Wagner NickyHon NICKY WAGNER (National): Thank you very much Mr Assistant Speaker. I'm enormously pleased to be speaking on this bill at its third reading. As the former Minister that started this work it's great to see the end of it and it's great to see it so successfully completed. I think everyone has done a great job and I'd like to congratulate everybody but particularly the customs officials. I think they worked on over a dozen Cabinet papers to deal with all these issues. They worked tirelessly and I wish to thank each and every one of them. I'd also like to compliment them on the work that they did with stakeholders. They spent hours with local businesses organisations and interested persons and they spent that time so they could co-design and come up with good solutions solutions that worked solutions that improved productivity.I also want to thank the current Minister Meka Whaitiri and the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee for working so collegially through this legislation. They were absolutely committed to make sure that this legislation would be the best that it could be because this type of legislation is important. It's enormously important. It makes a difference to the security and the prosperity of our country every single day. Good legislation can make our border run more efficiently and more effectively and that adds real value—real value to New Zealand and real value to New Zealanders. What we want to do at the border is to make it as user-friendly and as cost effective as possible for all legal passages and goods but as difficult and as hard to access and as punitive as possible to all illegal activities criminals and illicit goods. It's sometimes difficult to tell the difference but customs works enormously hard to achieve that. As has already been mentioned today customs has been around for a long time 178 years and this bill that we're debating tonight updates a series of Acts that have been amended numerous times. But interestingly enough there were still parts of this original Act that were 50 or 100 years old which are now going to be modernised. It's interesting and again it's been noted here that the new bill doesn't change the principles or the values or even the duties powers or obligations of the New Zealand Customs Service substantially but what it does do is simplify update modernise and really provide the flexibility to manage future challenges and changes in technology and in business practices and to give new tools to combat illegal activity.The bill is about balance: it needs to protect New Zealand and law-abiding citizens by good border practices but also it must preserve the privacy of legal travellers and businesses and the ease of managing the border processes. It also aims to simplify the collection of excise and it's been noted that's a very large amount of money. It wants to make that collection as cost-effective as possible and perhaps as painless as possible for the people it gets it from. It's a very big complex bill but most of it is pretty non-controversial. The work that New Zealand Customs Service did with their stakeholders makes sure that the changes are practical they are logical and they are streamlined.Customs is very aware that they contribute to the economic growth and the productivity of New Zealand by making it easier for travellers and traders to do business whether they're exporters or importers. There are numerous business-friendly changes within the bill simple things like businesses no longer being required to store records of interest in New Zealand itself. They'll be able to store them in the cloud internationally. There are new streamlined cheaper and less formal processes for customs to review duty assessments and that's particularly suited for low-value disputes but also for small businesses. There's new ways about ruling about the valuation of imports and also declaring of provisional value. There are also significant changes to sanctions. The bill will introduce a new infringement scheme similar to one that's already used by the Ministry for Primary Industries for minor offending. The new scheme I think will be more efficient it will be fairer and it will be transparent for customs and for offenders alike.So in summary this is a significant piece of work. It's been well done by New Zealand Customs Service and it will be beneficial to New Zealand and New Zealanders and to our economic growth and the future of the country. So well done everybody. I'm glad we've finally got to the third reading.