Roche Denise: Passports Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Passports Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading[Sitting date: 15 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7301. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): It is my pleasure to rise to take a call for the Greens on this the Passports Amendment Bill (No 2). We are of course supporting this bill like all the other parties in the House basically because it is a sensible bill to extend the life and validity of passports from 5 years to 10 years. Having that reintroduced is a very popular move and something that lots of people in the community have actually been lobbying for for some time now. I also note that with this bill we modernise the Passports Act of 1992 and we bring it into line with many of our neighbouring countries and our friends overseas.Other speakers have talked about the fact that Kiwis love to travel. There is no doubt about that. I guess if we are extending the validity of our passports back to 10 years it gives us a longer period of time in which to collect those wonderful visa stamps that you can collect along the way. Five years for me was not enough really to get enough in there to make it feel like it was worthwhile.I think we should reflect on the fact that Kiwis who do travel and are protected by those passports are protected by having New Zealand citizenship as well. That gives me pause to reflect essentially on those New Zealanders those citizens of New Zealand who have New Zealand passports who are currently being detained in Australia illegally. Their human rights are basically being breached because they are being detained in places like Christmas Island and essentially are about to be deported but are being detained without legal rights because they are going to be deported because of that country’s regulations around deportation. I think in New Zealand we would have learnt from the mistakes and our Government really—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member needs to come back to the bill.DENISE ROCHE: OK—certainly. There were passports in there a little bit.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes just not enough. Carry on.DENISE ROCHE: Not enough passports—OK then. So back to this bill. We are satisfied that the security issues—[Interruption] Rino Tirikatene got away with it. Anyway back to the bill Mr Deputy Speaker and I take your point.We are satisfied and I am pretty sure the rest of the Government Administration Committee was satisfied that the security issues that were raised as a potential flag were addressed. I was pleased to hear the Minister of Internal Affairs in his opening speech for this reading saying that security will be reviewed from time to time. That is very reassuring. We were also pleased to see that the costs of the passports have been kept down as much as we possibly could. That was a concern that was raised by the few people who did submit on the bill. But we are extending the time frame—the validity of the passport—from 5 years to 10 years so it is obvious that there will be an increased cost for that. We in the Greens are also pleased to see that within this bill it standardises the refugee papers which will be extended from 2 years to 5 years which is around the same amount of time that refugees have for seeking residency and so it reduces that anomaly as well.I want to also congratulate the Government Administration Committee. I sat in on that committee because I am the immigration spokesperson for the Greens. Our usual person is Mojo Mathers. I want to thank the permanent committee members for the detail and care that they took in scrutinising this bill and considering it. We will of course be supporting it. We commend it to the House.