Mooney JosephJOSEPH MOONEY (National—Southland): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. I rise this afternoon to speak in support of the Arms (Licence Holders' Applications for New Licences) Amendment Bill on behalf of the National Party. This is a rare moment when the Government actually does something sensible. They're amending the Arms Act to account for the fact that they've made a number of changes around the laws for firearms licence holders but unfortunately the resourcing isn't there for the police to actually process these licence applications. In fact existing licences that have come up for renewal which—from those changes back in 1992—they do every 10 years and now 2000 firearms licences have expired while police struggle to get through 9000 licence applications. This means that otherwise lawful holders of firearms licences and lawful holders of firearms have been unable to renew their licences due to no fault of their own simply because the resourcing isn't there to process these applications.So this is a sensible little bill that addresses that problem. It means that the holder of the current firearms licence may apply for a new licence before the expiry of their current licence" and if the application has not been processed—i.e. determined—before the licence holders current licence expires "their licence continues in force (unless it is sooner surrendered or revoked) until the licence holder is notified of the outcome of the application and any new licence issued takes effect from the date of its issue."So this is a very sensible little bill as I've said because it does solve this particular issue. I do note that police are totally overwhelmed with the demand at the moment for processing applications. As other speakers in the House have made mention of this afternoon I have personally heard from people who have been waiting for up to two years for a firearms licence to be processed which is a very very long period of time. I know that there are certainly big challenges for the police in processing these applications; they are considerably more complex nowadays than they used to be and because of the number of licences coming up for renewal it's exacerbated an existing problem which again in turn was exacerbated by COVID-19. It is an important issue. Our responsible firearms licence holders around New Zealand—and I would mention that the vast majority of them are incredibly responsible and the very small ones who aren't are quickly noticed by police and their firearms licences are taken off them which is quite a rare occurrence. So we have a lot of very responsible licence holders around New Zealand and they provide a very important contribution to their communities and their families both through taking care of the wild animals in New Zealand—game animals for example are an important part of our country environments our conservation environments and they provide food for people who hunt them—as well as the recreational values of people who get outdoors and spend quality time outdoors. But it's also that if they aren't controlled—and the Department of Conservation have their own funding issues and can't address all of these issues—it's actually the game animal hunters who provide a really important contribution to our conservation estate and our back country in New Zealand by controlling these animal numbers which otherwise there isn't provision to do so. For example there's the Game Animal Council who do a lot of great work in this space. There's the Fiordland Wapiti Foundation in my electorate which does an incredible job managing the wapiti population and actually looking after kea as well. They provide a really valuable contribution in monitoring the kea population in Fiordland and also providing food to various social agencies. So there's some amazing stuff happening and probably something that's not particularly well known publicly generally is that our hunting community in New Zealand actually provide a really important contribution to our conservation management and the preservation of our wild spaces through the activities that they do and importantly also hunting provides an opportunity for people to literally put food on the table for their families. I've spoken to people for whom that's actually been a critical part of putting meat in the freezer to ensure there's food on the table for the family.So a good little bill here to support these law-abiding good contributing members of our community."