Court Simon; Kuriger BarbaraSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. Look I'm pleased to take a brief second call on behalf of the ACT Party on this bill. I think it's important for New Zealanders listening at home and for those who may have tuned their television set to Parliamentary TV tonight and to see that the House is sitting under urgency progressing what has largely been an absolute flaming comet trail of poor legislation that finally we come to a bill that actually addresses a concern that my colleague Nicole McKee on behalf of licensed firearms owners has been raising for years and years—that there is going to be a backlog in relicensing firearms owners who are fit and proper people and who've been judged in the past as being suitable to hold a farm's licence. And that's for a number of reasons: all of the rushed changes to legislation that were made in 2019 and 2020. But I also want to point out that as an Aucklander it wasn't just the 2019 atrocity in Christchurch that led to the police being tasked with a different function around a firearms law legislation regulation where they were required to stand over hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life people I met who willingly voluntarily responsibly turned up to collection centres to hand over firearms that they treasured. That melting pot of New Zealanders I met on the day that I presented my firearms in 2019 to be collected—people from the Philippines Korea Singapore China new-school Kiwis and old-school Kiwis alike who responsibly as fit and proper persons deemed responsible enough to hold a firearms licence turned up to hand over their firearms. At that point it was quite clear the police—who we had previously assumed were helpful administrators safety assessors for clubs and rangers and individuals like myself who has been subjected to the fit and proper person assessment in my own home in my family home a number of times—had been given a different direction. So what we then experienced in 2020 was the COVID-19 response which if you lived in Auckland you knew meant that you didn't see a policeman on the street for nearly two years because they were given other tasks. They were told to go and stand outside hotels in downtown Auckland or at the airport guarding people who may escape custody and spread COVID-19 into the community. Or then they were sent to what became known as the Auckland regional boundary" or the "Berlin Wall" as we called it us Aucklanders. Thousands of police officers rotated around the Auckland regional boundary forcing motorists to queue for hours. Truck drivers with refrigerated goods with stock on board asking them to hand over their papers to prove why they should be allowed to leave the Auckland region. Every single member of Parliament who's from the Auckland region knows exactly what I'm talking about. Those 1.7 million people who live in Auckland and the tens of thousands of licensed firearms owners who live in Auckland know exactly what I'm talking about. The police were distracted. They were directed by this Government and by their Ministers to do different things. And as a result when it came to relicensing licensed firearms owners again got a short stick. Now the ACT Party supports the licensing extension provisions in this bill. The current situation where those with expired licences must find another licensed person a family member or a friend to take care of their firearms to store them safely—those parts and ammunition—because a person's licence is expired and they couldn't get it renewed for love or money their local police responsible for licensing were simply overwhelmed with the number of applications and the fact that they weren't resourced to deal with it. So people have been forced to rely on friends and family or other members of their gun clubs to store their firearms and parts and ammunition. Some of them have had to go and buy second gun safes just to store friends' gear because the police were unable to process the applications. They weren't resourced to do it and they were distracted and diverted at the instructions of this Government and successive police Ministers. The licensed firearms owners raised this again and again. Nicole McKee raised this again and again. And today after a 24-hour submission period with licensed firearms owners acutely aware of how their property rights are at risk like no other New Zealander has been treated in the last 50 years—I mean that I've been alive—they are so acutely aware of how at risk their property rights are; 140-plus of them were prepared to write to select committee with 24 hours' notice and make a submission. It shows you how seriously this group of people take their property rights and the property rights of their entire community of a quarter of a million fit and proper and responsible people and how seriously they view this current Government and police Minister's flawed flippant and what has appeared to be disrespectful approach to their property rights and to their community and to their culture. That's new-school Kiwis and old-school Kiwis alike. That's why ACT supports the licensing extension of this bill. Although under urgency it would have been helpful to have had more time. It's not a new problem; it's just a problem that the Government didn't think was important enough to deal with until it's about to cause a major major problem in compliance. Of course the compliance problem at the moment—well up until now—has been a problem for licensed firearms owners. It only really becomes a problem for the Government when the police as the agents tasked with administering the legislation find themselves potentially in breach of the law for failing to administer it. So when it becomes a reputational risk for the Government all of a sudden they leap to urgency don't they Mr Mitchell? Hon Mark Mitchell: They do.SIMON COURT: They leap when it's a reputational risk to a police Minister or a former police Minister. Hon Mark Mitchell: They hobble—they hobble into action.SIMON COURT: That's right—they leap. But we are concerned because it appears that the urgency and the lack of transparency has been used to slip through what appears to be helpful the ability to serve documents electronically on licensed firearms owners on people who administer rangers and who have officer roles in gun clubs rangers and so on. Because by serving documents electronically you think "Well that's extremely helpful; the police use email most of us use email."But what the police have chosen to do and I'm just going to read from the bill from the actual amended section 72A inserted by clause 7 is they've amended it to for "Service of documents". That means legal documents that mean if you don't do something about it if you don't get your lawyer to help you respond or if you don't take a physical action you're likely to suffer the full force of the law. When someone serves you a document that really pricks your attention. And so the "Section 72A amended (Service of documents)" says the police used to be able to transmit to the person's electronic address that the person has provided as an address for service; now it's to "an" electronic address. Now you can imagine there's a lot of New Zealanders particularly in rural environments or older people who might share an email address with their partner. They might have their own email addresses that is for their business and if they're retired potentially they don't operate that business anymore and they don't check that email that often. Or if they're an officer in a club and it's a volunteer role again they might not be checking their email that often. And all of a sudden this piece of legislation means that if the police sent them an email serving them documents they didn't even have to acknowledge or confirm to the police they've received them the date of that email the police officer or the agent hitting send is determined to be the date of service and all of the obligations duties or consequences associated with what has been served will fall on that person whether they knew it or not. So we have grave concerns about that and look forward to exploring that in the House with the Minister.Motion agreed to.Bill read a second time.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Barbara Kuriger): I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Arms (Licence Holders' Applications for New Licences) Amendment Bill."