Williams Poto: Passports Amendment Bill (No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Passports Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 22 September 2015. Volume:709;Page:6839. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): I rise to take a call on the Passports Amendment Bill (No 2). Mr Chairman I just call upon your ability to give us a bit of latitude in that given we are speaking to all parts this debate might be quite wide ranging and we might be traversing through several parts of the bill. I hope that will be appropriate in this regard.I want to speak specifically about some clauses in Part 1. I will start with clause 8 which amends section 5 of the principal Act and deals with the life of the passport. Of course we are moving the expiry of our passports from 5 years to 10 years. A little bit of the history behind that—the passport life the termination or the expiry date was moved to 5 years in the first place due to public pressure around perceived security threats particularly after 9/11. Although those threats are still evident I think that in terms of our ability to deal with them we have much better technology and knowledge and a lot of those perceived threats are now no longer apparent so the need to have the faster turn-round of passports is now diminished.We are now in a situation where it is appropriate to have 10-year passports. I know that there is inconvenience in having to renew passports sooner but 10 years does pose some problems at the other end when we are talking about advances in technology. We know how quickly technology moves and we know that the introduction of the electronic passport the e-passport for example has had a relatively quick take-up. So it has some significant advantages and one of them which one of our previous speakers raised is around cost savings from not having to renew quite so quickly.But we have also been considering the actual cost of the document itself and the level of subsidy that might be required to keep it within a level that is appropriate for many people to access. A passport is an important document to have. It is certainly a foundation document for anyone to use as identification not only overseas but also in New Zealand. So we would be really encouraging the accessibility of passports for all New Zealanders.Clauses 10 11 and 12 deal with the cancellation of passports and the matter of how that might be recorded whether it is done electronically whether the passport is required to be returned in a physical form or whether the passport can be cancelled without the actual physical document being seen. This is a vastly improved situation and it will add I guess to security issues in that one knows that the passport has been cancelled. It is noted electronically. This requires a high level of trust in our databases but it is possible to do so. So that just provides some added security that passports have been cancelled correctly.I also want to talk about new section 11A in clause 14 which deals with the warnings on the New Zealand travel document database. The Minister can actually record on the database when there is an indication that a warning is required. That may be when a travel document is to be recalled under the previous clauses that I mentioned earlier or when it is to be cancelled due to a court order. If this is with regard to a court order that could cancel the document.I also just want to make mention of the fact that in clause 24 we talk about the refugee travel documents which can be cancelled by the Minister if the refugee is making the appropriate declaration. I also want to make a point about the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the requests that are made to the UN high commissioner around appropriate identification documents. I know the difficulty for some citizens particularly those from places like Somalia who have issues with gaining appropriate identification documents. This bill does not necessarily deal with that but in principle it is an opportunity for us to discuss the importance of identification documents and the difficulty we have. Mr Chairman I do not want to take too much more of your time. Thank you very much.