O'Connor SimonBROKERING (WEAPONS AND RELATED ITEMS) CONTROLS BILLSecond ReadingDebate resumed.SIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. Very pleased to take a call as chair of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee on this Brokering (Weapons and Related Items) Controls Bill and to thank the Minister of Foreign Affairs for his contribution. As he rightly noted these are elements which need to be put on the record to make it very clear to obviously the courts and others about what is critical here.I want to thank all of those who have worked incredibly hard to bring this bill to the House and I want to acknowledge previous Ministers as well. This was actually brought in at first reading before the dissolution of the previous Parliament. In noting that too actually I believe it was a New Zealand First intention to introduce this within the Customs and Excise Act so I thank the Minister for delaying that and taking up this National Party - initiated bill.My thanks also go to all the officials and advisers who helped the committee. While never taking away from the work that the MPs do on these committees I think all of us in the House here would acknowledge the tremendous work of those officials advisers and the public too that come in to give us their thoughts—well a massive contribution.This bill is very particular. It is around the brokering of weapons. So simply put and in a New Zealand context it's a New Zealander be it a person or a company that is effectively buying and selling weapons—brokering and trading in them. So they are not the manufacturers of these weapons. They're the sort of person—just for the want of a very simple analogy—who will be I don't know buying weapons from Russia and then selling those on or brokering to the likes of Syria or it could be from Britain and into Germany or whatever. That's what we're talking about here. Why I mention that is a number of people were raising questions in the committee around effectively arms trading. That is separate to the brokering of weapons or the brokering of arms. This is about New Zealanders or New Zealand companies which are buying off an external entity and brokering—moving—those goods to another.As the House might anticipate the brokering of weapons is one of the more clever if not disingenuous ways that weapons are making their way into war zones. I had the good fortune in fact with Andrew Little and Ron Mark at the start of this year to go to Iraq and Afghanistan to see our troops there and as we took the various briefings from officers and commanders from most of the Allied countries it was very clear that a lot of the weapons that had been used against those troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are brokered. But I'd better be very very clear to the House that these are not weapons brokered by New Zealanders as far as I'm aware. It's just highlighting that this is a dangerous and problematic activity.Again it is not the sale of arms. There is legislation already on New Zealand's books which allows that so if a New Zealander is trying to buy—sorry. Well to buy weapons—that certainly comes under some legislation. If a New Zealander for some reason is making and trying to sell weapons that's already covered by existing legislation. This very simply is around the brokering of arms. It's also the domestic legislation required to bring about the Arms Trade Treaty which New Zealand signed in 2014.The select committee worked relatively hard on this. It was one of those bills that when it came before us it looked in a sense relatively simple but thanks to those who submitted to the committee it became relatively clear that there were items that needed to be tidied up. The biggest one was just being very very clear that this applies to New Zealanders either those who are resident in the country or New Zealanders who are ordinarily resident but might be overseas. In other words if a New Zealander brokering weapons decides to jump over to Australia or zip over to Italy and broker weapons there for a week they would still be captured by this legislation. It also applies to entities and corporations corporates and so forth.Importantly—and the Minister touched on this near the end—it does not apply to foreign nationals. That was something which we fleshed out and debated for a while. So if a foreign national is brokering weapons from New Zealand that is a problem but this bill itself doesn't address it. Again—really importantly—New Zealand already has domestic legislation which will deal with instances like that. One amongst many is to extradite said person and send them back to their own country where their brokering weapons legislation will kick in.We also thought as a select committee that it was quite important that people have a really clear understanding of what is and isn't to be brokered. It's probably not a surprise to most people in this House but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has a rather exhaustive list of items which are deemed to be military and those which are dual use. A really simple explanation of that of course is if you are making semi-automatic weapons they will be down as military-grade items and they are not allowed to be sent sold or brokered to countries such as—Syria comes to mind. However there are dual uses so guidance chips—well actually guidance chips for missiles probably only fit into that military-grade side. A dual use might actually be Kevlar gear. You may actually be able to use it for military purposes but the use of Kevlar in material may also be used in other non-military purposes. So that's what we're talking about there. We thought as a select committee it was rather important that the ministry through gazetting and then through to its website list what items are effectively banned what can and cannot be sold what are known as strategic goods and those which are dual use and which ultimately are military end uses.We also wanted to make really clear a question around the burden of proof. The context of this is if someone in New Zealand wants to be involved in brokering—and again I suspect it's probably important for the House to know and understand that we don't have a large number of people brokering weapons in New Zealand to our relief—but with this legislation a person is required to make themselves known to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade if they wish to be involved in brokering. Of course if they're not—if they don't make themselves known—an offence is created. The way that the bill was originally drafted made proving that they didn't know rather difficult. I'm no lawyer—there are much smarter legal minds than mine of course—but it's very difficult to prove a negative. You can't prove you didn't know. A person can prove that they knew something but to prove that they didn't know gets rather complicated and I want to thank particularly the Office of the Clerk for initially noting this concern and allowing us along with our advisers to move through to a resolution. And I think the committee's landed in a rather good spot there.We've also as a consequence of that narrowed what the expectations are around employees. Again the context of this: the employer—the person who effectively is doing the brokering—should know should register but there could be a question at times that an employee of that business did not know for whatever reason so we've tried to put a little bit of latitude in there. Again we would expect the employer the business to be letting all their employees know and so we're not going to allow employers to get off scot-free by any means but we're just narrowing the exceptions there.We also looked around annual reporting. It was one of the things we thought was relatively important—that if a person is going to register as a weapons broker there should be a report annually to talk about what they have done. In many ways it's just to marry up what they are saying they're going to do with what they have actually done. That report's to be furnished to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and we've left it up to the ministry to come up with basically what they want to do there.Look that's pretty much the long and the short of it. I think the Minister used the word dry"; it is one of those sorts of dry bits of legislation in and of itself but actually it's an incredibly important part too. First and foremost we don't want to see New Zealanders involved in illegitimate brokering of weapons but really importantly too I think we want to be seen as well an important and moral player in international affairs. So when we sign up to treaties like this New Zealand needs to be proactive in getting them into our domestic legislation and supporting good humanitarian and legal approaches. So with that I commend the bill to the House."