Davis KelvinKELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): I thank the Minister of Justice for her précis of the bill. Labour supports the Enhancing Identity Verification and Border Processes Legislation Bill. I think it was only going to be a matter of time until this sort of legislation was going to have to come into effect regardless of the Phillip Traynor/Smith incident. That was a real catalyst I have to admit but we were always going to have to upgrade our processes and our systems to ensure that offenders or people who need to be in certain places are always going to be kept there. We have relied in the past on paper identification signatures passwords PIN numbers and those sorts of things and now we are having to move to the next level with biometric identification such as retina scanning and thumbprints. The classic example of biometric processes is at the airport of course. We have a passport with a photo in it. Now you can go up to the SmartGate take off your glasses and a machine takes a photo of you. The machine itself can compare your photo taken as you are standing there with the photograph in your passport and make sure that the face that is in front of the machine at the moment and the passport photo actually are the same person. That will avoid certainly for people like myself—the customs officer used to hold up my passport look at me and go: Oh my God! You've aged in 3 years." That will not happen. The machine will not give that brutal feedback to us. We have to understand that the catalyst for the report was the Phillip Traynor/Smith escape. On 6 November 2014 Phillip Traynor/Smith passed unimpeded through immigration and security checks at Auckland Airport. He carried a New Zealand passport that had been issued some 16 months earlier in his birth name Phillip John Traynor and yet he was known by the Department of Corrections as Phillip John Smith. The fact is that he was able to sit in prison and apply for a passport under a name that he had used as a child and it was not picked up was because of the fact that the Department of Internal Affairs the Customs Service and the Department of Corrections were not on top of the aliases he had used. Let us understand that there are many people in prison and in the community in general who go by a number of names. Some people have been adopted and have got a different adult name from the one they were born under. There could be any reason why they have different names but it is important that our system keeps track of these names. Previously we just relied upon the honesty of people and of course many people—or most people—in prison are in fact there because of some form or dishonesty. So Phillip John Traynor was released on a Release to Work programme. It was some 74 hours I think before anybody realised that the man who was meant to be on this Release to Work programme and out in the community on this was in fact halfway across the Inca Trail and still climbing. The big issue for Phillip John Smith or Phillip Traynor/Smith was that he had an ego and once he got to Brazil—via Chile I believe it was—he felt he had to call back to New Zealand and email to let everyone know how smart he was. That was his downfall because I believe that even though he was in some backpackers in some town in Brazil he was actually recognised because of the media attention over there. If it had not been for the fact that he had an ego that got too much for him he would probably still be somewhere in South America. The biometric identifiers as I say track facial features. Iris and retina scans thumbprints—it is all done by computers. If someone turns up at the border customs officers can actually identify that the person they say they are and the person standing in front of the camera is the same person who is in the passport. A recent example was an Australian man who used his brother's passport to depart Australia to fight for a terrorist organisation in Syria. The visual check—like I say the guy at the customs hall held up the passport and said: "Oh yeah it looks like him." The customs officer obviously thought the photo looked like the man standing in front of him and he was able to abscond. A biometric check would have probably prevented that from happening. I can actually understand that because people say that my brother and I look very similar. Obviously I am a lot trimmer and less grey than him but still many people mistake us—Hon Annette King: And better looking.KELVIN DAVIS: And better looking—thank you Mrs King. I can only concur with that.Tim Macindoe: He must look like me.KELVIN DAVIS: So this guy was able to use his brother's passport—oh I look like you?Tim Macindoe: No he must.KELVIN DAVIS: Ha ha! Yes. So he was able to use his brother's passport to abscond over to Syria and fight for a terrorist organisation which is exactly the sort of the thing that we do not want to have happen or to reoccur. This bill actually amends a number of Acts but the current Customs and Excise Act allows a customs officer to require certain information from a person crossing the border in order to establish that person's identity including any prescribed document that the officer may specify. This includes a passport and the information contained therein but the Act does not currently explicitly state that biometric information is included in this authority and that is what this bill is doing. In all the Acts that it is amending it is making it explicit that biometric information can be used. The Immigration Act provides the clear authority to collect biometric information from all travellers on arrival to establish or verify their identity to check that they may enter New Zealand and from foreign passport holders on departure to verify their identity and confirm they have departed. However in order to act upon border intercept alerts the Customs Service also needs to be able to use the biometric information of New Zealanders on departure so this bill is making a number of points explicit in the Acts that it is amending. I believe there are some seven or so Acts that are being amended including the Parole Act 2002 the Sentencing Act 2002 the Mental Health (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Act and the Intellectual Disability (Compulsory Care and Rehabilitation) Act. Those Acts are there because there are some people who may need to be in secure facilities because they have a mental health issue or a disability. I can think for example of my dearly departed father-in-law who had Alzheimer's. I guess there is a tendency for some people with dementia to wander and somebody like my father-in-law may have been able to get out somehow and it would be easier to identify that person and show who he was—certainly because he was not able to actually recall his own name and explain who he was. The bill also amends the Customs and Excise Act the Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Act and the Privacy Act as well. Labour supports this bill. We believe it is something that was going to have to happen regardless. Even if the Phillip Traynor/Smith incident had not occurred this was still going to have to happen at some stage in the future to make sure that our borders are safe to make sure that people are where they are meant to be. We commend this bill to the House. Kia ora."