McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Mr Speaker. Well I was coming down to the House with a few lines in mind but after listening to that I'm totally confused and I'll have to outline why. But before I do I did want to just acknowledge the team up in the gods I suppose you'd call it because they've been through a number of arms inquiries and bits of legislation and many of them have accompanied us through quite a few of those things. I just want to congratulate them on a very difficult topic and a topic that will continue to cause debate for many years to come I've got no doubt but I think they should be acknowledged for the work they've done. One of the reasons that we're not comfortable with this bill was outlined very clearly by the Hon Ron Mark a moment or two ago; in fact a number of the reasons that we're not comfortable with it were outlined. I guess the very fact that we're passing a piece of legislation that's going to come back for review in perhaps four or five months' time seems extraordinary to me. He also confused the issue a bit because he then talked about the arms register being put out for five years. That confused me too because I don't think it is for five years; I think it's for three years. But we've heard today about the history of this piece of legislation. In fact the first piece of legislation was brought to Parliament under urgency to deal with the gun buy-back and a number of other matters related to people owning firearms in our community. At that time the Government gave us estimates of the number of those guns that were out in the community of how the buy-back might achieve a reduction in those guns and then yesterday we heard the Minister saying very clearly that this would take the guns out of the hands of the gangs. Well the statistics unfortunately tell you that's not going to happen because we have an estimated I think 1.2 million to 1.5 million guns in New Zealand society now; we have about 248000 or 250000 licensed gun owners in our society; and we had an estimated 240000 guns that were to be acquired as part of the gun buy-back. We seem to have acquired around 65000. So there could be almost 180000 of these now illegal guns still out in our community and if they're in the hands—and they will be—of people who are unlicensed they will never appear above ground again because they can't afford to. Those people will not bring them back into circulation; they'll be sold to the underworld. So that's a massive challenge that we've created and we created it because in the course of the first piece of legislation we didn't enable the police or whoever ran the gun buy-back to effectively buy back every gun of that type in New Zealand. We only allowed them to buy the guns back from what the Minister yesterday called the good guys. That in itself has created a massive challenge. So that is one of the flaws I think that's highlighted by this bill and one of the reasons why we can't support this bill. It frankly hasn't got the background to do the job that it needed to do. The next issue that concerns me greatly and it was raised by the Hon Nick Smith in his speech is the fact that we've got a royal commission reporting back to Parliament in a month's time on the very issues that created the need for this bill. I think that it's extraordinary that we'd be pushing a piece of legislation through the House and passing it in urgency when we don't know the result of that royal commission. Now I want to go back to the point that the Hon Ron Mark has raised a couple of times in the course of this debate both before and today. That is the fact that that we've gone through a lot of effort in the time I've been in this House to look at this very difficult and complex issue—because it is a complex issue because effectively we're taking the rights of people away from them and replacing them with well what's termed in the bill as a privilege. I've got an objection to that too which I'll talk about a little later. I don't think there's any doubt that our gun legislation needed to be reviewed and changed and improved. There's no question of that. The first piece of legislation was a reactive piece of legislation and I'm not at all critical of the need to react; there was a need to react at that time. It was a reactive piece of legislation which set out to try to achieve a task which as I just said a minute or two ago it didn't really achieve all that well. So we accept the fact that there was some form of gun reform needed but it needed to be done in a manner that in my view was much more informed and better calculated than this piece of legislation has been done. So it's disappointing that we're putting a piece of legislation through the House that we've already heard from the Government is going to be reviewed almost immediately after it goes through the House. This piece of legislation puts quite a significant imposition on gun owners. And the fact that the register has been delayed for three years is very significant because we had a register in New Zealand once before. It was disbanded because it was inefficient and sure in those days the manner in which you collected information was much more difficult than it is today. Of course in those days that information was probably much more secure as well and that's one of the great concerns that many of the submitters had when they came to the Parliament to talk about the gun register. So the potential for that gun register to leak and the potential for that to then become just another way for the crooks to get a hold of guns or those people that shouldn't have guns to get a hold of guns—there was great concern around that. Now maybe delaying the register might improve the chances of that being successful. I don't know whether that will be correct or not because we seem to continue to have leaks from all sorts of departments and businesses in New Zealand and around the world and that's also becoming more common. So that's another reason in my view that we don't support the piece of legislation because we are not sure that we can provide for a secure register. There's been some changes made to the bill and that was one of them of course the register being delayed but there's been some other changes made to the bill which I think are satisfactory. Whilst it's not perfect the fact that farmers and landowners are now able to obtain access to these types of guns to shoot pests and can be licensed to hold those guns is probably a good move. I tend to disagree with Ron Mark. I think you can shoot most things with a pretty simple sort of a gun if you're a good enough shot but—Hon Member: Show me!IAN McKELVIE: Ha ha! No I don't claim to be one of those but I do think that you know that's a reasonable change to the piece of legislation and probably not a bad change. It shouldn't make it any more difficult to control where those firearms are—and what this bill is all about at the end of the day is controlling where firearms are and who has access to them. I want to get on to the point that I made a little bit earlier about owning firearms being a privilege. I said yesterday that I think living is a privilege. I object to the term being put in the bill frankly because I think we're starting to categorise things in life by using terminology that we don't need to use in pieces of legislation. That is one of them. I just think the fact is that you've got to go through a pretty—I wouldn't say it's complicated; it might be for me—complex system to get a licence. Not everyone qualifies to get a gun licence. That's the other point that needs to be made here. But having got that licence all you've got to do to get a firearm is go down to the gun shop and buy the blimmin thing so that's hardly a privilege. I think that to use that type of language in a bill like this is unnecessary and it creates I guess a false sense of security for people going forward because it doesn't actually mean anything.I think it would be very good if we could have supported this piece of legislation. We can't support it and I've outlined a number of the reasons why I don't think we should support it. Brett Hudson earlier on outlined very clearly why we didn't support this piece of legislation. I just hope that—if the Government in fact think they're going to bring it back in the next term of Parliament—we're the Government that's bringing it back because we'll certainly be reviewing it in a manner that I think will make it a better piece of legislation and will do more to protect our society from what the first bill actually set out to protect our society from because this bill does not do that. It doesn't take guns out of the hands of the crooks. It just merely has taken and it will continue to take guns out of the hands of good people. It's disappointing that we can't support it. That's my contribution thank you.