Webb DuncanDr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. It is more in sadness than in anger that I saw Todd McClay there rise and sort of try to bag this bill because I must say he's such a decent fellow at the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee. It was a really good select committee and we made I think some excellent progress here. It was well-chaired by Mr O'Connor almost all of the time as well.You can refer to peaceniks and what have you but this really is an important part of the network of steps that are being taken to make sure that the illicit trade in arms is stopped. As the member would know this is in fact part of our international obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty which was ratified in 2014—a United Nations treaty which comes straight out of the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs. If we look at that the purpose of it goes right to the heart of what the United Nations is about: the maintenance of peace and security. That really is what we're seeking to achieve here: to make sure that New Zealand does not by accident become a place from where arms brokering occurs.We were very reliably informed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade that arms brokering is a very small activity in New Zealand indeed. There're perhaps one or two people who are in fact genuine arms brokers. Having said that we need to take these steps to ensure that we have the same kind of robust regulatory frameworks around arms brokering to make sure that New Zealand doesn't indeed become that. There's no great sophisticated industry. This isn't some Gunrunners" or "War Dogs" bill. In fact it may well be that there are some items which are quite legitimately traded. One of the things this bill does is it balances that.As the United Nations treaty does this bill also recognises the ability of sovereign nation States to ensure their own security within the realm of conventional weapons. Also the other thing it does which in fact goes beyond the treaty is recognise the fact that there are dual-use goods—a whole list an enormous list of items which have perfectly legitimate civilian uses. In fact many of the high-tech items have very very important civilian uses but put to the wrong use they can also have military applications. There's a balance to be struck there between ensuring that people aren't accidentally caught by this legislation and at the same time making sure that we don't have an industry in New Zealand identifying these high-tech goods and then arranging purchases and sales in overseas countries. Arms brokering as the Hon Mr Parker said is not about sales from New Zealand; it's about arranging transactions overseas between two overseas parties.The object of this bill—and the object of the treaty—which flows from the treaty is to prevent and eradicate the illicit trade in arms. We know that's important because we know that a lot of strife and armed conflict in the world today would not be possible but for the fact of the porous nature of the arms trade. So what we're trying to do is have a solid wall of defence a multilateral—this is a Government that wants to act multilaterally. It has a multilateral approach to the restrictions in the arms trade whether that be actual arms dealing—which is one thing—or arms brokering which is what we are concerned with here today.So that's the very very important thing that we're doing here today. I must say the select committee did work well. The bill as it came to us—I think we would all agree around that committee table that there was some room for improvement. As the Minister the Hon Winston Peters said the improvements are mainly technical. They don't go to the heart of the bill but they are important. They were important because they went to things like burden of proof. They went to the outline of the offences. Another matter that they went to was in fact extraterritoriality.This is a bill that by its very nature because it concerns transactions which occur overseas has an extraterritorial element. It is quite extraordinary for a nation a sovereign State like New Zealand to say we are going to create a regulatory regime and criminal offences which have reach overseas. So we've always got to be very cautious about that.As the bill was initially drafted it had an extraordinary element and that was that it appeared to achieve universal jurisdiction. That is to say that if an offence occurred overseas whoever did it wherever they did it whenever they did it New Zealand could in fact go and enforce its law against the citizen of another State. That's an extraordinary power. It does exist in some small areas—crimes of piracy and slavery are the classic examples—but it was not considered that this was appropriate because this is essentially a regulatory offence. It's an offence about engaging in an illicit commercial activity not entirely dissimilar to drug brokering or something of that ilk. So when we think about the justification for universal jurisdiction it wasn't there. When we looked at clause 33 of the bill we noted that to have an ability to arrest detain and charge someone who wasn't a New Zealand citizen for activities that occurred in a foreign nation—it wasn't appropriate it wasn't fit for purpose and it's good to see that that suggestion has been adopted.The other thing about this bill is its scope is broad in terms of the arms and items it covers. The Strategic Goods List—I invite those who suffer from a lack of sleep to go and read it because it is 300 pages of different items. Whilst the first 30-odd pages are guns and tanks and what have you the other hundred-and-whatever pages are all kinds of items of high technology whether it be avionics whether it be the Kevlar vests navigation systems chemicals and toxins and so on and so forth. It just goes on and on.Importantly people who trade in those goods without realising that they are in fact restricted goods won't be liable to prosecution as long as they believe they're going to be put to legitimate civilian uses. There are a number of situations where you won't require registration under this legislation—one won't require registration. That is one of them: where the goods are dual-use goods but you have a reasonable and honest belief that they're being put to civilian uses. Obviously for things like avionics there is a very good trade—and New Zealand has a very good trade in fact in its own avionics—and we don't want to suppress those kinds of industries.There are other areas as well that we were a little concerned about. Another one is where employees are acting believing quite reasonably that their employers have taken care that they are complying with this regime and that there's no wrongdoing involved. Obviously the trade in arms between sovereign States is an entirely legitimate function—we all recognise that—and if an employee's undertaking that in the belief that the registration has been undertaken there's absolutely no reason to intervene there.A couple of other things which were important were not only the registration process—which it must be said is relatively light-handed; there's a fit and proper person test but there's no great and onerous testing regime to make sure only people of the utmost integrity like the lawyers' application process—but the other thing is annual reporting of activities. Anyone who is engaging in brokering activities in New Zealand is required—and this was an innovation at select committee as well—to report those activities. So not only do we require registration of the brokers themselves but we also require reporting of exactly what brokering transactions were undertaken. That's important as well because it gives us a knowledge a visibility about the size of this industry in New Zealand so that we can trace and track what's going on.So we've got a whole lot of defences in there. We've got some jurisdictional improvements and we've got an approach which is entirely consistent—and in fact it's something we can be quite proud of. It goes beyond what the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty requires. It extends it beyond guns and tanks to dual-use goods to make sure that not only are we not supporting an illicit arms trade but we're not supporting an industry for the manufacture of illicit arms as well. So with that I commend this bill to the House."