Martin TraceyHon TRACEY MARTIN (Minister for Children): Kia ora Mr Speaker. Peace be upon you. I was sitting in Nelson Airport the day that this event unfolded and we watched it unfold on breaking news on the big screens. I was sitting across from a young man who was waiting for his flight to return to Christchurch and I had with me a staff member who has a child in that city. So we watched as we were sitting there with other New Zealanders. It was a moment of trying to absorb what was actually happening in our nation. Friday evolved. I went home. We'd been contacted you know as members of Government as members of Parliament. We were kept briefed in our own portfolio areas every so many hours about what was happening. The next day as the Minister of Internal Affairs I drove back across the Remutakas to come back to the office on the Saturday morning and as I drove across the Remutakas it was just so peaceful driving across the Remutakas. Again I struggled with: how do I comprehend what this means inside my life inside my world inside my country? It's moments like these that we turn to thoughts of our own family and what if that was our own family that was in the mosque to try and find a place to grab on to that empathy that we need to make sure that we acknowledge what has happened and the size of what we need to acknowledge. My family is I would think a fairly average New Zealand family. It's made up of New Zealand Pākehā New Zealand Māori New Zealand Cook Island Māori New Zealand Chinese and the most recent addition to our family is my daughter-in-law who is a Muslim Iraqi refugee via Syria. It was she that I turned mostly my thoughts to—how safe does she feel today as she goes about her life in this nation? So as you would I reached out and made sure that she felt safe and loved. But then the world kept turning and we saw the response of our nation. That single incident of evil committed upon us by a person who came here with evil intent did not define us. In the hours afterwards New Zealanders stood up; in the moment there—thinking of the gentleman who is a roadside worker who stood and stayed so that somebody did not die alone. I'm proud of who we are as a nation. I'm proud to stand in this Parliament with the members that are speaking today. I'm proud to be part of a coalition Government behind the leadership of the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern and I'm proud to be behind the leadership of the Rt Hon Winston Peters who is in this moment offshore making sure that others understand that this is not a defining incident of New Zealand. This is not us. We are better than this and every day our citizens currently show it in that way. I want to acknowledge the staff of Oranga Tamariki (OT). People may not know it but there are five OT offices in Christchurch as well as youth justice and care and protection facilities—approximately 650 staff. They immediately contacted all caregivers that have children in care to make sure that the children were safe. For those that were not contactable Oranga Tamariki staff visited them. Over 500 caregivers were followed up to offer support after this incident. They also reached out to the children who had been removed to the parents of the children who were with our caregivers to make sure that their parents knew their children were safe. Oranga Tamariki has also supported three unaccompanied children following the shootings and thankfully these children are now with family.I also want to talk about the fire and emergency services—personnel across seven stations in Christchurch who assisted with urban search and rescue looking for survivors and who provided additional medical emergency help. They were also involved in the communications centre. The Department of Internal Affairs staff who spent their whole weekend here in Wellington making sure that death certificates could be processed as quickly as possible when they were needed—they have been behind the scenes working on other things that we talk about.There is going to need to be another conversation—and I acknowledge my Green Party colleague—with regard to hate speech in this country. There absolutely needs to. We need to get past this immediate part. We need to acknowledge and come back together again. But we absolutely need to address what is going online and I for one am tired of running behind the internet on this. So when the time is right we will come together and we will make sure that we take action. But again I'm proud to be a New Zealander today because we are better than this.