Woods Megan: Airports (Cost Recovery for Processing of International Travellers) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Airports (Cost Recovery for Processing of International Travellers) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 10 December 2013. Volume:695;Page:15421. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is my pleasure to take a call on the Airports (Cost Recovery for Processing of International Travellers) Bill and to build on the comments that my colleague Darien Fenton has been making. As my colleague set out the purpose of the bill and the aim of the bill is to enable the Crown to recover the costs of aviation security biosecurity and customs for traveller processing from the operators of new or re-established international airports or international airports that sometimes request travellers to be processed in a non-routine manner.What sounds like a very technical and very dry piece of legislation is indeed very important to our economy. In fact our tourism industry and our ability to bring goods safely across the border and to protect our own agricultural industry are crucial to our survival economically. This piece of legislation is an important part of the puzzle that puts that together.As we were wondering with the last piece of legislation we are somewhat perplexed as to why this bill has sat on the Order Paper for so long and why it has not come back before this House before the second day before we rise for the Christmas break in 2013. The history of this legislation which my colleague alluded to and it is worth returning to is that this is a piece of legislation that had its genesis in 2004 when the idea started to be kicked around by Dr Michael Cullen as the then Minister of Finance about how it was we were going to deal with these issues of how we recover the costs at newly established international airports in relation to aviation security biosecurity and customs and how we process travellers especially in a non-routine manner. Some work was done on that and as my colleague referred to we got to the election in 2008 and much of that work was abandoned. So circles were reinvented and we came up with a new regime.That piece of legislation then worked through the process and was sent through to the Primary Production Committee. As my colleague has alluded to a very august select committee it was too with some very fine members on it including my colleague Damien O’Connor who heard submissions on this bill when it first came before the committee in 2010. The committee listened to the submitters. I believe there were eight submissions that came before the committee about how this legislation needed to be dealt with. The committee listened and it went back and it did its work as a good hard-working select committee would do. It went back and it made the changes that were necessary to make this a good piece of legislation.But was this bill rushed back to the House? Was it something that was brought back by a Minister keen to get on with the job of making sure that we had the way in which we dealt with our borders securely sewn up? No unfortunately that was not the case. Like many other pieces of legislation this bill has been allowed to languish on the Order Paper by a Government that seems to let a lot of things languish on the Order Paper and not come before the House in a timely manner.Labour will be supporting this legislation because we actually think it is important. We are pleased to see it. We think it is not before time. We would have liked to see it earlier and I am sure my colleague Damien O’Connor who worked so hard on this piece of legislation would have liked to see it come back earlier to the House. We do support this bill because biosecurity and customs services come at a huge cost to the Crown and any new international airport should have to realise part of those costs.As my colleague Darien Fenton has alluded to we do have a very high number of international airports per capita in New Zealand. We already have a reasonably large network of airports where international travel can be carried out to and from. New ones necessitate the replication by their very nature of biosecurity and customs services and additional costs fall on the Crown. For a number of years this Parliament and the select committees within this Parliament have been trying to sort out fair ways that these costs can be shared between the various parties that will benefit from the establishment of international airports. As I said earlier we did propose a similar cost recovery scheme in 2004. However after consultation and discussion with many of the territorial local authorities with regional councils and with businesses we chose to reduce the cost recovery period for providing customs and biosecurity services to a new international airport to just 1 year. We were concerned. We were very concerned indeed that a longer time period—