and then take our time to return back to the issue in a more fulsome way as required.There's one final point I do want also to put on record which is simply in relation to the timing of what we know about the buy-back scheme that the Government has said they will offer and the legislation which they intend to pass approximately a week from now. The Government has said repeatedly—and I thank them for their assurance; it's certainly the right thing to do—that there will be a fair buy-back scheme operating to properly compensate gun owners in a way that's similar to the ones we saw in Australia. All of that is good but I've got to say that I'm far less concerned about what the total ultimate cost of that will be because I accept what the Government is saying that it's almost impossible to know; what I'm far more interested in though is a bit more clarity from them on how that buy-back scheme will work so that the gun owners that we are about to deprive of their lawfully held possessions—and in a way I support—how they are going to be compensated: when under what schedule what they can expect.I don't like as a matter of practice passing legislation and saying "Don't worry; we'll compensate you for all that but we'll tell you what the compensation looks like later." I think the public of New Zealand deserve to know a little bit more about how that will work and frankly this House should know more about it as part of passing the legislation. So to me that piece is the piece about which there are far more questions to be answered sooner from the Government. The total bill will be what the total bill will be but I certainly hope that before next Tuesday when the legislation is passed by this House the Government sees its way clear to give us more information on that.Coming back to where I started we will never be the same as we were before 1.40-odd p.m. on 15 March and as a result of that New Zealand expects and demands and I think rightly so that this Parliament acts quickly and thoroughly to address what are now very clear deficiencies in our gun legislation and for that reason I'm proud to support the bill."