Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise to speak to this bill because as we know here in New Zealand unfortunately over this term the concept of regulating firearms has come to the fore in this House for many reasons and not least for our nation having lived through its most traumatic instance of gun violence that act of terror that happened in Christchurch in March 2019. We found that successive Governments had actually kicked the issue of prohibiting and regulating the use of firearms to a point where we're very late to it but I am very proud to be part of a Government who did act swiftly to regulate firearms to regulate the types of firearms that we found out so tragically were out on our streets and to regulate them—in fact to introduce far far more stringent and far more effectively enforceable regulations around things like having a gun register around having a fit and proper person test which was introduced only last month with the attendance of very senior members of the police force the deputy commissioner and others who'd been calling for this type of change for years and years. Other Governments including the previous Government had ignored them to tragic effect.The Green Party will not be supporting this particular bill today because we don't believe in using the criminal justice system and things like the regulation of firearms to further the type of rhetoric that only really makes politicians look tough on crime. The use of words like gangs" and the prohibitions that curtail human rights without really effectively regulating what we want to regulate—which is firearms use unlawfully out there on our streets—is not effective and we don't support it. I would note that with the rules that we introduced last month around the fit and proper person test we did in fact prohibit criminal groups and those with certain types of convictions from obtaining gun licences. "Criminal groups" does cover gangs.In this particular bill we have a reference back to the list of 35 gangs that we have listed. We know that that disproportionately focuses on Māori and Pacific populations. We know that those are not the only criminal groups that we need to prohibit from holding gun licences—we learnt that in Christchurch. So to say that we will focus only on the old kind of gang that we've already listed and we will use the term "gangs" we will rile this fear in our communities without actually looking at what we want to prohibit which is people with criminal intent which is people who are known to be violent to hold people who have the type of hate the type of ill will in our communities—as we know many different types of groups may hold but we're only going to focus on gangs.We know that our criminal justice system has previously done that to our detriment because it has focused away from what is in fact dangerous. In fact we're not going to focus on what prevents crime; we're not going to focus on strengthening our communities so that they are more equal and that people do have jobs and homes and access to mental healthcare access to drug addiction services; but we are going to keep doing the same old thing that we kept on doing before. We're going to do things that we know in fact breach human rights. We're going to make our communities more divided and unequal while we see crime rates rise. Well that isn't what this Government is about. So we do oppose this bill."