Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki-King Country): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to speak on the Customs and Excise (Arrival Information) Amendment Bill this afternoon around arrival information. Any time we simplify something into digital these days has got to be a good thing. Everyone is getting largely used to digital—with the exception of a few—and I'm pleased to see like everyone else that there will be some support for those people who haven't quite reached that digital phase. But I think a lot of travellers now are certainly in that space.Customs is one of those areas where often people are very critical of the process because at times it can be slow. You know when you're coming back from a holiday and you're tired—and you do hear people often talking about the different lanes and how long it takes. And part of the paperwork is part of what's slowing it down. But I think the important thing about it is—from the perspective of the country that we come from where our main exporter is primary production—a little bit of slowness actually doesn't hurt because we don't want the wrong things to go through. So anything we can do to make sure that the focus is clearly and sharply on looking for the right things rather than people faffing around with paperwork has got to be a good thing. And obviously if it's digital it'll be much easier to collate because it does need to be thorough.I think back to partway through last year when there was a foot-and-mouth scare in Australia. Albeit it was a benign scare but it did come through in a piece of pork and we do import a lot of pork into this country and the stuff that we're importing through the proper channels is well and truly checked out. But the biggest fear is that somebody is going to come through customs and they're going to end up having a piece of meat or something in their bag or a source of plant material that's going to decimate either our livestock industries or our horticulture industries. That's the last thing we want and the last thing we can afford. Because many people would have seen the awful happenings over the Mycoplasma bovis incident when many cows were culled and many farmers were under stress. Yes that was a terrible time in and of itself and something like foot-and-mouth would be far worse—because Mycoplasma bovis was not ever an issue for trade because there is only one other country in the world that doesn't have Mycoplasma bovis.If we were to get foot-and-mouth into this country we would see many of the same things going on out in our farm base in terms of having to destroy animals. But what's worse than that is we would have to renegotiate all of our trade deals because we actually have foot-and-mouth disease - free trade deals at the moment. And I understand that even if we were to be able to get it under control through vaccination—and those vaccinations change a bit like the COVID ones do; because you get different strains and it moves as anything like that does—even if that was the case and we did get it under control through vaccination we would still end up having to renegotiate our trade deals because we'd be foot-and-mouth vaccinated not foot-and-mouth - free like we currently are now.I thank the House for bearing with me as I worked my way through that but I think often when people think about customs they don't think about the relevance of why we are doing so much checking in a country like ours where food production is so important.It is of note that it is possible with the current bill that we have that we are able to digitise. I wasn't on the select committee that did this but it is important to note that the reasons for changing this legislation now are to be able to give clearer obligations and make sure that the penalties are fitting what is going on. Many of us might have heard of a person who's accidentally turned up and forgotten there was an apple in the bottom of their bag—sometimes there's an accident but oftentimes people try to bring things in because they simply don't understand the dangers to this country of doing so. I can't stand watching those border control programmes because it totally annoys me the sort of things that people try to bring in. And so we wouldn't want to see anybody deliberately having plant material meat or anything in their suitcases. I know those detector dogs are very smart and very accurate and have the ability to be able to sniff out lots of things these days as people are walking through the airport but you know we can't afford to have something coming through that shouldn't be there.So it's good to see these new liability offences that are being put in place. One is for failing to provide prescribed arrival information. It's really important that people are brought to the fact that filling out either currently a paper form or in future a digital form—so they're actually really going through it bit by bit and clearly in their mind recognising the sort of things that it's not OK to bring in.The second one is for providing erroneous information. Again it's just showing people that they really do need to be taking this seriously. I do share some of the concerns around—Simon O'Connor brought it up before—the cruise ships. I'm sure the Defence Force have all their systems in place but as Simon said when you fly into this country: one point one airport you get checked you fill the forms out everything's checked then you move on. I've been on cruise ships and I've actually been on ships that cruise around New Zealand and you get off at multiple ports on multiple days and there is a lot of food on cruise ships and everyone's told to do the right thing. And we hope that they do. But it is that multiple-entry nature of cruise ships—and I really do hope that something can be sorted out quite soon in terms of being able to make sure that those ships are really checked when they come in because they could be quite a source. People actually do get off and they're in the streets quite quickly out and about off on tours. They all try to sell you different tours. I went on one once where we were stopped at Tauranga and you went on this food basket tour—so you could be in a kiwifruit orchard or you could be in a place where there's fish or butchery or whatever. There's quite a risk that actually goes on with those cruise ships. And now that they're back—and we welcome they're back because they're a great tourism opportunity—we just need to make sure that this system is put in place as soon as possible so that we can monitor what goes on more carefully with those ships.I also hope—I've seen a lot of digital things being planned in the past and attempted to be implemented that don't quite work as well as they're supposed to right from day one. So I really hope that the system before customers are exposed to it or people travelling in and out of the country—I hope that it's been critically tested and tested and tested just to make sure that it's not going to fall over. Because the last thing we want to do is have people lined up at the border for hours on end for a system that's not working because that could be extremely frustrating.So with that I would reiterate the point that National does support this bill. It's one that's actually building this into the new phase of technology but also just adding those extra couple of penalties that we talked about. And I do hope that whatever we do in this space keeps our New Zealand primary industries as disease-free as they currently are. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.