van Velden BrookeBROOKE VAN VELDEN (Deputy Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in support of the third reading of the Maritime Powers Bill. The purpose of this bill is to put in place clear powers for the enforcement of New Zealand's laws in international waters and we need to be quite clear about what this law is not doing. We're not expanding our laws or creating new criminal offences. We're simply allowing the New Zealand Government and the police and our enforcement agencies the ability to enforce our laws in international waters. It's about ensuring that we have the power to enforce our current laws not create new ones. I think that's an important point to make.This bill though as we see when we look through it provides a range of mechanisms to help with the enforcement of New Zealand's laws in international waters by allowing things like search and surveillance of a ship requiring a ship to stop boarding the ship and searching the ship for a person that might be suspected to have broken the law in New Zealand or broken the law in our international waters and we're able to detain that ship and arrest a person. I think that's very important and it's quite striking that we haven't had this clearly written out in law before. I think it points to a real issue that we are seeing in New Zealand which is that we have far too much criminal activity and not enough enforcement to stop criminal activity. It doesn't matter where I go in New Zealand—I am met with people in our communities who say that we need healthier and safer communities and we need to have a stronger enforcement of our laws. It doesn't matter whether it's a woman in Auckland Central who says that she's moving out of town because she doesn't feel safe there because it's not safe on the streets or whether it's people saying they don't feel safe even walking around their neighbourhoods at night because they know that there are so many people on meth and they just don't feel safe. We need to have safer communities and that means enforcing the law letting people know that they can be safe because the police will be there for them. The same thing needs to apply to criminal activity when it's coming to New Zealand because we have to ask a very obvious question: where are all those illegal firearms coming from? Where is all that meth that's being dealt on our streets coming from? Well part of it is coming from ships entering New Zealand waters and distributing those goods into our communities and making them less safe. We want to have healthier communities that are thriving and that means taking illegal firearms out of the hands of gangs—because that's where they end up—and taking meth away from the gangs—because that's where it goes. Those illegal firearms and those drugs on the streets destroy our communities. So we have to stop it where we see it and having these laws in place allows us to keep those illegal firearms and that meth off our streets. It also means that where an offence has been committed in New Zealand and the ship leaves our waters we have the ability to enforce those laws find that ship find the people who have made our communities less safe detain them and search the ship for other illegal activity that might have been occurring there. That's a very very important law to pass because it will make our communities safer. We want fewer illegal guns on the street and we want less meth in our communities and in the hands of our children.I think it's really important in particular when it comes to drug smuggling migrant smuggling firearms trafficking and wildlife smuggling because we are an island nation—these goods have to come from somewhere and most of our transport is shipping routes. We need to have the ability to extend our criminal jurisdiction outside of New Zealand waters and into our international waters. That's already recognised in the law and this bill passing will solidify that in the law.We already have some bespoke laws—things like the Fisheries Act the Maritime Crimes Act and the Customs and Excise Act where we accept that our criminal law needs to go into those international waters. But what this bill does is recognise that we need to have simple laws that all New Zealanders can read and understand instead of having separated provisions within different parts of law. This makes it all it one place and it makes it easier so that when you end up in a situation for example where you have a ship that you know has broken the law and is leaving our waters and you have a search warrant for a particular good—you might think it's for drug smuggling and you end up on that ship and you realise that they have illegal firearms—it allows you the privilege to go for a search and seizure for both of those goods not just the drugs. So it allows for that ability to search and seize on a range of issues—not just wildlife not just people smuggling not just guns. It's very important to have it bespoke set down in the law and enforceable in our New Zealand laws. So I commend this bill to the House because I believe it will make our communities safer. We'll have fewer illegal firearms on our streets and we'll have less meth in our community.