Mitchell MarkHon MARK MITCHELL (National—Whangaparāoa): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker O'Connor. Can I just pass on my congratulations as well. I don't know whether I should be nervous having you in the Chair or not but congratulations. It's good to see you there. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): Thank you Mr Mitchell. Hon MARK MITCHELL: Oh I'll wait and see. This is a massive lost opportunity by the Government. This firearms prohibition order (FPO) legislation actually could have had some teeth. It could have been meaningful. It could have actually given our front-line police officers the ability to start taking illegal firearms out of the hands of gangs. Sadly I predict that this is going to be a complete flop. I'll keep an eye on it. We'll come back in six months and we'll find out just how effective it's been because this is meant to be addressing an issue that's in front of us right now. It's not something that we anticipate happening—we're not trying to harden our borders because there might be a terror threat. This is something that's happening right now right in front of us every day: shootings homicides and illegal firearms; gangs well-armed and arming up even more.The police asked for the firearms prohibition order as an effective tool for them to be able to deal with that. This isn't an effective tool. It's not retrospective at all so it means there has to be some fresh offending. It goes in front of the judge and the judge can decide whether or not they're going to apply an FPO. The police can request one; the judge can decide. They apply the FPO to the defendant and they are then back out on the street or maybe they get a term of imprisonment—I don't know. But they have an FPO and they're back out on the street and nine times out of ten they'll be out reoffending. If it's a gang member they'll be out associating with their mates and the police are left to try and police them. They generally know who they are. The Police Association along with us said that if you want to make this bill meaningful if you actually want to allow the police to actually use it be effective and be able to stop people and search them and take any firearms that are found and by the way let the criminals know that if they do want to drive on to the street with a firearm in their car then there's a much higher likelihood that the police can detect them with that firearm and take action. They need to have a warrantless search power—you need to have an extended search power. This is status quo. There are no new search powers. The police have already got search powers under the Search and Surveillance Act—they've already got section 18. They could use that before this bill came into the House. There's nothing new in this bill. There's actually nothing new in this bill other than the fact that the judge now can issue a firearms prohibition order to an offender—that's it. How this is going to be effective? How are the actual front-line police officers going to use this new piece of legislation to be effective to clamp down on the gangs and to keep the public safe? I think it's going to be an abject failure.What amazes me is that I put up a Supplementary Order Paper when the Minister was in the House during the committee stage or maybe it was the second reading—no I think it was the second reading. I said to him to let's work across the House and let's see if we can actually get that warrantless search power that the Police Association asked for—based off what the Australians had done to make sure that their legislation was effective; so there was lots of information there and evidence there and the Police Association used that in their submission to the select committee—and let's try and get this actually folded into the bill. Well the Leader of the House and the Minister of Police and the sponsor of the bill turned around and said Oh you obviously don't understand. I thought you wanted to get this through. I thought you were supporting it. You know we're trying to rush this through to give it to the police and you obviously don't understand how the process goes because if we were to do that it's going to slow the process down." How is it going to slow the process down? It's quite simply what I've done today by bringing a Supplementary Order Paper along which has been voted down by the Government. There was a compromise in here—there was a compromise in this Supplementary Order Paper—because we removed "premises" and we made it "public spaces and vehicles". This is exactly what the Police Association in their submission to the committee said: if you don't want to go with a full warrantless search power there's a compromise solution. This is the compromise solution. What have they done? They've voted it down.I hope that this FPO bill does do what we all want it to achieve and that is to give our police officers more powers to be able to remove illegal firearms and make our streets safer make their jobs safer and make the public safer. My fear is this—and I think probably sadly I'm going to be proven right. This bill is almost meaningless. It doesn't introduce any more powers. It doesn't give the police any more tools. It allows the court on their own discretion to apply an FPO order. We will be watching it because we have got a continued ongoing rise in violent crime in our country. We should be the safest country in the world. We're not and we'll be watching very closely to see whether or not this bill actually makes the impact that the Minister and the Government have told us that it will. Thank you Mr Speaker."