McLellan TraceyDr TRACEY McLELLAN (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker for the chance at 11.40 p.m. at night to say a few words on the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Amendment Bill. And it's kind of a shame that we're having this important conversation at this hour in the evening under urgency. I would have thought some due respect would have been at a more timely part of the day where people had the opportunity to maybe tune in.Simon Court: Well maybe if there were still FPOs then you could have negotiated that but we got rid of them.Dr TRACEY McLELLAN: You know 7.30 8.30 is usually prime time for TV watching isn't it Mr Court? But you know 11.30 people have watched the news they're on to their Netflix and they're probably off to bed but never mind.Tangi Utikere: Why are we still here?Dr TRACEY McLELLAN: I have no idea. But this bill makes as my colleagues have said three changes to the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Act. The first one—and they're all quite benign on the surface. The first one amends the Arms Act 1983 to extend the group of persons against whom a firearms prohibition order (FPO) may be made; amends the Arms Act 1983 to establish a new review process that enables persons subject to an FPO to apply to the court to have that order varied perhaps modified or even revoked; and it amends the Search and Surveillance Act 2012 to introduce a new without cause search power that enables police to conduct searches in respect of a person who the police suspect on reasonable grounds may be subject to an FPO.Before coming down to the House I listened to my colleague the Hon Dr Duncan Webb who is a professor of law talk about the history of—I think it was way back in the 1700s and there was some story about a particular man who and I don't profess to have the legal intellect that that Dr Webb has but I know that it was really important that not since that time have we thought about engaging these measures. So that goes to show what a potentially ill-conceived and ill-thought-out piece of legislation this is. And look the reality is that this doesn't go any way to resolving the actual problem does it? You know the National Party pre-election went on and on and on about the concept and they campaigned really hard on resolving the gang problem and this doesn't go any way whatsoever to doing anything about crime and anything about the issue of gangs.So as we've said the proposed changes to the FPO add almost nothing. And that's a bit of a shame because there was an opportunity to actually start to put together a suite of measures that could have tackled the issues at hand. But this does very little and as my colleague the Hon Ginny Andersen has just said you put that together with the fact that there's loosening up of gun laws on the other hand and it's a bit of a recipe for disaster. So the FPO laws are already in place and they work—they work well—and the Government is really really planning to make military style semi-automatic weapons more widely available. And we know that the police have advised that they will end up in the wrong hands. So there's a couple of just practical things that we have to think about. How will a person be identified as a gang member? What is the process for demonstrating that they're no longer a gang member or they're no longer affiliated to that gang? And what does good behaviour mean with regard to actually getting off an FPO earlier?When you think about it it's almost laughable. We knew the coalition of cuts" would cut services and we've talked about that throughout the evening in various other ways but now we're actually talking about cutting safety and cutting protections from our communities. So that's not really very good. Madam Speaker—Mr Speaker my apologies; as I said it's very late. The firearms prohibition orders as we've said are really a back-door way of planning to introduce greater access to military semi-automatic weapons and I think that that's something we have to be really wary of in conjunction with these other measures.Now ACT is putting our police in harm's way and I don't say that lightly but I think that that's actually quite justified. The police have already got a dangerous job as we know without the risk of having assault weapons pulled on them during circumstances where these FPO orders are being amended. And I just want to finish my contribution by saying that Nicola Willis made a commitment that National would continue to support a ban on those weapons after the 15 March attack. So clearly this is a Government very divided."