Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to this bill but not in opposition to changing our gun laws. I want to pay tribute to those victims of our nation's tragedy of 15 March. It is for them that our gun laws must change because it is not sustainable to have a set of laws where such a deranged individual can get their hands on such lethal weapons with almost nobody knowing about it. That much is certain and that much is the consensus in this House of Parliament and almost up and down the entire length of this country. However this bill is not an attempt to improve public safety; it is an exercise in political theatre.This bill was made redundant and unnecessary by an Order in Council passed down by the Prime Minister and the Government in the week after the tragedy of 15 March. That Order in Council made it clear that only those approximately 7500 people with the most restricted level of licence—an E category licence that requires extreme vetting and registration of every single weapon—could have semi-automatic weapons. That was a great start. That was a good placeholder which wouldn't expire until 30 June. That Order in Council could have been the beginning of a careful considered thoughtful legislative process—the type of legislative process that the Government now promises will commence almost as soon as this bill has passed through this House and become a law.People might ask themselves What was the rush and what was the hurry?" Other than the need to be seen to be doing something there was none. The fact is that unlike the Prime Minister who asked "Well is it better to do nothing?" I believe that this bill may end up being worse than nothing.We could not find in the Finance and Expenditure Committee what the officials' estimates of the success of the gun buy-back might be. So what will members of this House say when we get to the end of the amnesty period this September and we find that our gun buy-back has been no more successful than the Australian one—one that found that between 40 and 80 percent? Just as our Prime Minister couldn't say today how many guns there are in New Zealand the Australians didn't know either but between 40 and 80 percent of these dangerous weapons have been handed in and they've been handed in by the people who are the law-abiding ones. We could find ourselves with a bigger black market in dangerous semi-automatic weapons than ever outside any regulatory cordon whatsoever. Why might that be? Well one good reason is that today in the eleventh hour—such is the rush of this process—the Government decided that they would reward people with compensation if their weapons were owned legally but they wouldn't offer compensation for people who hand in illegal weapons. That is how insane the outcomes of this process are.That is to say nothing—maybe it's a law that won't work—about the way it has been gone about—to say nothing of the truncated select committee process which gave no serious consideration to improving the law didn't consider any other options such as upgrading licensing and didn't allow the committee to consider what the success of the buy-back might be. It simply said "There is urgency. We must act. We're going to do this anyway." That is not good lawmaking. That is not the way to get the law-abiding gun community—whom we need as allies in creating a safer society—on board and that is not the way to celebrate the institution of Parliament and our democracy at a time when exactly our democratic institutions of freedom have been challenged so violently.So for all of those reasons I am in support of changing our gun laws but it is impossible for anyone of good conscience to support this bill the way it's been brought about and the problems with it that may well make our society more dangerous than on 15 March. Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker."