O'Connor Simon: Summary Offences (Possession of Hand-held Lasers) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Simon: Summary Offences (Possession of Hand-held Lasers) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 28 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18437. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I am really pleased to rise and speak to the Summary Offences (Possession of Hand-held Lasers) Amendment Bill on this—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The time has come to suspend the House for dinner. I shall resume the Chair at 7.30 p.m.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Members the House has resumed. Before the dinner break we were on the second reading of the Summary Offences (Possession of Hand-held Lasers) Amendment Bill. Iain Lees-Galloway was speaking at the time and has 9 minutes—Iain Lees-Galloway: No Simon O’Connor was speaking at the time.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Simon O’Connor was speaking and has 9 minutes and 50 seconds remaining to speak.SIMON O’CONNOR: I know that my colleagues across the House particularly Mr Iain Lees-Galloway and the buddy MP crossing the border into my electorate Carol Beaumont have been anticipating this speech. When I was rudely interrupted 10 seconds or 1/100th of the way into my speech I was talking about how it was a pleasure to talk to thesummary offences bill. The pleasure is because not only is this is an important bill and an important member’s bill but it is in the name of my good friend and colleague Dr Cam Calder. He has put an enormous amount of effort time and passion into this bill. I think it is great that the House is supporting it here at its second reading.It is an important bill because it is responding to what is really a pretty key area of abuse often which is people using high-power laser pointers. There are plenty of instances in the public domain where helicopters and jets coming into airports have been interfered with. As someone who has had the pleasure of being in a cockpit a few times over the last few years I realise the critical nature of what is occurring particularly between 0 feet and 10000 feet. The pilots are very focused. The last thing they need is a bright laser shining in their eyes.We are taking this very seriously. The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee looked at a range of options particularly around the penalties. As I understand it every person is liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than 3 months or a fine not exceeding $2000. I think this is a proportionate response and sends a strong signal. We are also saying that those with a high-power laser in their possession need to pretty much have a reasonable excuse. It is hard to think other than if you are an academic or a researcher why you would need such a high-powered device with you.One other thing I would note before concluding the call is that we as a select committee looked at the whole search and seizure element. Initially it was in the bill. In itself the bill would have empowered the police to be able to search and seize equipment. It was seen that actually that is already within the Search and Surveillance Act 2012 so we were happy to have the bill refer to that. It is a good bill. It has been worked at very hard not only by the select committee but of course by Dr Cam Calder. Once again at this second reading I acknowledge the work that he is doing and commend this bill to the House.