Williamson Maurice: Aviation Security Legislation Bill — Second Reading 
Williamson Maurice: Aviation Security Legislation Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:641;Page:11501] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 Speaking from the National Party’s perspective I say that we are very happy to support the legislation. However I do want to cover just a few aspects of it and say why I think it is a bill that has to be passed. 
But first I will just give an explanation to people in case they thought I was doing something subversive with perfume. I was returning from Paris having travelled with my good friends Darren Hughes and Moana Mackey. I bought some perfume at the French duty-free shop because I was now on the airside of customs which meant I was safe to do so. I put it in my bag and away I went. What I did not realise was that when I got to Heathrow instead of being able to transfer from the Air France plane across to the Air New Zealand plane I had to come back through the security system to be checked. They put my bag through and said there was a liquid in it. I said “No there’s not.” then said “Oh actually I just bought a bottle of perfume. It’s still sealed. It’s still in its wrapper. It’s still got the duty-free certificate and everything.” So the guy opened it up and had a look. It was Yves St Laurent. It had the receipt and it had everything else. He said: “That’s right.” and threw it straight in the rubbish bin. I was pretty upset about it because it was sealed— 
Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith 
: How much did it cost? 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: It was about €120 I think. I did not even look. My guidance counsellor has told me not to keep thinking about the money and that I will get over it one day. But that is what I wanted to say. 
However I do understand why vigilance is required—certainly in some of those high-security places. Let me tell anybody who really is interested that Heathrow is now just ghastly. Heathrow is now so backlogged and has such queues that people can spend an hour and a half in a queue trying to get through the searches. But on the other hand we have to say to ourselves: “Should we just get rid of this and I will take my chances with someone taking something on board the plane and blowing it to smithereens?”. 
The other thing I would like the House to realise is that legislation really is not a terribly effective tool for aviation security. I think that of all the various transport sectors out there aviation security does a stunningly good job. I think Mark and his team have for years and years run a particularly crisp operation and done a good job. But issues and events arise almost overnight. Remember how it was only when the police raided some places in London and found that there were some formulas for some liquids that one could take on board mix together and make into a detonator that suddenly almost that night liquids became something that people could not have in their bags? Up until then we had all carried all sorts of liquids in our handbags and toilet bags such as hairspray perfume aftershave and so on. Suddenly on one night it all changed. 
We know how long it takes to get legislation through this place even at the very best of times. So legislation is not a terribly good vehicle for dealing with it and that is why we have to have legislation that is empowering and enabling and that allows the Aviation Security Service to make almost instant decisions when a new issue arises. I can give a bold prediction to this House that within 12 months of today another issue about aviation security will have been brought to the fore. Aviation officials will have raided somebody’s house or arrested somebody somewhere who was boarding a plane and found that it was something to do with the heels on someone’s shoes. Members will remember that that is what the shoe bomber was trying to carry the explosives in. So aviation security has a really difficult job. 
I have always wondered how effective it is in New Zealand because I worked out at the airport on a number of occasions when I was working for Air New Zealand and management were called in to do things like load the aeroplanes. Although there was quite a bit of security around how the passengers came and went to the airplane just about anybody could actually get on to the campus of the airport and get from the engineering base to the catering base. Even when the aeroplanes were in dock being fixed just about anybody could get on them and go up on to the plane. A terrorist could probably have found a Boeing 747 gone on board hidden what he or she wanted to hide a couple of days before the plane was ready to go back on line and then when that person got on board as a passenger it would be hidden in some little tray. 
This bill again does some things about legislation for checking and making sure that the people who work at the airport—the engineering staff the people who cater the aeroplanes and the people who service the aeroplanes—can all have background checks and can have searches of themselves made and so on. We will not have a safe aviation system if people can sneak in around the back way and get either bombs or weapons on board. 
One of the things that the Green Party MP Keith Locke is very concerned about is the people called sky marshals. These people will have the potential—and I stress the word “potential”—to be armed and to be on an aeroplane while carrying a weapon. First of all we have had to allow that in order to comply with a whole lot of aviation security rules elsewhere. The point I would make to the Green Party is that we cannot do just what we want as a nation because if we did then other countries would have the right to say: “Your planes don’t come here.”—and not just our planes. Any planes of any carrier would not fly from New Zealand to their jurisdictions. So we have to be mindful of the fact that other jurisdictions have some pretty severe rules. They want from time to time to be able to have armed sky marshals on board an aeroplane. This legislation will allow that to happen. But I suggest to this House that it will not be very often. I suggest it may be very very rare that they are needed. 
Keith Locke’s other concern was that if there are armed sky marshals on a plane and they use these weapons we may be endangering the whole aircraft by puncturing a hole in it and depressurising it. We have been told very clearly by a number of people from the Air Line Pilots’ Association and so on that the movies where we see a gunshot blowing huge holes into a plane so that everyone gets sucked out and dies is just a bit of Hollywood. In fact an airplane can sustain a bullet into the skin of its fuselage and still stay perfectly intact. I put it to the House that if a terrorist were going to blow up a plane or crash it into the ground and kill not only everybody on board the plane but maybe hundreds of innocent people on the ground as well we might actually be quite grateful if there were somebody on the plane who was able to pull out a weapon from behind his or her jacket and take the terrorist down if necessary maybe while causing some damage to the plane or maybe even to another passenger. Someone said: “Well what if an innocent passenger gets killed?”. That would be a tragedy. It would be awful for that to happen but it would be a hell of a lot better for one innocent passenger to die in the skirmish and the terrorist to get taken out by the sky marshal than for the whole 747 to go crashing into the Sky Tower in Auckland and kill everybody on the 747 and everybody at Skycity Casino and so on. So these are all matters of risk. 
This legislation I must say had some really interesting bits to it. We were confronted with the issue of new technology that can nearly show people naked as they walk in front of it. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: A horrible thought. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: Yes it is a very horrible thought. I agree with Mr Henare on that. 
There are new X-ray - type technologies that can almost show a person naked. I actually do not quite believe it but we were told that the X-ray can zoom through clothing and so on. What is happening is that technology is starting to outpace our ability to legislate and this bill which will become an Act when it is passed is important in terms of starting to give the Aviation Security Service some ability to implement tools and regimes that will keep our skies safe. I know that a lot of New Zealanders say to me: “Oh isn’t it bizarre that you go through all this checking and even have to get your laptop out of your bag and so on when you are getting on board a 737. But if you are getting on board an ATR going to Queenstown you don’t.” I guess that all I can say to them is that it is a really simple test: if the plane can go elsewhere in the world—which a 737 can; it can go to Australia or Fiji or Rarotonga—then checking is carried out; if the plane cannot fly more than a few hundred kilometres and would fall into the water if it were to try to leave New Zealand shores then I think it does not require quite the same level of scrutiny. 
All I want to say is that we listened with interest to certain communities like the Sikhs with their kirpans which are the ceremonial ornamental little daggers they wear. Although I understand that these people are not specifically going to cause any security issue they also must understand that they have to be checked and that it may be a way that those can be put to one side. To be fair the Sikh community was very good. Sikhs said they understand that as long as it is done in a sensitive way. They know that if they have fairly large turbans on their heads that is a place where a particular piece of explosive or weaponry could be concealed. 
This is legislation that shows Parliament working at its best. The select committee worked well. All the members worked together very well—as we do on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—and I am pleased that the National Party is supporting it.