Tirikatene RinoRINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. I am pleased to speak in support of this bill the Enhancing Identity Verification and Border Processes Legislation Bill at its first reading. I note that the speaker who has just resumed her seat Jacqui Dean mentioned that this is how the Government responds. In a way it is sad that the Government is responding to this because this piece of legislation has come about because of a succession of huge blunders that were made by a succession of Government agencies. If we look at the Department of Corrections the Ministry of Justice the Customs Service and Department of Internal Affairs—all of those agencies dropped the ball. They dropped the ball and allowed a very serious convicted criminal who was still carrying out his sentence to be issued with a passport cross through the border jump on a plane and end up on the other side of the world in South America. That was a huge blunder. Yes we know that things need to be fixed but we do not want to be seeing these blunders happening all of the time. We are seeing it too often in food safety areas and now we are seeing it in border protection areas. Therefore I do acknowledge the good work by the retired High Court judge Dr John Priestley QC and Simon Murdoch who conducted this inquiry—after the debacle of Phillip John Smith also known as Phillip John Traynor—into the failings of our Government agencies in preventing a very serious criminal from jetting away overseas. This bill gets to the nub of one issue which is the issue of aliases—also known as". We had Phillip John Smith also known as Phillip John Traynor. The fact that his identity information from his birth—he had a heinous criminal career under the family name of his stepfather. So those failings led him to be able to apply for a passport under his birth name and no one knew otherwise—no one within the Government agencies knew otherwise. So this bill does crack down on that. It does allow the agencies to share more information to ensure that we do not see these events happening again. There are operational changes that I understand the agencies concerned are already carrying out. This bill just implements the changes that are needed at a legislative level. So we do welcome these changes but I do note the concerns of the Green Party that whenever you are looking at sharing of private information we need to make sure that the systems are robust. We obviously note that there was—as was identified in the report—a complete failure of or lack of comprehensive systems in place in the case of Mr Smith. We do want to make sure—and I think that is why this bill needs thorough examination and consideration by the Law and Order Committee—that the right balance is struck. At the end of the day we want to get it right. We want to make sure that the bad persons of high interest in the criminal justice system are not allowed to just jump on a plane and just fly out of the country but we also want to ensure that it does not unnecessarily intrude on those people who are not of high interest to the criminal justice system. These are some long-overdue measures that we do welcome. I was interested to note the use of biometric information—we are talking about retinas thumbprints and various other unique identifiers that we do have. I am pleased that although biometric systems were not in place there certainly was a biological impact on Phillip John Smith when he was intercepted in Brazil and brought back and thrown back into prison here because he went away with what seemed like a full head of hair and came back completely bald. I think that it was good that our law enforcement folks whether they were in Brazil or our own police were able to yank him back to prison here in New Zealand. I understand he is awaiting further charges and the outcome of his brief South American escapade. We do support this bill. We do look forward to examining it further at the select committee and I commend it to the House."