Roberts AngelaANGELA ROBERTS (Labour): It is an honour to stand and take a call on the Autonomous Sanctions Bill. I do it very respectfully knowing the experience that you bring this bill to the House with as a former Minister of Foreign Affairs. I appreciate you were not the Minister of Foreign Affairs—self caught Madam Speaker. So we really appreciate—other speakers have reflected on this—the intent behind this bill: the attempt to improve our ability to respond to issues of real concern on the international stage. But unfortunately this is the wrong solution to the problem. We welcome the debate. We welcome the expectation that these issues should be looked at carefully and thoughtfully because they are complex in an ever-moving environment.We are living in a world of global uncertainty the scale and pace of which we haven't experienced before. We need to make sure that our kete our tool kit is nimble and effective. So that is why we welcome this debate because it is really important that we make sure that our tool kit is a good one. Unfortunately this doesn't hit the mark. It is too narrow and it is short-sighted. The idea of attending to human rights abuses outside of the Asia-Pacific region is a missed opportunity. The idea of missing emerging areas such as cyber-security—and one thing that we have learnt is that issues like cyber-security remind us that our neighbourhood is not just those in the Asia-Pacific region or in the Waikato but actually it is a global community with such issues. It is because of this pace and complexity of change that we have to make sure that anything that does get enhanced in our tool kit is able to be nimble and responsive.So sending this bill to select committee will be insufficient because the changes that would be required the intensely intricate policy work that needs to be done would surely require changes to the bill that would sit outside of its scope. We are really pleased with the thinking that has gone into it. What we would hope is that experience and the challenges that have been brought to us with this bill mean that everybody across the House will pitch in and help to enhance the significant tools that we already have at our disposal the significant international controls we already can utilise. We want to have a coherent approach that makes sure that we can respond to issues of real concern as they arise across the world. We're futureproofed. We want to make sure that we can connect and enhance the tools that we already have and bilateral arrangements and multilateral tools.We do have to come back to the classroom occasionally some of us do remember those days. Many times over the years we've had model UN and actually World Trade Organisation debates in our senior classrooms because it is really important for our young people to understand the significant connections and relationships that we have globally in order for us to participate in them. And very very quickly—because of course you'd have to set up a rogue nation who would go off and do things on their own—you would find the students would very quickly understand the power of collaboration. That collaboration is so important and we're seeing it today in our response to COVID: a whole pile of different world views attending to problems. A whole pile of different voices attending to problems means we are more likely to be able to find real and lasting solutions that mean that we can attend to our absolute need for peace and security. We are really pleased that the issue has been raised but we do not think that it attends or answers the questions and these are the wrong solutions to the problems and as such I cannot be supporting this bill.