Faafoi Kris: Cultural Property (Protection in Armed Conflict) Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Faafoi Kris: Cultural Property (Protection in Armed Conflict) Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 05 December 2012. Volume:686;Page:7256. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana) 
: 
 It is an honour and a privilege to be able to speak to this bill the Cultural Property (Protection in Armed Conflict) Bill. I agree with the former speaker on his feet Tau Henare— 
Iain Lees-Galloway 
: The future Speaker! 
KRIS FAAFOI 
: —future Speaker sorry—that this is a good bill and it certainly makes sure that New Zealand follows through with the international obligations that it has through signing up to the Hague convention of 1954. 
Can I just touch on what Richard Prosser said earlier on. I think there is a time and a place for humour in this House but for him to try to bring up humour around this issue and the reputation of our armed forces probably was not the right moment. I just do want to join with the Minister for Arts Culture and Heritage the Hon Chris Finlayson and my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway in talking about the reputation of our armed forces around the globe in this area. They are absolutely outstanding and upstanding when they are out there doing duties on behalf of New Zealanders. 
I am going to take only a very brief call. This bill sets out to achieve three simple things: to create a number of criminal offences in relation to cultural property to prohibit trade in cultural property removed from occupied territory and to prevent unauthorised use of the convention emblem. My colleague Iain Lees-Galloway did talk about the third point the prevention of unauthorised use of the emblem. We think that is very important because there could be moves by some people overseas to use this emblem in I guess a scurrilous way to protect things that should not be protected. So we think that bringing that provision within this bill is certainly something that we support. 
In his opening remarks the Minister Chris Finlayson talked about this convention coming into force because of what happened in World War II and there have been many stories from previous speakers about what has happened in the past and about some of the injustices that have happened in the past but I just wanted to also support what Tau Henare said about our own history with our own taonga around this. New Zealand has had its conflicts. There are things of great cultural significance to our indigenous people that have been taken and have been traded overseas and thankfully some of them have come back to New Zealand. I think that it is absolutely fitting that we recognise the importance of those cultural items by making sure that we pass this legislation through today. 
Of course there are also conflicts happening at the moment and Paul Hutchison spoke about the conflict in the Middle East. Unfortunately we are still seeing sites of religious importance being targeted by some people and we hope that through the fact that New Zealand is meeting its international obligations with other nations we can stamp out that kind of behaviour because you would hope that in the 60-ish years since the Second World War we would recognise that carrying out this kind of behaviour—that as many people have said to the victors go the spoils. You would hope we have learnt from those instances where it is absolutely inappropriate to take some of those spoils in a cultural sense. 
It is a privilege to be able to speak to this bill. As Mr Henare said it is a good bill and it absolutely makes sure that we follow through with our obligations under our ratifying of the Hague convention. 
Bill read a third time.