Bakshi Kanwaljit SinghKANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker for the opportunity to speak and contribute on this very important bill. First of all I would like to congratulate Chris Bishop for drawing his third bill within a very short period of time. There are members who have been waiting for a long long time for their bill to be drawn but he has got his third bill being debated. This is a very important bill because the National Party always believes in law and order and is tough on law and order. We have done a lot in that area. I would like to touch first of all—as the Minister speaking in reply David Clark mentioned—on the inquiry and Chris Bishop also mentioned about the inquiry which was held in the last term of Parliament. I would like to read the recommendation which was made by the Law and Order Committee. It was: we recommend to the Government that the Arms Act 1983 be amended to clearly state that a gang member or prospect must not be considered a fit and proper person to possess firearms and therefore must not hold a firearms licence." So that was the recommendation. The majority of the recommendations made in that inquiry the Government accepted. The report back was done in April 2017 and the minority view by New Zealand First said "Whilst the report recommends law changes to prohibit gangs from legally owning firearms it does not provide information or recommendations on the adequacy of sentences given to a gang member and other criminals who commit offences involving illicit firearms." So that was a clear indication of what that inquiry did. I remember talking to the previous President of the Police Association Greg O'Connor and he was very concerned about this issue. Today what we are hearing is that the Labour Party—and two of the members who were present in the inquiry were the Hon Stuart Nash and the Hon Ron Mark who was speaking before a few other speakers and who was angrily trying to narrate the history of what had happened. But they were part of this inquiry. They mentioned this and this was the recommendation of the inquiry to the Government of the day—that they should consider this aspect. Unfortunately we were not the Government later on but the Minister of Police at that time the Hon Paula Bennett accepted the majority of the recommendations and they were to be implemented. But I congratulate once again Chris Bishop for picking up from that inquiry the one issue that was raised by the select committee and for bringing this bill to the House and this bill was drawn. I can assure you that there was a lot of concern about the gangs having firearms and that issue was raised not only by the Police Association but by some of the other people who were involved. Here I would also like to acknowledge the people who legally own the firearms. They are the law-abiding citizens and the inquiry clearly mentioned that we are not trying to target the people who legally own the firearms or who are the licence holders. There are about 250000 people who legally have got licences and they are not the people to be targeted. So I think this bill is very important. We should have this sent to the select committee and I don't know why there is opposition. We had another bill recently pass through this House the National Animal Identification and Tracing Amendment Bill in which we gave the authority for a fisheries officer to do a search. Today we are hearing from the Green Party and the Labour Party that we should not be giving any authority to the Commissioner of Police who can authorise his officers to go and do a search. So how contrary it is that a fisheries officer can go and do any search whereas for a person who is holding firearms we are not allowed to go and search their premises. So I think this is totally hypocrisy of the Government and they are not thinking it through seriously. I hope that they may consider supporting this bill."