Penk ChrisCHRIS PENK (National—Kaipara ki Mahurangi): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. A great pleasure to be able to speak to the Maritime Powers Bill. Others have already set out some of the reasons that it's really important for the New Zealand Parliament to take a keen interest in this domain and I want to pick up on a theme actually that Ingrid Leary who's just resumed her seat was touching upon in terms of the large coastal area that we have as a nation. I would go so far as to say that in fact New Zealand is a large nation but it just so happens that a lot of that territory is water rather than land. Certainly when you think about our sovereign interests as well as those needed to protect our more general interests—the protection of human rights and so forth that she and Simon O'Connor have spoken about—it's very important that we are active and engaged in what's needed to control this domain and this environment and of course that's the intent of the bill: to be able to give powers to officers of the New Zealand State to do exactly that. My colleague Simon O'Connor has mentioned that National does support this bill at least to select committee. At that point of course we'll be examining different issues that may arise whether technical or even—just in my own case certainly—to try and get a really good understanding of exactly what's at stake. There's inherently a tension I suppose when one tries to extend the national jurisdiction to international waters with international" of course meaning between nations in a sort of metaphorical sense but literally between nations literally between territorial waters—lines on a map if not in that actual ocean of course—out at sea and therefore areas which perhaps are something of a grey area legally. To provide some clarity in that space which is the intent of the bill is a very worthy objective but it will of course be important to understand exactly what that means in different scenarios where the ships are flagged with perhaps the insignia of another sovereign nation—and to be clear the bill does provide the procedures that will be followed in such a case—or perhaps unflagged and so on. So a certain amount of detail has already been provided and that's valuable as far as it goes but it will be interesting at select committee for those who are lucky enough to be on that select committee and to be able to interrogate the detail to just try to thrash out some of those issues. One of the key themes of course that we'll need to look at is the scope of the bill in terms of the types of officers who are given these powers. It's been discussed already in terms of members of the armed forces customs officers and so on as well as endangered species officers and conservation officers. There might be a pretty good argument on the face of it for inclusion of powers to a pretty broad range of enforcement officers but of course we also need to consider whether we are sending them into an environment for which they are well trained and able to provide that kind of work. I don't suggest by the way that that would be the case necessarily but again I think it's something that would be worth discussing and clarifying at select committee. One of the pieces of background to the bill is that we don't really have a good feel for the extent to which such crimes and offences are being undertaken at the moment—beyond the horizon so to speak—and of course that's the usual tension when we are giving powers to find out the extent of a problem as well as to solve the problem. We don't really know necessarily what's happening out there because we have not given our officers the ability to find out such things to search and seize and so on. And similarly we get the tension at the individual vessel level of not knowing whether a vessel or its crew has committed some kind of offence until a search is undertaken. Of course we don't want to have in New Zealand's name searches carried out that are unnecessary; so I see that the threshold will be that there will need to be reasonable grounds to suspect that an offence has been committed or will be committed. So that sounds reasonable again as far as it goes but we'll look forward to working through that detail as the bill makes its way through the House. I would just raise one further issue if I may before resuming my seat and that's just the sensitivity around laws that give to itself powers to one sovereign nation in an area where freedom of navigation is considered a crucial value and of course it will be officers of the New Zealand State—the New Zealand Government—who will be carrying out such searches and so on even if from the New Zealand perspective it is for entirely benign purposes. So we'll just need to think about how that all plays out in terms of international law and how our relations are with other State and non-State actors. But with that caveat to use the elegant phrase as always of Simon O'Connor I do reiterate as he said that National supports the bill at least for now. We look forward to moving forward to the rest of the debate accordingly."