O'Connor SimonSIMON O'CONNOR (Chairperson of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee): Thank you Madam Chair. Look I'm very pleased to take a call in this discussion about the external sector as the chair of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee and can I in beginning acknowledge all the members of that committee but also the Ministers. As the chair of this committee I will leave aside most of the politics and just sort of touch on some of the key elements that—CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): All of it preferably.SIMON O'CONNOR: Oh you never know you've got to have a flick. Five minutes for five estimates—the first we'll touch on is Vote Foreign Affairs and Trade over $549 million. A lot of the discussion that occurred initially was around the spend for new embassies particularly querying why Stockholm was chosen. I'm sure it is a lovely city; maybe I'm biased I'd love to go and visit it but the committee did spend quite a bit of time discussing Stockholm. In the discussion of the Estimates then we moved into questions around of all things actually Israel—in particular asking why New Zealand did not have representation there in Israel; we're aware that it's in Ankara and the Minister spoke to that but there were questions around that—and also querying the Minister whether Jerusalem would be a place of choice seeing it is the capital of that country.There was also quite a bit of time questioning the Minister because of previous statements he had made around whether he and the new Cabinet would rescind UN Resolution 2334—something I personally have called for. That has been declined. I think sadly and a number of us on the committee noted that although not all and there was some confusion by members as to why the New Zealand Government had also gone on and sponsored another unbalanced resolution in the UN which I think is disappointing.Questions were raised of the Minister more in the written part around why a pro-Hezbollah protest was allowed to occur in Auckland. This has raised a number of questions for members on the committee particularly around when the debates on free speech are occurring at the moment.Finally one of the elements around Israel—again it became quite a notable part—was recent support implicit by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions group an anti-Israeli group. There were questions of why that was allowed to happen from MFAT. It was both I suppose worrying and confusing to the committee firstly that the ministry advocates a two-State solution but was implicitly supporting a group that does not—in fact wants no Israel. The other was really a wider question in the foreign affairs space: would our ministry of foreign affairs be supporting groups that said that we shouldn't trade with China or India? I suspect the answer is no. So there's more questions there.We did raise in foreign affairs the whole question of trade with Russia and to round it out as well how we are placed for APEC in 2021. It was good to hear from the Minister. I think the realistic assessment is that more money will be needed.We also touched on development assistance. Obviously the Government's big push has been around more money into the Pacific. The committee was interested basically at how the Pacific could absorb that.Vote Defence and Vote Defence Force that's $314 million and $3.4 billion respectively. Look one of the big issues for the committee in discussing with the Minister was really in a sense the gap between what is desired and what can be funded. I think that was actually quite a constructive conversation there.Look I'm very happy to say in the Chamber I'm pleased that since the Estimates hearing the Government has found funding for the P-8A Poseidons. I think that's a really good decision. But the committee was also continuing to question particularly in the aviation space the place of the Singaporean F-15s and Singaporean troops to come down to Ōhākea the context being with the move to ban foreign buyers that's having some potential influence on our relationship with Singapore. So that was good to raise those. But I think particularly in defence the committee's going to be interested to see with all the desire for spending across naval air force and army what will be prioritised first in what's always a limited budget.The final but not least area is Vote Customs $230.63 million as the Minister in the chair Meka Whaitiri will know. I should declare I am the National spokesperson in this area but I don't intend to politic it as I said. Look it was good to see that more money is being spent to disrupt drug smuggling. The committee was interested to see how that exactly is going to fare. There were some questions that with the increase of funding we didn't at that point see in some of the documents a requisite change in the performance targets. In other words they were static but a good conversation was had there. Finally around the whole border levies I think there's about a $13 million surplus at the moment; just keen to understand how that goes in the future.