Woods MeganDr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is my pleasure to take a call on this bill. I think many of us have enjoyed its passage through this House. Like speakers before me and I imagine after me I would like to congratulate Peter Beck and the team at Rocket Lab on what is a remarkable achievement. To see New Zealand join the ranks of 10 other countries that are capable of doing this is I think something that all of us feel pride around.I think the story of Rocket Lab and what it has achieved is an important one for us as legislators in this House. It is a story of science and innovation and it is a story of how long some of these projects take to come to fruition. So I share the enthusiasm of the previous speaker Todd Muller for what has been achieved here but I would like to caution him about taking political credit where it is not necessarily due because this is a project that goes back many years many years before the Business Growth Agenda was even imagined.This is something that the previous speaker said none of us in this House could have imagined was possible 3 or 4 years ago. Well that is not necessarily true. If we go back to 2007 Rocket Lab had designed its suborbital rocket which was capable of reaching heights of up to 150 kilometres and it had plans to send scientific packages DNA and even human ashes above Earth according to its business development manager Mark Rocket. This is back in 2007 when it had got to this point where it was capable of putting things up 150 kilometres in the air so a lot of work had already occurred to get to that point.Then I think we do need to recognise the role that the previous Government and a previous Minister for Economic Development Minister Trevor Mallard played in bringing this project through. It was—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to—I do not want to appear to be ungracious but I am currently in the Chair and it is inappropriate for the member to bring me into the debate.Dr MEGAN WOODS: OK thank you. I was just paying due credit. A previous Minister for Economic Development who attended Rocket Lab's launch way back in 2007 said it would enhance New Zealand's emerging reputation as a developer of first-rate technology and components so I think that to imagine that this has happened because of a scheme that has been put in place in the last 3 or 4 years simply does not understand what an innovation cycle looks like.The kind of willingness to back over the long term which we need to have transgresses parliaments. It is something that we should all take from this story of Rocket Lab and its success here because many of the things that we want to achieve in this technology space are not going to show us the fruits in the kinds of parliamentary cycles that we are often accustomed to. I think this is testament to that and to a previous Government for having the vision and actually the courage to back such a project which 10 years ago—a decade ago—would have sounded mighty fanciful.The other really important part of this story to draw out and for us to learn from is around the cross-collaboration that can happen across technology sectors. My colleague the Hon David Parker has already talked about some of the carbon fibre technology coming from the America's Cup technology that was developed around those boats. This is what is so important around getting critical mass of technology in this country so that we can have that kind of cross-pollination and collaboration across industries and so that we can grow an economy that is based on innovation that is based on technology and that is based on knowledge. This speaks very clearly to that. It is why when you have a success like this or like the technology in the America's Cup space you cannot always predict what the spin-off commercial opportunities or the further technology opportunities are going to be from that work. I think that is something that we as legislators should always remember.The other thing is that as we are passing this legislation I think it is apt and timely for us to think about the kind of economy that we want to create if we are seeing Rocket Lab as one of the success stories here and think about what we need to be doing to plan for that future. That is why I am most proud of the work that the Labour Party has done over the last 3 years in the Future of Work Commission where we have thought long and hard about the big-picture thinking around what a transformation of the New Zealand economy looks like and what we are going to require. This goes right back into our education system right back into our early childhood education system into our primary and secondary and then our tertiary systems. We are thinking about what the kinds of skills are that future workforces are going to require.I am not saying that in every primary school we should be putting rocket technology on the curriculum. What I am saying is we should be educating our children entering early childhood education and primary school today to have the kinds of skills where they can turn their minds to these kinds of subjects should they want to. If we are intent on creating an innovative economy then we have to be far more innovative with our education system and importantly link that to our future workforce requirements. I think that the bill we are passing here the enabling regulatory framework that is going to allow this industry to flourish in New Zealand and allow for this to happen needs to sit alongside some other thinking within Government and within this Parliament that is long-sighted.My colleague David Parker went through many of the amendments that were made at the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee to this piece of legislation. There were 11 submissions received in total on this piece of legislation and it is fair to say they were all substantial. They traversed many areas some of which were understandable and good submissions to get in terms of civil aviation and what the interplay is that we are talking about in the area of airspace which goes beyond what has previously been regulated—what the interplay and the safety concerns were there. There was also the submission that Venture Southland brought that the Hon David Parker mentioned which talked about it needing to be explicit in this legislation that this is for peaceful purposes. Actually we are talking about New Zealand being among a group of only 11 countries that are launching rockets. With that comes a great responsibility and I think that for us here in New Zealand knowing that we are doing this for peaceful purposes is critically important.Labour is more than happy to support this legislation. We see that it is a long-term project that is bearing fruit and what we hope is that we can all across this House—whatever side or corner of this House that we are sitting on—take the lessons from this: the need to take a long-term view of innovation and the kind of commitment that it requires the kind of courage that that initial investment sometimes requires and that one of the most difficult things about politicians being involved in innovation is that there is political risk if you do it well. Politicians do not want to come to the House and answer questions about failed projects but anyone who has worked in the innovation sector knows that to have success you have got to take risks. In fact you could say that a very successful innovation sector would be counting on a very high failure rate and that is not always politically palatable. But what we have here is a success story that we can all be proud of and I think we can also be very pleased that this House is putting into place the regulatory regime that we require in order to make sure that this operates in an orderly and safe way and for the right purposes in our country. Thank you.