Mitchell Clayton: Passports Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMitchell Clayton: Passports Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading[Sitting date: 15 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7302. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to take a call. I think I will be struggling to do as fantastic a job as Rino Tirikatene did before. I thought that was a fantastic example of how to filibuster and fill up 10 minutes. Labour members were clearly getting the “speak for 10 minutes” call—fantastic. I would also like to recognise Mr Brett Hudson for his contribution as well. I think that as a National Party member he is certainly a well-balanced member. Of course having a chip on both shoulders does help.We will of course be supporting this—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mentioning the bill would be a good start.CLAYTON MITCHELL: Absolutely—I will get there right now. I had to get that out of the way nice and quickly. We will be supporting this bill today in the House. Just for the reference of Mr Hudson on Tuesday night for example I was sitting in the House and out of the four bills that were read out that day New Zealand First actually supported three of them. That is a 75 percent support rate. Let us just see how we get on today.Look there is not a lot that has already been said that I can re-say but New Zealand First does support the bill because it does make sense. Back in 2001 of course we had the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in the USA. That was the catalyst for the Labour Government to bring in these reduced passports. I think it was a quick reaction. I think it was a reaction that probably in hindsight was unnecessary but it was an action that was taken none the less. New Zealand First did not support the reduction from 10 years to 5 years for passports back in those days and has on a number of occasions spoken about bringing back those 10-year passports.We are somewhat disappointed that it has taken 7 years for this Government to actually bring this bill to the House. Now that it has been brought to the House it has actually been moving along quite quickly and certainly in a positive fashion. At the end of today’s deliberation—the final third reading of this bill—we are going to see this Passports Amendment Bill (No 2) enacted and making some positive changes to the Passports Act 1992. The Act of course is—first and foremost; first cab off the ranks—going to bring a lot of happiness and joy to people back home particularly those who are getting passports and those travellers those New Zealanders who get around a bit because they will have a 10-year passport application available from 30 November.Of course this bill would not have got there without the input from the Government Administration Committee. I just want to commend committee members’ input on this bill. I think they have worked diligently. There were about 20 submitters. Nobody came in to give an oral submission but they certainly were in favour of these passports being expanded out to 10 years. Of course Peter Dunne has I think done a good job of working with Cabinet and the National Government to ensure that the pricing of this passport did not blow out to the $404 that was initially expected. He has actually brought that into a more palatable fee of $180-odd.New Zealand First thinks that that price could come down. We think that $180 albeit over a 10-year period is about a $90 deduction on what you would be paying over the $135 you would be paying twice for the same period with 5-year passports. It is actually only a 9½ year passport. If you understand the ideology as New Zealand First does and think that every dollar is a prisoner then we can make some small but significant changes—in the size of the passport for example and how many pages are within it—that might actually help reduce some of those costs. We are talking about potentially from 2021 getting an extra $200 million - odd from Treasury to actually enable that.I skimmed over it before but I just want to also bring the attention back to 2001 when the Labour Government brought in 5-year passports. It was a little bit quick. The vast majority of countries around the world stuck with their 10-year passports—Australia being one of them and Canada. The United States of America even kept its 10-year passports. Many of the OECD countries realised that their passports were actually OK at 10 years. So it was a bit of a shame that we reacted so quickly in hindsight but it is good to see that we are making some headway now.As far as the security of the new passports goes I think it is a much better way of operation that they can be cancelled via the computer—you do not need to send them in to cancel them cut them in half or do whatever they do. That is certainly going to make things a lot easier for the Department of Internal Affairs with people coming or going. It is a reminder to those people who are planning on travelling to make sure that all their fines are paid up and there are no warrants for arrests or anything like that because of course it is all done over the computer and you might find yourself inadvertently getting to the departure lounge and being turned away at the gates because you might have a fine that has not been paid.I will not go on any further. We do support this bill. New Zealand First strongly supports this bill going through the House. We look forward to hearing from some of the other speakers this afternoon. Thank you.