Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. The ACT Party supports this bill and we like the idea of providing more information to people so that they can do the right thing. When they're arriving in New Zealand—many many of them—they will be able to get the information they need about the things that are important to New Zealand as a primary producer of great food and great products grown from the soil.I'll just give you a few stats. In the year to March 2020 the last year that we felt normal there were 169 ship visits to New Zealand carrying between say 1500 some as many as 5000 passengers each. Now if you took the bottom end of the range say it was 1500 passengers per ship that would be around 250000 people arriving by ship in New Zealand every year—we're talking cruise liners primarily—making 901 port calls. A very large number of opportunities for people to make a mistake and potentially bring something into New Zealand like a banana in the bottom of the backpack that they'd forgotten to remove.In terms of air travel I'm just going to pick one month. December 2019: 528000 people arrived by aircraft in New Zealand. In fact Statistics New Zealand—the most recent data available for 2018—indicates that there were 77000 international flights arriving in New Zealand.So if this bill leads to more people arriving in New Zealand having a better understanding about how important biosecurity is to New Zealand what are the rules and what they must know in order to make good decisions when they arrive in our country then that's a good thing.But there's a few problems that this bill doesn't address. I had a recent experience coming back across the border as an international arrival and I was shocked because I hadn't been through this experience for some years. I was given a small blue trifold form with a number of questions on it—in the early hours of the morning—and asked to fill it out and make an accurate declaration about a whole lot of information that if I got wrong I was going to be subject to many many fines. Potentially imprisonment; I don't know. Loss of things.When I arrived in New Zealand and picked up my bag I queued for about half an hour in a queue with five flights' worth of people all holding their blue forms to hand them over to a long-suffering Ministry for Primary Industries officer who had been there for many hours in the night receiving these forms from passengers. I asked him How come we have to wait so long to hand you this form?" And he said "Oh it's just because we don't want everybody queueing for the X-ray machines all at once so we make you queue here to hand the form over." I thought to myself "I'm not entirely sure if this is helping biosecurity. I don't know if this is making New Zealand's primary producers safer." that in order to control the number of people going to the X-ray machine they have to run a filter.Then there was a 20-minute queue for the X-ray machine where every passenger arriving in New Zealand—some with three or four pieces of luggage—had to queue to put their baggage through an X-ray machine no doubt looking for the apple or the banana or I don't know some packet of hipster barbecue products that someone had forgotten they needed to declare. But what was really shocking was that none of the flights arriving at that time came from a destination that you'd say is high-risk. And yet every single passenger was subject to the same essentially risk treatment as if they'd arrived from the highest-risk origin.When you think about how many people are arriving in New Zealand—528000 say on flights in the month of December 2019—to create a system that subjects people arriving in New Zealand to that kind of intervention without actually having any due regard for the risk then you think about the actual risk to New Zealand of a disease like foot-and-mouth arriving and yet it doesn't seem to be any extra special treatment any extra special risk assessment or risk mitigation for those arriving from high-risk destinations places where diseases like foot-and-mouth are always present in the soils.So while ACT supports this bill it certainly does point to potentially a lack of focus in the way that biosecurity is managed in New Zealand and that's just for international arrivals; that's just for passengers let alone all of those vessels that arrive in New Zealand from destinations where they might have marine pests on them—for example organisms which are really damaging to our natural environment to our fisheries. So while ACT will support this bill because we believe it's important that people arriving in New Zealand have access to better information there is much much more work this Government should do and could do to streamline the biosecurity risk assessment process and the movement of passengers through our international waters."