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Mr Brown spoke of the rights of freedom and the rights of security that New Zealanders should have and do enjoy. We certainly agree with those points.. New Zealanders should have the rights of freedom and the right to be able to travel. But the role of the Government is also to provide safety and security for its citizens. The first part of the explanatory note of this bill states: “The recent increase in international terrorism and people smuggling has necessitated a review of New Zealand’s citizenship and passport legislation to ensure there are no preventable risks to national security.” This is the case and I do not think anybody would disagree. The question is how we go about ensuring that these preventable risks do not occur. 
I think it is also important to remember that until quite recently the Prime Minister was given to repeating on many occasions that we live in an incredibly benign strategic environment. Some might well question why this bill is necessary if that is indeed still her opinion. I think though that recent events have moved us on from there and that everyone in the House agrees that some revision of our law is necessary. As I said I will not go over all of the reservations we have. Those will be addressed by the select committee and we will be participating fully there. 
I will briefly touch on a few issues that we are particularly concerned about. The first is an issue that has been raised by other members of the House and it is one that I spoke out about quite recently—that is the issue of women coming to New Zealand to have their babies firstly because they want their children to be born in New Zealand and therefore be entitled to New Zealand citizenship and to a lesser extent because care is free to pregnant women and babies in this country. Certainly we do not endorse this practice as something we would like to see happen routinely and we do know that it does happen. We will look with interest at the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper which he has touched on very briefly to see what that contains. Obviously we cannot say one way or the other whether we will be supporting that until we see it. 
There is also an issue of overstayers having children so that they can stay in the country and that is not a practice we endorse. Another thing that seems to be apparent in much of the legislation recently introduced into the House is increased ministerial power. That is becoming evident in many bills. We will be looking very closely at any provisions in this bill that will see ministerial power increased and at what effect it might have in a practical sense. We certainly believe in the power of the law. Law must be enforceable and routinely enforced and not taken away from people by the Minister making decisions off his own bat.. So we will be looking to see where we think the Minister might be increasing his power both unwisely and inappropriately. 
I come now to the second part of the bill which deals with the passport provisions and I will voice ACT New Zealand’s concerns about this particular part. The Minister has said that the Government is committed to ensuring that New Zealanders can travel freely with a secure passport. Of course this is something that everybody wishes to see. He goes on to say that to ensure this the bill would reduce the validity of the New Zealand passport from 10 years to 5 years. We can see no good reason for this to happen and there are many reasons for our concern. Firstly we too are concerned—as I think the New Zealand First member mentioned—that this Minister has been very good at revenue collecting in his various portfolios. We would be very loath to see a stealth tax brought in under the guise of national security. That would be a very retrograde step. 
We believe in the national security provisions put forward in this bill but we do worry that bringing down the time limit of a passport is just another way of gathering revenue. We see no evidence of a regulatory impact statement and no cost-benefit analysis that would support doing this. We worry that this might perhaps be a knee-jerk reaction. As I say we can think of no good reason why bringing the life of a passport from 10 years down to 5 years would actually change anything at all. Fraudsters are very clever people and no matter what the system is they are very good at finding ways around it. We would be very loath to see the 99.9 percent of law-abiding New Zealanders in this sense punished in order to try to stop those who have very cleverly managed to gain passports fraudulently. Bringing the life of a passport down to 5 years will see absolutely no change in this practice at all. Certainly we do not want to see it increasing but reducing the life of a passport will not deal with the problem. The international standard for a passport is 10 years. This Government seems keen to make us world leaders in many areas—I will not go into that—but there is no reason why we should be a world leader in this respect and bring the life of passports down to 5 years. 
ACT New Zealand does support this bill but with grave reservations in many areas. We look forward to the bill being examined in close detail at the select committee. I go back to the intention of the bill once again. We agree with the reasons for the bill but we need to look very carefully at how we go about ensuring that there are no preventable risks to national security. We certainly do not want to see law-abiding New Zealanders—and that accounts for just about every single one of us—disadvantaged in any way as a result of this legislation. We support the bill’s referral to the select committee and we await a further decision about our support or otherwise at that time.