Passports Amendment Bill (No 2)

When we were last on the Passports Amendment Bill (No 2) the next split call went to the Labour Party. Does it wish to take the 5-minute call?

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call on the Passports Amendment Bill (No 2). When we were last in the House debating this bill, I recall my colleague Adrian Rurawhe referring to New Zealand passports as taonga, and I recall commenting on that at the time. New Zealand passports are taonga. The value of a New Zealand passport on the international stage cannot be diminished. We have a reputation in this country for being good global citizens and having a sense of responsibility to our fellow global citizens. Our passports are valued in that regard. Our New Zealand passports actually permit us to travel with relative ease around the globe, given that they are held in such high regard. New Zealand is considered a safe and secure country, so it is right and proper that we acknowledge the significance that we hold as New Zealanders carrying New Zealand passports.

When we were previously talking about this the member for Invercargill did make a comment about the huge inconvenience in having to renew your passport every 5 years. I think, as I recall it, the statement was something like—and I am paraphrasing—it being the “worst thing ever” to have to renew your passport every 5 years. I think that if you put that alongside—

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: First World problems.

—house price inflation in Auckland, the number of children living in poverty, and the fact that our health and safety laws in this country mean that you cannot be guaranteed to go to work and come home safe, I think, yes, having a 5-year passport and the inconvenience of having to renew it every 5 years is right up there with that! As my colleague says, that is a First World problem.

I do want to commend my colleagues the Hon Phil Goff and the Hon Trevor Mallard for their campaign to increase the expiry time of a passport to 10 years, so thank you very much for bringing that to the House’s attention. Thank you to the Government for actually taking on what is a very good idea, and my acknowledgments to the Government Administration Committee for the hard work that it has been doing on this piece of legislation. There has been a bit of public pressure to ensure that we can now have 10-year passports instead of 5-year passports.

I know that it is inconvenient, especially to certain people in Invercargill, to renew their passports every 5 years. The reason we actually had 5-year passports in the first place was in some part a result of what happened on 9/11, but technology, and the ability to track individuals, has advanced since those times. We now have amazing technology with our passports, which means that we no longer have the requirement to renew them so frequently. But that increase in technology also creates an issue, which I think was acknowledged and discussed in the select committee, in that technology does move on, and having a 10-year passport may mean that we are no longer using the latest technology to protect the holders of those passports.

I do want to make a comment on the bill not requiring the physical copy of your passport to be handed in, in order to have it cancelled. That could potentially pose some problems. If we cancel passports electronically but do not have the physical document, there may be an opportunity to use that document in a fraudulent way.

I do not think there is much more to say on this bill. We do support it and I commend it to the House. Thank you.

It is a pleasure to rise and take a short call on the Passports Amendment Bill (No 2). This is good sensible policy that is responding to an ever-changing world. As we have just heard from the previous speaker, Poto Williams, there were very good reasons to reduce the validity of passports from 10 to 5 years, but now that we are able to extend it back out to 10 years again, that makes a lot of sense. I think that for a significant number of New Zealanders this will be very much welcome news. Although some people may get to use their passport every year for a holiday, I know that for many New Zealanders, an overseas trip is something that perhaps might happen only every 5 or 6 or 7 years. For those people to perhaps have to go to the expense of getting a passport only to find it has expired the very next time they want to go overseas certainly would add a fair amount of cost to them for an overseas trip that is not going to occur very often. Technology has moved forward as, again, other speakers have referred to—we have got the SmartGate ability with our new passports, and that kind of thing.

For anyone who was considering perhaps extending the length of passports for people under the age of 16, there are clearly really good reasons why we would not do that. I experienced that a little bit myself earlier in the year when we went to go through the SmartGate with my two boys, and neither of them were actually able to go through the SmartGate because their faces had changed through their teenage years to such a significant level that, actually, the face recognition software did not recognise them. So, given how quickly young people can change, it is obviously a clear reason. Interestingly enough, though, it still accepted me, even though I had considerably less hair than the last time my passport photo had been taken. So it is obviously able to accommodate some things like that, but just not some of the changes that young people will have as they go through those early phases of life.

So I am absolutely pleased to be able to see, as I said, good sensible policy coming through, good practical responses, and an ability to provide good services for New Zealanders with regard to their passports. I commend this bill to the House.

It has increasingly become an habit in this Parliament to conclude on a Thursday afternoon with bills that we all agree on. I think it is a nice way for us to leave Parliament, but I look forward even more to next Tuesday afternoon when we will be debating perhaps more contentious subjects.

I am really pleased to be supporting this bill. It has been a long time in coming, but I am very pleased that the select committee that dealt with it, the Government Administration Committee, which is the committee I have the privilege of chairing, was able to do so in a pretty efficient manner. Not only are we reporting it back in good time but we are also recommending that the implementation date be moved forward by a month.

Before I get on to the specifics of the bill, I would like to just refer to why we changed the provisions in the passport legislation originally so that we would move from 10-year passports to 5-year passports. I guess it is particularly appropriate given that it is 14 years ago this week that New Zealand watched in horror as the planes crashed horrifically into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and other places. Tomorrow, or the next day, is the 14-year anniversary of those events. The world was pretty shaken up by those events. I remember people walking around this building, just unable to believe that what we were seeing on television was actually happening in a part of the world that many of us had visited—I had been in the World Trade Center on a number of occasions. I think the whole world was shocked by those events, with the exception of a very small number of people who, through their own fanatical beliefs, supported the sort of action that killed so many innocent people.

So as a result of those attacks and, I guess, increased awareness of terrorist threats, New Zealand, like many other countries, decided to increase its security profile, and, as a result of that, we moved from 10-year provisions in our passports to 5 years so that they would expire in half the time that they had previously. When this bill came to the committee—in fact, I will go back a further step. When a petition was presented to our select committee calling for this measure to be taken, one of the first questions our committee asked our advisers was “We moved to 5-year passports because of the increased security risk. Would we be diminishing the security of New Zealanders”—the people coming into New Zealand or leaving on New Zealand passports—“and increasing the threat if we changed to a 10-year passport?”. Of course, because that was the primary driver for changing it from 10 years to 5 years, we wanted to make sure that we were not recommending something that would increase our security risk. As the select committee, we were given very confident assurances that that was no longer the case and that changes in technology, changes in the exchange of information, etc., now mean that we could confidently move from 5 years back to 10 years on the understanding that we were not increasing the security risk. Of course, that was one of the major things that we wanted to tick off.

Can I acknowledge Kyle Lockwood, of flag fame, who actually was the person who instigated the petition to the committee in the first place. He came along to the committee and made a robust presentation. Our committee recommended that the Government considered this favourably. The Minister responsible, the Hon Peter Dunne, took that recommendation and translated it into the legislation that we now see coming back from the select committee with, again, I think, all parties in this Parliament supporting it, which is a very good thing.

The select committee made just one change, as I alluded to in my opening comments, and that was to recommend that instead of starting it in, I think, December or January—I cannot remember the original date, but we are recommending that this come into force in November.

Tragically, it was not in time for the member for Invercargill, Sarah Dowie, to have her passport renewed for 10 years! I just want to extend my sympathy and support to the member, who in the House during an earlier part of the debate said that one of the worst things that could happen to a person was to have to renew a passport after 5 years rather than after 10 years. She has had a pretty good life is all I can say if that is the worst thing that could happen to her. So we were not in time. The member had to renew her passport and, unfortunately, in 5 years’ time she is going to have to go through that trauma yet again because her passport will expire. But I hope that if she is in the House for the next 5 years, she will be exposed to a little more robustness and may understand that that is not the worst thing that can happen in her life.

The reason that we wanted to bring this forward as early as possible was so that more New Zealanders could have the convenience of renewing their passports prior to the summer travel, when a lot of people move out of New Zealand over the summer holidays. They would be able to renew their passports for a 10-year period. So I hope that our committee has made life a little more convenient for people, but I still do not share the member for Invercargill’s view that it is the worst thing that you can have happen.

The other point that we considered a lot as a select committee—and I just want to alert members of the House to this consideration, because I am sure a lot of them have heard this concern as well—is that there was some early speculation, when we were debating this at the select committee, that the fees for the passport would double. So if we went from 5 years to 10 years, the fees would, you know, match the increase in size. The Minister made a very prompt response that he would not be looking at that very favourably, and the officials gave the members of the select committee very confident assurances that passport issuing would be on a cost recovery basis—full stop. There would not be an opportunity for additional revenue gathering as we move from 5 to 10 years; they will just be doing simple cost recovery.

The select committee have included that in its report to the House and we will be keeping an eye on that, because we do not want people to have to pay a huge amount more. There will be a little additional cost because some of the infrastructure costs remain the same, and, obviously, if people renew their passports only after 10 years rather than 5 years, there will be fewer renewals and therefore a lower level of income. But it is not significant.

Can I just refer in passing to the Hon Peter Dunne’s Supplementary Order Paper 115. He has tabled it, everyone has seen it, and I know we should not be referring to the detail of it until the Committee stage, but I just want to say that I am really sorry that we missed putting “2” after the word “Schedule” in the bill as reported back. We will be supporting that typo correction when it comes to the Committee stage.

As my colleague Poto Williams did earlier, I want to acknowledge the hard work that both the Hon Phil Goff and the Hon Trevor Mallard have done in ensuring that this matter was raised at an appropriate time. When we knew that the security risk that had driven the change from 10 years to 5 years had now been eliminated by other factors, the Hon Phil Goff and the Hon Trevor Mallard both took this up within Labour and then more publicly, and they actually drove the petition that Kyle Lockwood brought to our select committee. So I want to acknowledge both of them.

I also want to acknowledge what was a very conscientious presentation from the officials to the select committee. These officials were probably the same group of people or were in the same part of the Department of Internal Affairs that gave the original advice to Ministers to move from 10 years to 5 years. So I said to them “Right, what’s changed, other than the view of the Minister?”, and they were very competent in—not justifying; I do not mean that in a derogatory way—explaining very well all the factors that could lead us to confidently proceed with this legislation. It is something that we took seriously, because no committee would want to recommend to the House that any New Zealander holding a passport and travelling around the world was at an increased risk as a result of legislation we passed, or that our country was exposed to an increased risk as a result of this change. I also want to say that the Clerk’s Office and the members of the committee have all worked really diligently on this bill.

I think it is a good bill. As I said right at the beginning, it is nice to finish on a Thursday with a bill that we all agree on. I look forward to it being passed and implemented in time for New Zealanders who need to renew their passports to be able to do so for a longer period of time.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, for the opportunity to speak on the second reading of the Passports Amendment Bill (No 2). Since the validity period of passports for adults was reduced, people have been very keen for it to be changed back, so this bill is in response to that need. This bill is going to extend the validity period of passports from 5 years to 10 years for citizens aged 16 and over. We know that the reason for reducing the validity period of passports was security, and it was not just us; other countries also took such measures, but since then some countries have gone back and increased the validity period of their passports. It is the right thing to do to increase the validity period of our passports from 5 years to 10 years.

A passport is a travel document, and people travel for various reasons. Those who travel for business reasons travel quite often, and it adds extra work, inconvenience, and expense to renew a passport every 5 years. Given that we are a very multicultural country—one in four people in Auckland is born overseas—people have extended families overseas and they visit them quite often. Sometimes there can be an emergency in the extended family requiring travel. The 5-year period is seen to be too short. I say this taking into consideration that, with technology, we can renew passports online—filling in forms, etc., can be done online—but still this 5-year period for passports is seen to be too short. So I support extending the validity period of passports from 5 to 10 years, and I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

Bill read a second time.