Mitchell MarkHon MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): Thank you Madam Chair. I'd just like to start by also supporting Tim Macindoe's comments around it being good to see the Minister in the chair Tracey Martin actually taking calls. I have to say I'm not as worried about being on her Christmas card list. I'm sure she understands why. I also wanted to actually mention a contribution made by Deborah Russell because it was a very good one and she raised a point that I'd still like the Minister to address which hasn't been fully addressed. I'm actually going to use a personal example around it and that is the successful prosecution and conviction of Kiwis that are engaging in offshore transactions. I'm actually really proud of this bill. I think it's a very good bill and as a nation and as a country we should be proud that we're taking positive steps towards making sure that we can never be involved in the type of behaviour that's being talked about tonight around weapons and the harm and the pain that they cause especially in conflict areas.So the example that I want to use—and the Minister can come back and address the issue that was raised by Deborah Russell—is that back in 2004 I was appointed by the interim Government in Iraq to establish what's called the Provincial Joint Operations Centre. It was the centre that was formed to train—it performed two real functions. The first one was to train all the newly formed Iraqi security forces so you had the Iraqi Police Service; you had the Iraqi National Guard; you had the tactical support unit which was effectively like our armed offenders squad or our Special Tactics Group; you had the borders and customs police; and you had the facilities protections police and the Facilities Protection Service was really about guarding critical infrastructure—so the ports the airports the port of Umm Qasr or Khawr az-Zubayr. So we fundamentally had five services there. The first function was to deliver all the training to the command element—so that was major rank upwards—and the second role was to provide command and control in an operations centre in terms of coordinating the operations that were going on particularly in the Basra area but also more widely in the Dhi Qar province.There were three real threats that we were dealing with. One was the highly organised criminal gangs that were normally sponsored by the tribes the second was obviously al-Qaeda and the third was the Mahdi militia who were led by Muqtada al-Sadr who is now actually part of the political solution in Baghdad although you would have seen that there was a riot in Baghdad last summer and it was actually led by Muqtada al-Sadr and he remains in Parliament. I'm not sure what would happen here if a New Zealand MP was to lead a riot and I guess that's why we're so lucky to be living in the country that we are and having the democracy and the Parliament that we have. So the issue that I raise—and it comes back to the point that Deborah Russell made—was that the biggest threat that these guys were having to deal with when they were out on operations was always coming up against—whether it was a highly organised criminal gang or whether it was al-Qaeda or whether it was the Mahdi militia or one of the militias operating they were all heavily armed and they were heavily armed with weapons that weren't procured with an end use certificate or procured through the normal channels. They were procured on the black market and obviously the black market avoids regulation. It doesn't want to adhere to regulation and rules and so it's very hard to police and it's very hard to shut down when you're dealing with very porous borders. But the good news is that the international community has become far more organised around it and we see treaties like the one we're now legislating to support and we see people like Viktor Bout sitting in a prison in Thailand which is a good thing. But it brings me back to the question and the issue that was raised by Deborah Russell and that's—quite simply—if a Kiwi engages with the procurement of weapons overseas and those weapons find themselves in a conflict zone without an end use certificate and without the proper paperwork or the proper process having been adhered to talk us through how we're actually going to gather the evidence and how we're going to charge and going to convict that person because I think every single one of us in this Parliament and in this country wants to see that person convicted. Thank you Madam Chair. The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 24 in the name of the Rt Hon Winston Peters to clause 4 be agreed to.Amendments agreed to.Part 1 as amended agreed to.