SpeechHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's good to be able to talk to this as someone who was pretty intimately involved in the process that led to the initial bill being passed. Section 501 of the Migration Act in Australia was passed on 24 December 2014 without any consultation with the New Zealand Government or the New Zealand High Commission and without any forewarning until late January when it became newsworthy in Australia. I wouldn't normally be that comfortable with a bill like this being passed under urgency or with any perceived retrospectivity about it but it was the right thing to do in 2015 when we did it; it's the right thing to do now—for reasons that I will elaborate on.But I want to touch first on the extraordinary contribution by the Green MP Golriz Ghahraman. I say to Golriz Ghahraman this: if she wants to be angry with a Government and to rail against a Government that created the conditions for this to be necessary I say fair enough but pick the right Government because there was no deal and any suggestion that there was is quite mischievous in my view. This was imposed on New Zealand with the deportation of offenders whose DNA may in many cases have been Kiwi but who had lived so long in Australia that the conditions that led them to a life of lawlessness were entirely Australian and that they were removing their responsibility—the responsibility that the conditions they imposed led to those crimes—is entirely them. That was exactly the message that I and my colleague Amy Adams as Minister of Justice said to Australian home affairs Minister the Hon Peter Dutton sometime in the middle of 2015 in the Cabinet offices in Sydney. I can tell the House without going into details of the conversation that that was a particularly robust exchange.I think it is as the last two Prime Ministers have said a bit of a stain on the relationship between our two otherwise very close countries that we will not—cannot—control. Despite the hyperbole by Ms Ghahraman this is not something that New Zealand can fix but we can manage and we should manage. And I think in doing this we are making New Zealand safer than if we don't pass legislation like this. If both Attorneys-General in their New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vets on the original bill and on this one have said that there is not a punitive aspect or a double jeopardy aspect to this—in fact it's rehabilitative and I think if anybody including Ms Ghahraman would consider this in another way: imagine what somebody on life parole for murder having been deported would pose in risk to New Zealanders if that person were not subject to some controls. And she rightly points out that until the 2015 bill was passed there wasn't actually any protection in that regard. Perhaps there should have been but it's right to have it now and it's wrong to suggest that that's retrospective.If one looks at the purpose the definition of returning offender" that Nicole McKee went through—the definition of and criteria for determining that a person is a returning prisoner—it was always intended that the people who were convicted prior to that bill having Royal assent would be captured by the legislation. The Attorney-General the Hon David Parker I think quite confidently says that he disagrees with the High Court's decision and indeed the Crown's appeal to the Court of Appeal is a signal that the Crown disagrees with the courts. That's appropriate and I frankly think—I'm no lawyer but I've watched this closely—that the Crown would prevail on appeal. We'll never know because the right thing to do and the safe thing to do is to pass what is a belts and braces piece of legislation to make it absolutely clear what is required to keep New Zealanders safe. That was what we did in 2015 and I think that's what we're tightening up today.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Five-minute call—Sarah Pallett."