SpeechHon RON MARK (Minister of Defence): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's really interesting—we had a saying in Waiōuru that if you got posted there and you stood still and you never moved from there eventually you'd get to meet everyone in the New Zealand Army because everyone transits through Waiōuru; likewise Parliament. In my 20-odd years here—it's been rather curious. I look at this piece of legislation—tobacco tobacco smuggling excise duties—and I can recall these debates going back. In 2002—I think around 2002—at the time when we first started this discussion about smoke-free New Zealand and excise duties and what it was going to do there were predictions made.In fact I recall trying to highlight the issue of tobacco smuggling back then. In fact at that time I came across an interesting chap who'd spent some time in prison. He had embedded himself inside a certain sector of the Auckland community which comprised a lot of foreign students who were making an absolute killing importing illegal tobacco; and by the way CDs and by the way producing fake drivers licences—very bright brilliant young people who were doing very well on the black market. Trying to raise the issue of what raising excise duties would do in exasperating the black market tobacco problem just fell on deaf years. I remember those debates in the House—nobody wanted to accept it. Everybody was focused on the purity of a smoke-free New Zealand and it's interesting hearing the comments about it.So I come to this bill—the bill is about combatting tobacco smuggling. My point is that it's pleasing in 2020 to finally see some legislation aimed at combatting tobacco smuggling—finally doing that the same as illegal growing of tobacco as well. But why is New Zealand First supporting this piece of legislation? We know from the Minister's documents that Crown revenue for tobacco excise was about $2 billion last year—excise duty on tobacco about $2 billion. Now that's a result of the National Party and the Māori Party doing a deal and escalating excise duties. The one thing that was going to happen as tobacco prices increased: it was going to create a supply/demand challenge and an opportunity for increased smuggling and that's what we saw. One of the other predictions was that we'd see more dairies being robbed. We predicted that and that came to pass. We are dealing with that now. This piece of legislation attacks the problem of smuggling. It creates a permitting regime so that anyone importing tobacco tobacco leaf has to get a permit—tick for that. We agree with that. It removes the ability for people to import tobacco through the international mail service—tick we agree with that. It creates a simplified seizure process. Anything that can simplify the processes there and allow customs to destroy the product as quickly as possible we agree—tick for that. It won't have an effect on the vast majority of people who purchase their cigarettes legitimately—tick for that. It won't affect people bringing in their allowance of tobacco through customs when they arrive back from their holidays in Australia—tick for that; we agree with that.It will impose import controls over tobacco products; we've already said we agree with that. So essentially as we go through the advantages of this piece of legislation New Zealand First can only say this is aimed and targeted correctly. It's probably just about 15 years late but hey we're here under urgency so let's get it done.