Mitchell Clayton: Passports Amendment Bill (No 2) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMitchell Clayton: Passports Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading[Sitting date: 18 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4579. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): I stand to take a call for New Zealand First in the first reading of the Passports Amendment Bill (No 2).David Seymour: Very strong opinions.CLAYTON MITCHELL: And already David Seymour you are into it. I would like to start by simply saying: David if you throw a party and you are the only person—David Seymour: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. Standing Orders require the member to refer to another member by his full name not only his Christian name.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): That is actually not quite accurate but the Speakers’ rulings do require that and the member I am sure will react much more appropriately to future interjections.CLAYTON MITCHELL: Absolutely. So let me finish what I am saying Mr Seymour of the David variety. At the end of the day if you throw a party and you are the only person who shows up at that party are you actually throwing a party or are you just a person by yourself at home alone—because it is a lot of noise from a very very small corner over there.I would like to add that I have been as busy as a bee with a bum full of honey in the Beehive today and there has been a little bit of a lack of preparedness for today’s delivery. But I dare say I think that just about every single New Zealander could stand up and speak to this piece of legislation because finally we have got a little bit of common sense. I would also like to say this—and I bet you that this compliment does not come across very often to the honourable member Peter Dunne—for the simple reason that I commend him for fighting hard to get the costs of passports down when Cabinet was originally coming out with a fee of around $225 and for bringing that fee down to $180. So I would like to congratulate him on fighting a good fight for New Zealanders; however I think that there is still more of a fight that needs to be had.Although New Zealand First strongly supports this bill—in fact back in 2012 the Rt Hon Winston Peters spoke to this matter for the first time and New Zealand First was the first party to say that this was absurd. The reality of cutting back passports from 10 years to 5 years when the vast majority of the world—the Western World that was supposedly affected by the terror attacks—kept their passports at 10 years for me was that it was an opportunity for this Government to collect revenue to put some money in the coffers and it was at the expense of everyday Kiwis.Sarah Dowie also mentioned the 77 percent of Kiwis who have passports. That is fantastic. We are a flightless bird and we do like to travel the world. I myself have had many passports and travelled the world too but we should be making it affordable for 100 percent of Kiwis to be able to do that. Travel internationally at the moment is probably the cheapest it has ever been and we should not be excluding any New Zealander from being able to afford that right. Denise Roche said that the cost of passports over a 10-year period is going to be reduced by nearly $100 over that period. But if you think about it the actual cost of putting a passport together is the same—it does not matter whether you are doing it for 5 years or 10 years. So in actual fact there is no cost saving. We should be able to bring the cost of passports back even more than to $180.David Seymour: Oh fixed and variable costs mate.CLAYTON MITCHELL: And if you would let the grown-ups just speak for a moment Mr Seymour we might give you some sort of positive thinking and some practical sensible and innovative ideas. If we are just throwing a little bit of a sling out here the reality is that at the moment I think there are 20-odd pages in a passport. If we cut back the number of pages in a passport—because let us be honest back in the 1990s when I was doing some prolific travelling you used to have to ask for countries to stamp your passport and even after 10 years you could not actually fill up all the pages in your passport. It was almost like you would wear it as a badge of honour—how many different countries you went to when you were travelling around Europe. By simply looking at things practically we might actually be able to reduce the cost of those passports by reducing the number of pages that are in them and that might be brought out in the select committee.The second point I would like to bring your attention to is how quickly this Government can react—with the recent retrospective legislation it has put through and backdated that ripped the $1000 kick-start contribution off the table. So we know that this Government when it is in action can get things done. That piece of legislation did not suit the vast majority of New Zealanders but this piece of legislation does. We have been getting a lot of correspondence and I am sure that Labour has been getting it and that National has been getting it. The Greens have certainly been getting it as well. We have in New Zealand First people writing to us to ask why this piece of legislation is taking so long to come through. It should not take this amount of time—until 1 January 2016—to get this through. If we have made a decision as a political movement and it looks like we have got full support across the table I for one would be happy to debate this in urgency and take it right through to the end stages to push this through.There will be Supplementary Order Papers but the reality is that there are people here right now in this country waiting to put in their applications for their passports. They are wanting to travel but they cannot and they are going to be locked into a 5-year passport deal. Right now it looks like we are seriously making a move forward for the betterment of New Zealand so why cannot this go into urgency? I urge you to consider that and put that to the House for consideration.There are some serious concerns from New Zealand First with regard to a media report that was sent out last week on 9 June about the potential doubling up—$400 by 2021—for those costs of passports. The cost and the time issue are certainly the most fundamental issues that we have to keep up with the play on. We understand about the modernising of the Passports Act 1992 and about the 16-year-olds who get only 5-year passports. We understand that. I think that is a sensible pragmatic solution. I have got young children myself and goodness me they change. From the week that I start Parliament to the week that I get home they look different. I can understand that that is in line with the rest of the world so we also support that.I would also like to say just to finish things off—because again I could waffle on and take up 10 minutes of everybody’s precious time back home—that I think the message is clear out there that we are behind in this. The piece of legislation putting passports back to a 5-year passport was not from the National Government as was suggested; it was actually done by the Labour Government. I think that move was a little bit too quick off the hip and I think we should have stuck with those 10-year passports. Now it is coming down to getting those costs down and actually making it affordable for New Zealanders to travel.I am concerned that the cost of travelling is being increased with new legislation the travel tax that has been put through—$16 out; $6 coming back. A young family with four or five family members wanting to pop across the Ditch to Australia for a week is now up for $100-odd. Putting in the cost of the passport we need to do what we can to get these flightless Kiwi birds out on their planes and travelling around the rest of the world. It is a great world to see but when you are out there you realise what a wonderful country we live in and it certainly does make you appreciate it a lot more. Thank you.