Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. Before I begin I was just reflecting on the fact that as an immunocompromised Auckland member of the House it's been almost six months since I was here in person speaking. So it's good to see everyone—although distanced—and you know just keeping that locked-down city in mind because we did do some hard yards. But to begin to come back to the topic of this particular bill which is more effective firearm regulation and the safety of our communities against gun violence I do want us to hold in our minds and hearts the tragedy that led to this work being brought before this House and being prioritised for our nation which was the terror attack on the mosques on 15 March in 2019. So it's almost three years ago—although time seems to have lost meaning—since the fact that 51 people lost their lives as a result of gun violence. Of course that means that countless lives were affected and changed for ever. Hundreds were impacted directly. Some of those victims will live with the impact of their very real physical injuries for their whole lifetime and others will live with the very real impact of the mental health scars as a result of that hate crime. It was of course the latest and probably the first act of hate that led to such an extent of harm in living memory in our nation and what came after that was a reaction by the last Government—which the Green Party is proudly a part of—that was swift. It should never have come to a tragedy like that with the extent of the loss of life for this House of Representatives or successive Governments to react and look at our very lax gun laws. But the first Act immediately after that was a call—a massive call—by members of the public who had rallied around the victims of March 15 and had actually called for action and the first Act of these different tranches of gun law reform was to ban all military-style semi-automatics. That came quickly but it was very clear that other regulations like this one have to follow and they have to come with a bit more detailed thought. Regulating gun violence falls within the kaupapa of the Green Party as one of our charter values is non-violence. So we do support evidence-based regulation of all firearms and in this case we were involved. I as both police and justice spokesperson was involved in the consultations that began the work of this particular bill with the previous Minister of Police the Hon Stuart Nash and I commend the current Minister for continuing that work and bringing it before the House. Because this is a bill that criminalises the association of those who have an order against them with others who hold guns one of our core concerns is alleviated in this current form of the bill which was that it wasn't just association with those who might hold gun licences but that in fact they were living in a house with a firearm for example. So it's a higher risk and one that takes the discretion out and the speculation out and leads us away in our lawmaking from prejudice-based application of the law. So this bill effectively creates two criminal offences but it also creates the power of a judge to issue in sentencing a 10-year long firearms prohibition order which then bans association with people who have firearms not in a secure storage from residing if you have an order against you at premises in which firearms are stored and joining shooting clubs and attending activities involving firearms. That seems like a good balance for us but I do want to address the fact that the two criminal offences that are created here carry sentences of five years' or seven years' maximum penalties. We do always have a concern that our criminal justice policy does follow an evidence-based core and we do want to hold that in fact although this bill does speak of things like rehabilitation and successful reintegration being taken into account when orders are considered currently in New Zealand our prisons don't in fact have standardised rehabilitation programmes. People don't actually have access to what we might say will be successful reintegration back into the community and our prison system according to the Prime Minister's chief scientist last term has failed. So prison isn't a solution for keeping our communities safe and we do want to see more investment by this Government in what does work—standardised rehabilitation programmes drug and alcohol treatment mental health treatment—and we do want to hold also that while we live in a country where our justice system very clearly has been proven over and over again to target Māori. Whether it's for search and seizure whether it's for arrest whether it's conviction and when convicted sentences of imprisonment we still have not fully taken account of what we know actually keeps communities safe. We know that the safest communities are not those that are very highly policed or very highly criminalised. The safest communities are those with access to secure warm dry accessible housing inclusive education meaningful work and when people are not in work with a social safety net that provides them the opportunity not just to barely survive but to thrive. So we do want the Government to go ahead and regulate guns effectively because gun violence is a blight on our society. But we hope that the pain and hurt of victims of gun violence is not used as a means to dog-whistle and to lean in more and more to policies that only make politicians look tough on crime without in fact keeping our communities safe. So that is the Green vision but we do commend this bill to the House.