Woods MeganHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Housing): Thank you Mr Speaker. Over the days and months since March 15 I have had the privilege of working alongside our Muslim communities in Christchurch to see close up on an everyday basis the impact of the loss of 51 lives. The reach of that loss of those 51 lives stretches into the hundreds of people who are left affected today and I want to give my love and my thoughts to all of those people today. I know what an important milestone the publishing of this royal commission report is for this community today. I also know how difficult the very act of giving evidence to the commission was for many in the community. It meant a reliving of the trauma and remembering a series of events that they could never have imagined and that they really didn't want to revisit but none the less they believed and understood the importance of this royal commission into what happened and so were prepared to do that. So I really want to thank the members of the community who did that. But I do know what an important part of the journey giving that evidence has been. I also know seeing this laid bare over the course of 800 pages collected together into four volumes how difficult and confronting it has been to read and having spent the weekend with many of the affected members of the community what a traumatic ordeal it was again reading this laid here in black and white. But I want to thank all members of the community for what they have done because I know that there existed within this community an utter commitment that they needed to do whatever was necessary to ensure that this never happened in their country—New Zealand—ever again and so thank you for that. One of the things that has always touched me the most every day since March 15 is the way in which members of these communities regard the atrocities of March 15 not just as an attack on them in their places of worship in their mosques but an attack on New Zealand the country that many of them have chosen to call home and that they are proud as New Zealanders to call home. For many years and certainly in the months following the attack the concerns that the Muslim community have had around the feeling like there was a disproportionate level of scrutiny on them is something that I have heard many times. The report does confirm that there was an inappropriate concentration of resources and it does also identify failings in the firearms systems and these are the very things for which apologies have been issued today. But it also—importantly—identifies that there was not one single thing that would have prevented this attack and I think that is really important to remember. There are 44 recommendations contained in this volume and I am conscious of how much we must treasure each of those 44 recommendations because those recommendations are born out of the evidence and the grief of a group of people that were prepared to retell their stories so that we in this country would never have to relive that. As a Government we have agreed in principle with all of these but I think it is important that we realise some of these changes have already begun such as the gun reform. The commission report acknowledges that while there was a permissive firearms regime that certainly was something that could have made New Zealand a more attractive location for the terrorist and that work has already begun and is under way in this area. But some of the changes we need to make are long term such as education. It is also true that some of the recommendations and the considerations we have to give will be hard and they will be challenging but this is not a reason not to do them. As a group of politicians in this House it is our duty to ensure that we are willing to do what is hard and what is challenging and to not resile from it because it will make a difference. Our failure to address the firearms regime over decades is an example where we didn't do what was required because it was hard and challenging. I think the best monument we can leave to those 51 who died is the fact that as a group of members of this Parliament we are prepared to do what is hard and challenging.