Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

This Government is committed to reducing firearms violence—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Excuse me, honourable Minister, would you please move?

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I move, That the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Justice Committee to consider the bill.

This Government is committed to reducing firearms violence and the impact it has on our communities. Following the tragic events of 15 March, this Government embarked on an ambitious firearm reform programme which will reshape how we regulate firearms in our country. This included taking 60 prohibited weapons off the streets, establishing a ministerial arms advisory group to assist these reforms, setting up a new purpose-built firearms unit within police to implement these reforms and, by June 2023, we will have a comprehensive register in place that will help to fill a 30-year deficit of information when it comes to firearms in our community.

This bill is another part of the Government’s comprehensive plan to tackle firearms violence. We need to respond to the harm that gun-related violence does to our society. We need to put aside political divisions and recognise that more can be done to remove guns from the hands of those who would use them to harm us.

As Minister of Police, it is my strong belief—and that of this Government—that it is a privilege not a right to own or use a gun in this country. Those that maintain a risk of recidivism back into serious crime need to be excluded from a key means of perpetrating their criminal violence, coercion, and control: their future access to firearms.

This bill presents to the House firearms prohibition orders as an additional tool to reduce gun crime. The bill provides an important new way for New Zealand to keep firearms out of the hands of criminals, and to keep our communities safe. This bill will ensure that a person subject to a firearms prohibition order will not be able to use, access, or be around guns. Unless a court order says otherwise, they also will not be able to live in or visit locations where there are firearms, or associate with someone who has them.

The bill will make it a criminal offence to breach a firearms prohibition order, and also a crime to knowingly supply firearms to those that have a firearms prohibition order placed on them. The bill enables a court to make a firearms prohibition order for any person 18 years of age or older who has been convicted of a serious criminal offence. Qualifying offences for a firearms prohibition order are serious firearms offences, serious violent offences, participation in organised criminal groups, or terrorism-related offences.

The bill has a number of safeguards built into it. In particular, the court must be satisfied that, on balance of probabilities, the making of a firearms prohibition order is reasonable, necessary, and appropriate to assist in managing the risk that that person sentenced poses to public safety. The qualifying convictions in the bill target those who present the highest risk of future serious violent crime or serious firearms offences. Those who are subject to a firearms prohibition order are required to meet a number of conditions: they would not be able to be around firearms, stay where firearms are stored or are available, join or visit shooting clubs or ranges, participate in any activity that involves firearms, visit places where firearms are made, repaired or modified.

However, these standard conditions may be modified by the court to take into account particular personal circumstances—this is an important safeguard. The bill enables a court to take into consideration a person’s rehabilitation and reintegration needs, and provides some flexibility to enable a subject person to reside or work in a place where guns may be stored, such as a farm. The court can provide for this flexibility through a tailored court order. In this way, the bill provides some important flexibility to support a subject person’s rehabilitation, reintegration, and ongoing relationships with and within the community. The bill provides a tiered approach to penalties to ensure that they are proportionate to the extent of the breach of the firearms prohibition order.

Clause 10 of the bill creates lower and upper order penalties. The lower order penalty which would be available for breaches of standard or special conditions would be punishable by a term of up to two years’ imprisonment. This is consistent with most breach offences. The higher order penalty would see someone who committed a breach of a broad condition imprisoned for up to five years—or up to seven years if that breach involved a prohibited firearm. This is consistent with similar unlawful possession offences. There are also penalties for knowingly supplying a firearm to a person subject to a firearms prohibition order. This offence would have similar tiered penalties: up to seven years’ imprisonment for selling or supplying a prohibited firearm; up to five years’ imprisonment for selling or supplying other arms parts.

This bill aims to reduce firearm offending and victimisation, and that will help reduce victimisation in our communities and, in particular, in our Māori communities. Māori have experienced a worrying growth in serious firearms offences perpetrated on their communities and whānau. The incidence of these crimes on these communities has almost doubled over the last 10 years. The serious firearms-related criminal harm that is their lived experience is now close to double that of the general population, too. Firearms prohibition orders will help us in addressing this. I know that matters raised and considered by Māori will be further explored as the bill is scrutinised by the Justice Committee, and I look forward to hearing this important feedback.

The bill before Parliament today represents an important development in extending the New Zealand arms control. It will further improve public safety, and build on earlier reforms introduced by this Government. It provides additional measures, and wider sanction and controls targeted at those that have serious criminal convictions and are hardened to crime. We want to prevent those people from accessing firearms which are a key means of perpetrating future violent and serious crime. If they breach such a ban, or others are complicit in such a breach by supplying firearms, they will face harsh penalties. This is an important step towards making our communities safer and addressing firearms violence. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to stand this evening and take a first reading call on this, the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill. I want to put on record, first of all, to the Minister that I don’t believe that there’s been any real focus or commitment or will on her part or on the part of the Government to address what’s been happening in this country in the last four years. It is a shameless stain on the performance, the support, and the introduction to this House of bills that would actually take serious and positive action against what we’ve seen in this country, and that is a massive growth in gang numbers. The 501s, we know that they have been a big contributor to that. We know that there is a more sinister element to what they do. They’ve got international networks, they’re well-funded, they’re violent, they’re willing to carry firearms, and they’re also willing to use them.

But we’ve had two members’ bills come into this House, two firearms prohibition orders bills come into this House, both sponsored by members of the Opposition—Chris Bishop, when he was police spokesperson, and then Simeon Brown, when he was police spokesperson. This Government voted both of them down, and they voted both of them down on the promise that they’d introduce their own bill. Call me cynical, but this bill was introduced on the last sitting day of last year. Their priorities are all wrong. The messages that they are sending to our front-line police staff is that this isn’t important enough.

I want to acknowledge Greg O’Connor, and I do want to acknowledge him as also a colleague in the police service. I was very proud to have had 14 years in our police service, what I consider to be the world’s most professional, the best police service, and police officers that serve every day without fear or favour. But I had several conversations with Greg over the last three or four years, and I was extremely disappointed to have them dismissed, just saying, “Oh, tub-thumping and trying to be tough and no, there’s no issues, and that’s the wrong approach.” And that type of response—and I was extremely disappointed that from a serving member with the experience that he’s got that he could not communicate to his own team, to his own caucus, to his own Cabinet that we had a growing issue in this country. And now, as we see and we heard the—

💬 Greg O’Connor: It started in 2013.

It started when, Greg? When did it start? I’ll tell you when it started. It started in 2017. It started in 2017 when we started to see a rise in violent crime. And not only did we start to see a rise in violent crime—[Interruption]

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! Order! Interjections should be rare and reasonable. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Not only do we start to see a rise in violent crime in 2017, but sitting right alongside that, we started to see a decrease in action being taken. So you had a rise in violent crime right through the country and, at the same time, arrests started to drop off and go down. And the reason for that is because the signals that were been sent from this Government to the police is that we don’t want you making arrests. We don’t want you dealing with this. We don’t want you bringing people into the criminal justice system. And what you’ve done is you’ve overseen and created an environment for gangs to feel emboldened, for gangs to be able to get out there and take over public spaces, for gangs to be able to get out and abuse members of the public and ignore laws that other law-abiding members of the public have to stick to, and with gangs that are now regularly carrying firearms and are willing to use them. Our police officers every night and every day have to go out now and they have to face and deal with gangs and gang bangers that are carrying firearms and are willing to use them. And it’s all happened under the watch of this Government.

Support your police, give them the tools that they need. This is good. We’re going to support it. We’ll support it through select committee. We have to make some changes because you haven’t got a warrantless search power in there. What do the front-line police officers say? I’ll tell you what they say, because I was talking to the police officers that worked on the Matthew Hunt case and the David Goldfinch case. Just to remind the House, Matthew was shot and killed in broad daylight on the streets of West Auckland by a gang member that had two military-style rifles. And David was shot and was able to get himself and remove himself out of that situation. He showed resilience and bravery to actually extract himself. He’s a father of two young kids, and thank goodness he’s still around. But the reality of it is, Mr O’Connor, that they needed to have these types of orders. They needed to have this sort of ability two, three years ago in 2018 or 2019, not 2022. It’s late. Let’s get it through as quickly as we can. We see you keep bringing bills into this House and trying to pass them as quickly as you can. Let’s get this one. This one here should be passed as quickly as we can. We should be giving them the tools that they need now. But what you’ve failed to do—and coming back to my original point, is that I was speaking to some of the officers that worked on the Matthew Hunt and the David Goldfinch case, and they did an outstanding job. We saw a conviction and we saw a very good sentencing, but I talked about this, and do you know what they said? They said without a warrantless search capability, this is meaningless. It’s toothless—it’s toothless.

The Police Association is saying the same thing. I’ve spoken to Chris Cahill—very clear about it. They know and they understand. They’re speaking to the front-line police officers every day. As a past president of the Police Association, you should be listening to that, Mr O’Connor, and I expect when you stand to take your call that you will acknowledge that. If you’re serious on the Government side of the House, when we go into select committee, I’d expect us to work together in a bipartisan way to make sure that we strengthen this bill and that we give our front-line police officers that go out there every night, every day and deal with these gangs that are armed up, that are well armed, better armed than they are, willing to use them, that we actually give them legislation that has some teeth to it and that they can actually use to start making some inroads into what has now become a massive problem and is going to be extremely difficult to deal with in the future.

I don’t have any confidence at all in the police Minister currently, Poto Williams—zero. I have no confidence at all in the Labour Cabinet. I’d like to have some confidence in the broader caucus and the member sitting across from me, because he has got a wealth of experience. But right now I’ve got zero because they’ve created an environment where police don’t feel supported. They don’t feel like this Government’s got their back. There are massive issues around leadership. And they want to protect their community; that’s why they joined the police.

I don’t like harking too far back. Like I said, I had a policing career and I loved it and I’m very proud of the police service. Recently, I’ve been to a couple of graduations at the Police Dog Training Centre, one for Grant Diver, a very close friend of mine who I worked with on the armed offenders squad (AOS) for a long time and who was shot in the line of duty. He’ll never fully recover. He’ll never fully come right. Or Bruce Lamb, I attended his son’s graduation. He’s following his father’s footsteps. He was shot in Christchurch.

These things were very rare, they didn’t really happen too much, in my time. In my time, we were more dealing with sharpened knives and things like that. Occasionally, yes, there’d be firearms that we’d have to deal with. But it was rare. Our police officers today are working and operating in a very different environment. They’re operating in an environment where we’ve seen a huge proliferation of gangs. In my own electorate, where we’ve been gang-free and where my police area commander worked very hard with his staff to try and keep the gangs out, we now have the Hell’s Angels who have bought commercial property in Silverdale and set up a pad. We’ve now got the Comanchero Motorcycle Club that have moved in. They’re now actively recruiting within my community, and I’m working very closely with my area commander and with our other elected officials, the local board and the councillors, to try and come up with a local plan to push these guys out and purge our community—get rid of them.

But it’s time for this House to get serious. My expectation with this Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill is that we genuinely work together on the Justice Committee with the chair—who is a very good chair, and I acknowledge her; she’s in the House. I served with her husband—and I acknowledge him, Geoff Gwyn; we did our AOS qualifying course together—and he has a clear understanding of the challenges that are faced by front-line police officers.

But I would ask that when we start to consider this bill that the first thing that we do is we bring a warrantless search power and we give that to our front-line police officers because without it, this bill is meaningless. There are other things on the fringes that we’ll discuss and we’ll try to make it stronger, but I’m putting a line in the sand on this, which is that that is something that we feel very strongly is required inside this bill to make sure that our front-line police officers can actually use a piece of legislation that is effective and will make them safer and will make the public safer. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. New Zealanders deserve to feel safe in their homes and safe in their communities. That is why this Government is introducing firearms prohibition orders, an additional tool in the tool kit to reduce gun crime and also to reduce organised crime in New Zealand.

This bill enables a court to make a firearms prohibition order—or an FPO—for any person who’s aged over 18 years who has been convicted of a serious criminal offence. Qualifying offences for an FPO are a serious firearms order or a serious violent offence. Those people who are subject to an FPO are required to meet a number of conditions. It means they would not be able to be around firearms, stay where firearms are stored or be available, join or visit a shooting range, participate in any activity that involves firearms, and also visit places where firearms are made, repaired, or modified.

It’s important to note that this bill enables flexibility for the court to take into consideration a person’s rehabilitation and reintegration needs. It’s important to have that flexibility to enable a subject person to reside or work in a place where guns may be stored, such as a farm place. The court can provide for this flexibility through a tailored court order.

The bill also provides a tiered approach to offenders. The lower order penalty, which would be available for breaches of a standard special condition, would be punishable by a term of up to two years in prison. The higher order penalty would see someone who has committed a breach of the broad condition imprisoned for up to five years, or up to even seven years if that breach involved a prohibited firearm. This is consistent with similar unlawful possession offences. There are also penalties for knowingly supplying a firearm to a person with a firearms prohibition order. This is particularly important in the organised criminal space. This bill aims to reduce firearm offending and victimisation that will help reduce crime in New Zealand and will help make an impact in that space.

Introducing FPOs sits alongside a record number of police in the front line, with specific focus on gangs and organised crime. Thanks to this Government’s investment in police, we have the largest police workforce ever. Police are out there every day outside this building keeping our communities safe. New Zealand will have over 700—700—officers specifically focused on organised crime; far more than when that member opposite, the Hon Mark Mitchell, was a police officer.

Over the last year, Operation Tauwhiro targeted the disruption and prevention of firearms-related violence by criminal gangs and organised criminal groups. Since it was launched, 1,369 firearms and 52.87 kilograms of methamphetamine have been seized, with 1,161 having been arrested in relation to firearm offences.

This Government is hitting gangs where it hurts: in their pockets. Already, this Government has seized $500 million in cash and assets from gangs and criminals in four years alone. Translated, that’s an equivalent to $1.6 billion from the illicit economy; an economy that profits from guns, drugs, criminal offending, and exploiting our communities.

But we cannot simply arrest our way out of a problem. Firearms prohibition orders and law enforcement alone will not resolve such a complex issue. We can’t be tough on crime without addressing the underlying causes of crime. We must continue our efforts to break the cycle of gang violence in order to reduce the harm in our communities—in particular, Māori communities, that are disproportionately affected each day.

Budget 2021 provided $70 million for the expansion of Te Pae Oranga or iwi justice panels. Te Pae Oranga panels don’t just look at what happened when someone offended; they also look at the underlying reasons why someone offended, what’s going on in peoples’ lives, and give participants and victims a chance to have their say. They’re working. Already they’ve been shown to reduce the harm from reoffending by 22 percent. When we reduce reoffending, we reduce victimisation.

In comparison to this, what have the National Party achieved? They were talking about firearms prohibition orders in 2008, back when Simeon Brown was still in church kindy. When they were in Government they were asleep at the wheel and in Opposition they’re asleep in the backseat with a cashmere blanket pulled down overhead listening to a bit of Mike Hosking, or Michael Bublé if you’re Paul Goldsmith—true story.

This bill extends arms control in New Zealand. It will provide additional measures, wider sanctions, and controls targeted at those who have serious criminal convictions and who are hardened to crime. We want to prevent those people from accessing firearms, with the key means for perpetrating future violent—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! With apologies to the member, I’ve warned the House once in this debate already: interjections will be rare and they will be reasonable. A barrage of shouting is not acceptable.

New Zealanders deserve to feel safe in their homes and their communities. This bill is just one tool of many delivered by this Government to make our communities safer. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and thank you for the opportunity to speak on the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill. I think there’s a very important question which the Government actually needs to give an answer to. My colleague Andrew Bayly was asking it before, and members opposite have failed to actually answer it, and it is this question: if this piece of legislation is so important, as the Government is stating it is—and this side of the House agrees it is—why have you not supported bringing this legislation to this House sooner?

The Government was recommended by the police in 2017 in the briefing to the incoming Minister that the police needed firearms prohibition orders (FPOs) to help arrest the growth of gangs and the growth of firearms violence in our communities. This Government has sat on its hands under Stuart Nash, and then under Poto Williams. This Government has sat on its hands and ignored the real issues facing our community when it comes to guns and gangs. The fact is that they have peddled their soft-on-crime philosophy through this country, and New Zealanders are the ones paying the consequences of those decisions. This bill is something which, unfortunately, has come far too late for many New Zealanders. We’ve seen the stories in the news. Day after day, there are shootings—whether it’s at shopping centres, at bars in the late night, or wherever it is—and even innocent families are having their houses shot because the gang forgot they got the wrong address. That’s the kind of violence too many New Zealanders are actually being perpetrated by far too often.

If the Minister spent a bit more time actually on the front line, talking to front-line police officers and asking them how they feel they are going with their job, they would be telling this Government that they feel like they’re losing the battle when it comes to crime at the moment in New Zealand. They’d tell her that they feel like things are going backwards far too quickly. They might talk about how many extra police they’ve recruited—well, they can talk about it; they’ve failed on the 1,800 police they promised. They said 1,800 by 2020; they’ve got only halfway there. That’s a failure. They can talk about all the different things that they’ve tried to do, but the reality is that, if you talk to police on the front line, they say New Zealand’s law and order is going backwards under this Government, and they feel like they’re losing. That’s not how I want our front-line police officers to feel. I want them to feel them to feel confident, I want them to feel equipped, and I want them to feel like they’ve got the tools they need to be able to enforce the law rather than sit by and watch while others perpetrate violence.

I ask members on the other side to actually answer this question: National has had two pieces of legislation come before Parliament—there was Chris Bishop’s and there was my bill, which came to Parliament to address this issue. Now, my bill went to the Justice Committee, and the members on the other side could have worked with the National Party to actually make sure that bill had what it needed to be good law and to make sure that it would be in the best interests of New Zealand. The committee did its best. We made that law as good as we could, and the Government voted it down. They could have worked with the National Party to actually make it happen. In fact, while it was going through select committee, the Government just announced they were going to bring their own legislation through—while it was going through select committee. That is something which just shows that they’re acting in bad faith on an issue where they should be working with the Opposition to make sure that the police have the tools they need and that New Zealanders can be kept safe.

We heard the previous member say, “New Zealanders deserve to feel safe in their homes and in their communities.” We fundamentally agree with that statement, but why did you sit on your hands for four years? Now, how long is it going to take for this to actually go into law? They could have worked with us and had that law in place by the end of last year. Now, this has to go through a whole other select committee process. Submitters have to put their submissions back in again. They have to scrutinise a new piece of legislation. Officials have to be involved—when that process could have been sorted and actually made sure the law was in place by now to help keep our communities safe.

So the National Party will be supporting this bill because we want to make sure New Zealanders are kept safe and we want to make sure our police have the tools that they need, but there are a couple of areas in this piece of legislation which, from my perspective, do raise some serious concerns. The first one is around the fact that there is a lack of search powers in this piece of legislation, and it was very clear in the submissions which came through—particularly from the Police Association—where they made it abundantly clear that, if you bring in place firearms prohibition orders legislation without giving the police new search powers, effectively the powers will be toothless. So I can imagine the Police Association—they may have already written their submission on this bill, and they’ll be saying that point to the select committee again. The question I’ve got for the Government is: are they actually going to listen to our front-line police officers? Because, otherwise, you’re going to pass this piece of legislation, and it’s not actually going to give them the tools to actually go in there and fix the problem which actually needs to be addressed.

The other issue which is in the bill, which is very different from the bill that I brought to Parliament last year, is the fact that this bill now requires someone to go and commit an offence prior to the courts being able to put in place a firearms prohibition order. Now, I don’t know about other members on the other side of the House, but I would’ve thought the police should be given the ability to put these in place against people who have already committed violent offences, so that they have less access to firearms, so we can protect the public. But, in this bill, it’s saying, “No, no, no. We want these people—before we’re going to put in place the FPO—to actually go out and commit another serious offence and create more victims of crime.” So instead of actually trying to be preventative and trying to prevent crime, we are actually saying, “Well, if you commit a serious violent crime, we’ll give you an FPO. But until you’ve done it, well, fair game!” I mean, that’s the reality. So I just think that’s something which, actually, New Zealanders will be very concerned about it, and I think people are going to be submitting on that point because, actually, this bill should be preventative.

I know that members may not like the idea of the police—because the bill I brought allowed the Police Commissioner to be able to put in place, with some very strict tests as to whether those FPOs could be put in place. They might not have liked that, but it was about looking forward and trying to prevent harm, whereas this bill is saying, “Actually, well, if these people go and commit a very serious violent offence and cause more victims of crime, the courts may impose an FPO at that point.” Well it’s too late then, because more harm has been done.

So the National Party will be supporting this bill, and I know that my colleague Mark Mitchell will be working very hard on that committee to make sure that we improve this piece of legislation so that it is the best it can be to keep New Zealanders safe. We just hope that the Government, actually, also acts in good faith and works with the National Party so that we can have an enduring piece of legislation which actually works for New Zealanders and supports our police for years to come and keeps New Zealanders safe. Thank you.

Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break, and the House will resume at 7 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Kia ora. Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. Thank you, Madam Speaker, and thank you for the opportunity to take what will be a “briefish” call on the first reading of the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill.

Just today, actually, I saw a headline that I found quite alarming, and it was about knowingly supplying a firearm to gang members. It was timely, because we’re talking about this bill—we’re debating this bill—in the House tonight, and I will come back to that as one of the key points of this legislation. It has really concerned me that I feel like I’m seeing an increasing number of reports in my communities in Northland—shared by Northland police, for example—of more gun violence and more gun seizures. There was a report just yesterday in Kaitāia, and five days ago there was another report in the paper. There were reports in December; and there were reports in November. I think that this piece of legislation is timely, and I am speaking in full support of it.

The Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill is another step that we are taking to ensure that our communities are safer. It’s thanks to this Government’s record investment in police that we have the largest police workforce ever. Our police are out there on the streets every day, keeping our communities safe. I want to talk about Operation Tauwhiro, which has targeted the disruption and prevention of firearms-related violence by criminal gangs and organised criminal groups. Since it was launched, 1,369 firearms and 52.87 kilograms of methamphetamine have been seized, and 1,161 people have been arrested in relation to firearm offences. We have a huge issue in Aotearoa New Zealand, and I hope that this piece of legislation is going to be another step that we can take to protect our communities.

This bill will make it illegal for high-risk people to own firearms by introducing firearms prohibition orders (FPOs). That will strengthen action taken already to combat the influence of gangs and organised crime to help keep New Zealanders and their families safe. FPOs will protect the public from harm by prohibiting high-risk people from accessing, being around, or using firearms, and breaching the conditions of firearms prohibition orders will be a criminal offence.

I did just want to refer to the Minister’s opening speech, which I was here for at the beginning of the debate. I’m just going to pull it up here. One of the points that she made, which I was particularly interested in—and, as I am a member of the Justice Committee, I hope that, through submissions, we will be able to explore this further. She made the comment that this bill aims to reduce firearm offending and victimisation and that it will help reduce victimisation of Māori and the impact of firearms-related violence on Māori communities. She then went on to say that Māori have experienced a worrying growth in serious firearm offences perpetrated on their communities and whānau. The incidence of these crimes on these communities has almost doubled over the last 10 years. The serious firearms-related criminal harm that is their lived experience is now close to double that of the general population too. As a Māori member on the Justice Committee, I hope we receive submissions in relation to this, so that we can explore that further during that process, because that is, as I referred to at the opening of my speech, what I am sensing and noticing within our communities and why I am supporting this legislation.

I also want to go back to what I mentioned in the beginning of my speech: how in this legislation it is actually proposed that if you knowingly supply somebody with one of these orders with a firearm, that will be captured by this legislation and that will be an offence. In the news today: “[a] gun licence holder “gladly” supplied firearms to [a] gang member”. The judge accepted the Crown’s submission that “it is hard to imagine more serious offending than what you did. You supplied a person who you knew was a gang member with lethal weapons, and you did so in a covert and underhanded way … voluntarily, willingly, and gladly.” Willingness to supply weapons to people who are prohibited is a serious issue, and I am glad that the legislation that we are introducing tonight is proposing that that be an offence under this legislation as well. With that, I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Before I begin, I was just reflecting on the fact that as an immunocompromised Auckland member of the House, it’s been almost six months since I was here in person, speaking. So it’s good to see everyone—although distanced—and, you know, just keeping that locked-down city in mind, because we did do some hard yards.

But to begin, to come back to the topic of this particular bill, which is more effective firearm regulation and the safety of our communities against gun violence, I do want us to hold in our minds and hearts the tragedy that led to this work being brought before this House and being prioritised for our nation, which was the terror attack on the mosques on 15 March in 2019. So it’s almost three years ago—although time seems to have lost meaning—since the fact that 51 people lost their lives as a result of gun violence. Of course, that means that countless lives were affected and changed for ever. Hundreds were impacted directly. Some of those victims will live with the impact of their very real physical injuries for their whole lifetime, and others will live with the very real impact of the mental health scars as a result of that hate crime.

It was, of course, the latest and probably the first act of hate that led to such an extent of harm in living memory in our nation, and what came after that was a reaction by the last Government—which the Green Party is proudly a part of—that was swift. It should never have come to a tragedy like that, with the extent of the loss of life, for this House of Representatives or successive Governments to react and look at our very lax gun laws. But the first Act immediately after that was a call—a massive call—by members of the public who had rallied around the victims of March 15 and had actually called for action, and the first Act of these different tranches of gun law reform was to ban all military-style semi-automatics. That came quickly, but it was very clear that other regulations like this one have to follow and they have to come with a bit more detailed thought.

Regulating gun violence falls within the kaupapa of the Green Party, as one of our charter values is non-violence. So we do support evidence-based regulation of all firearms, and in this case, we were involved. I, as both police and justice spokesperson, was involved in the consultations that began the work of this particular bill with the previous Minister of Police, the Hon Stuart Nash, and I commend the current Minister for continuing that work and bringing it before the House. Because this is a bill that criminalises the association of those who have an order against them with others who hold guns, one of our core concerns is alleviated in this current form of the bill, which was that it wasn’t just association with those who might hold gun licences but that, in fact, they were living in a house with a firearm, for example. So it’s a higher risk, and one that takes the discretion out and the speculation out and leads us away in our lawmaking from prejudice-based application of the law.

So this bill, effectively, creates two criminal offences, but it also creates the power of a judge to issue in sentencing a 10-year long firearms prohibition order, which then bans association with people who have firearms not in a secure storage from residing, if you have an order against you, at premises in which firearms are stored and joining shooting clubs and attending activities involving firearms. That seems like a good balance for us, but I do want to address the fact that the two criminal offences that are created here carry sentences of five years’ or seven years’ maximum penalties.

We do always have a concern that our criminal justice policy does follow an evidence-based core, and we do want to hold that, in fact, although this bill does speak of things like rehabilitation and successful reintegration being taken into account when orders are considered, currently in New Zealand our prisons don’t, in fact, have standardised rehabilitation programmes. People don’t actually have access to what we might say will be successful reintegration back into the community, and our prison system, according to the Prime Minister’s chief scientist last term, has failed.

So prison isn’t a solution for keeping our communities safe, and we do want to see more investment by this Government in what does work—standardised rehabilitation programmes, drug and alcohol treatment, mental health treatment—and we do want to hold also that while we live in a country where our justice system very clearly has been proven over and over again to target Māori. Whether it’s for search and seizure, whether it’s for arrest, whether it’s conviction and, when convicted, sentences of imprisonment, we still have not fully taken account of what we know actually keeps communities safe. We know that the safest communities are not those that are very highly policed or very highly criminalised. The safest communities are those with access to secure, warm, dry, accessible housing, inclusive education, meaningful work, and, when people are not in work, with a social safety net that provides them the opportunity not just to barely survive but to thrive.

So we do want the Government to go ahead and regulate guns effectively, because gun violence is a blight on our society. But we hope that the pain and hurt of victims of gun violence is not used as a means to dog-whistle and to lean in more and more to policies that only make politicians look tough on crime without, in fact, keeping our communities safe. So that is the Green vision, but we do commend this bill to the House.

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s nice to see Golriz Ghahraman return to the House after a lengthy absence. Welcome back—and there she goes. Madam Speaker, if you’ll forgive me, a very brief—she’s back. That’s great.

💬 Golriz Ghahraman: Point of order. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m not sure if members are allowed to actually refer to whether or not other members are present in the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Yes, it was on the margins. I heard and I listened, the member actually hadn’t gone anywhere. I think it was more in the nature of—well, I’m assuming—a throwaway aside. So thank you for bringing that to my attention.

Thank you. You try to be gracious to the Green Party and that’s what you get back. Out of interest for the member, the Speaker’s rulings are not as specific as she might think; there are actually reasonable exceptions to that ruling and that would normally have been one. But, in any case, there you go, be gracious to the Greens, that’s what you get.

Madam Speaker, if you’ll forgive me one more indulgence before addressing this Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill. I’ve also just spoken to a journalist who has been prohibited by the Speaker from going outside to speak to protesters. I feel the need to put that on the record that, first of all, that’s an unacceptable breach of press freedom for the Speaker to, effectively, say the only way that journalists can report on events is from on high, on a balcony looking down. But, more importantly, it’s a tremendous own goal that only confirms some of the worst and wildest suspicions of those protesters. I think that needs to be recorded—that if that’s true, the Speaker I don’t think has acted well in those circumstances.

To turn to the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill, the ACT Party is very pleased to be supporting this piece of legislation. It represents a quantum shift in the quality of legislation that this Government and its predecessor bring to the House in terms of firearm control. Let me count the ways—there’s three things I really like about this piece of legislation. First and foremost, it is actually being done with due process, made the way that laws should be made. I’ve said in this House many times that if firearm laws are worth doing, then they are worth doing right. This piece of legislation has had prior consultation before being introduced, it’s been debated in the House now, it’s going to be referred to the Justice Committee—I would hope and assume from the indications we’ve had so far—for a full six-month consultation of the public and examination so that people can have their say and MPs can do their job on the Justice Committee to properly examine the bill.

That is a far cry from what we experienced in 2019, when this Parliament—with the exception of one member in Opposition, I might add—rushed through hasty knee-jerk and, ultimately, highly ineffective legislation banning select types of firearms for political theatre over public safety. So I have to congratulate the Government for actually putting some proper due process back into the way it brings firearms legislation to this House, and I look forward to people being able to submit to the Justice Committee and the Justice Committee being able to listen and, hopefully, make sensible amendments if needed, to add to the consultation that has already been undertaken. So that is a very big tick.

The second thing I like about this bill, and we like in ACT, is that this particular piece of legislation is focused not on the types of firearms, but on the types of people that have them. There are, basically, two approaches to firearm legislation. One of them we have tried over several decades, of trying to define exactly what sort of firearms people should be able to have. Now, within reason, that is actually not a bad thing. For example, people have never had, outside of collectors’ items, automatic firearms in this country. People haven’t had what are called assault rifles outside of collectors in this country.

To try and define exactly what is, for example, a “military-style semi-automatic weapon” has turned into a ludicrous array of court cases and arguments that ultimately turn on how many screws attach the stock of the firearm to the rest of the piece. That is an absolute folly to try and micro-regulate the types of firearms instead of the types of people. We saw it in the House just today when our hapless police Minister stood up and said 60,000 military-style semi-automatic firearms had been confiscated. She was asked whether she was sure about that and she stood up and she fumbled and mumbled and said, “Oh, I think I’ve been advised, but I don’t know. I’ll probably have to come back and correct it.” Even our police Minister struggles to know what types of firearms she’s talking about.

So having a piece of legislation that focuses on the types of people that have them is the second big improvement in the Government’s approach to firearms legislation behind actually having proper due process and consultation like this Parliament was set up to do. The important thing here is that we’re focusing on the criminals with firearms. You see, when we had former Mike Hosking panellist Stuart Nash in charge of firearm legislation, he was entirely focused on trying to make sure that the licensed, law-abiding, fit and proper firearm owners were criminals, and the only effect was that the criminals became firearm owners. He banned 60,000 firearms—we can’t ask the current Minister of Police what type they were because she doesn’t know—and yet there were actually 240,000. Let me get that right—he banned 240,000; he collected 60,000. Well, the gangs know where the other 180,000 went. For the first time in our country’s history, the majority of serving police officers want to carry firearms themselves because there are so many of them out in the streets and New Zealanders hear about their misuse each and every day.

So this piece of legislation that says, “If you are convicted of a select number of offences, the court can issue a firearms prohibition order and you may not have a firearm, be near a firearm, be on a premise such as a gun shop or licenced firearm owner’s home where firearms are not locked up.” It keeps the bad people away from firearms instead of the shameful, knee-jerk, ineffective legacy of trying to stop people who have shown themselves to be fit and proper from lawfully using firearms. So that is the second big improvement in this piece of legislation.

The final thing that I really like about this piece of legislation is that it’s not going to affect people the way it might have affected those who were simply in the way or in an unfortunate circumstance. Prior pieces of legislation introduced by other parties to this House would have made criminals of people who were inadvertently in the way of firearms, and that was wrong, it would have been difficult to enforce, and laws that don’t work are ultimately unsustainable.

If we want to prevent the kinds of terrible atrocities that sparked off the wave of firearm legislation that has occurred over the last two years, then we need to focus on making sure that the wrong people, the people who have shown their character to be unfit to have firearms, don’t have them. We also need to accept that firearms are present in New Zealand; that is a physical reality that can’t easily be changed by our laws. If we make it so difficult and lose the trust of the good, law-abiding people who have been deemed fit and proper, then we’re going to end up in a much worse space than we have been. That’s what the last two years have shown since Stuart Nash cavalierly banned a whole lot of firearms and ended up with more of them on the streets with the gangs, leading to the police wanting to be armed themselves because it’s got so bad. Instead, if we start targeting the people who shouldn’t have firearms, then there is some hope of good lawmaking, laws that are respected, and safer streets for New Zealanders.

I want to commend, again, this bill to the House, I want to thank the Government for coming around to a more sensible way of making firearm legislation, and I want to give my best wishes to the Justice Committee and all those who submit to it for a civilised, constructive exchange, which improves this bill further. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

People deserve to feel safe in their homes, and working communities, like Manurewa, bear the brunt of gun violence. That’s why I’m proud to speak to the first reading of this bill, introduced by a Government that is giving police the tools they need to crack down on serious crime and get guns off our streets, while, at the same, underlying causes of crime are being addressed.

When the Opposition say that this Government has not done enough to address gun violence, that ignores the work of police to implement the sweeping reforms that brought stricter gun controls at a pace envied by the rest of the world, with legislatures paralysed by inaction as gun crime grows globally. This is a Government that determined that the ability to own and operate a firearm is a privilege. That took thousands of semi-automatic, military-style guns off the streets. That made changes to the licensing regime to ensure that strict controls are in place to make sure that guns don’t fall into the wrong hands. That has resourced police with a highly specialised organised crime unit, and has set the ground work for a new, purpose-built firearms unit within the police to implement the reforms.

Firearms prohibition orders (FPOs) go that extra step again. They stop someone being able to be in the presence of firearms that are not owned by them. It also extends police powers needed to enforce that. How big that next step is seems to be at the heart of this disagreement. I’ve heard from the Opposition tonight that a disagreement arising from some disappointment that the Government did not support a National member’s bill that would have only applied to gang members.

But we are, in this House, mostly in agreement because we see a problem that needs fixing, so I will talk a little about the consensus here. It comes down to those rights which we are balancing, and as a fundamental part of our role as Parliamentarians, wherever we make changes to police powers, we think carefully about the rights involved, and the balancing of those rights. Firearms prohibition orders see the rights of a very small number, with a history of violent offending, restricted from being able to associate with people who own guns, then balanced alongside the rights of ordinary New Zealanders to feel safe at their local shops and their schools, and to be free from the threat of gun violence.

Government consultation began on this in 2019, because it’s vitally important that those communities who are most affected by this have their say on where to draw that line. That followed the recommendations of the Law and Order Committee in 2017 from its inquiry into the illegal possession of firearms, which recommended that FPOs be implemented. The committee noted that several submitters had raised the introduction of FPOs, pointing to three Australian states that had implemented them at the time, and I thank that committee for their consensus building in this important area.

These ideas have support from around the House, but it’s no surprise that a National bill proposed some of the changes in this legislation. However, that extensive public consultation for this legislation was not done for a member’s bill. The Government has also been able to deliver this proposal, which strikes a balancing of rights far better, and takes into account community voice, and doesn’t simply focus on gangs.

So what are those disagreements? The first is that we could have done this quicker, had we rewritten that member’s bill. I was a member of the Justice Committee which considered that member’s bill very closely. We made a number of changes, especially around things like penalties. But, in the end, it was premised on a different sort of restriction on who could not associate with people who did legitimately own guns. That National Party member’s bill before the House last year was, in my view, fundamentally flawed, and it’s not the way to implement a successful FPO regime. Their bill, as introduced by Brett Hudson in the previous Parliament, was a mess, and that remained the case despite the Justice Committee’s work. It would only cover gang members with convictions, leaving gaps about who would be covered, and it didn’t extend to people convicted of terrorism offences.

By contrast, this bill will include serious firearms offences, serious violent offences, and offensive participation in organised criminal groups, and terrorism related offences. It is not a smaller net, it is not a wider net; it is a more focused net, it is a more effective net that is captured here, and, therefore, a better balancing of the rights of the small number of people who cannot associate with others who freedoms are, in some way, impinged upon.

The second disagreement is that those offences are out of step, and I look forward to this committee really digging into the detail of the two-tiered system of offences, of penalties created by this bill, which, I think, strike a good balance between punishment and deterrence, in this instance.

That’s why I’m proud to stand with this side of the House, which has made a difference in gun crime, which is protecting people, and which is making our communities safer.

Thank you. Following on from a previous Government speaker, talking in this debate on firearms protection orders, who has just said that this Government has made a difference in gun crime, and that is true—they have made a difference—it’s increased by 50 percent in Auckland over the past 18 months. And it is part of the wider decline in general law and order and public safety in this country over the past couple of years under this Government’s watch. That’s a tragedy for many New Zealanders and their families and their communities, because people no longer feel as safe in their communities when they see a rapid increase in gang membership—increased by 50 percent—when they see a near doubling of serious violent crime since this Government took office, and that increase in gun crime. So that’s why there is so much interest in this and so much concern about law and order generally. So this Government has made a difference, but sadly it is not the difference that we want to see—they’ve made things substantially worse.

So this legislation, the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill, is introducing firearm protection orders that can be made against somebody who has been convicted of a serious offence under the Arms Act or the Crimes Act or various other pieces of legislation to ensure that they do not have access, lawfully, to weapons. People might say, “Well, why on earth is this not the case already?” And that is the issue. The problem that we’re trying to deal with is the fact that the Arms Act and its regulations are insufficient to prevent access to firearms for these sorts of high-risk individuals, because, while they might not be a fit and proper person to get a firearms licence, they can still access firearms and associate with people who access firearms or reside at or live in locations where firearms are held, and that’s what we’re seeking to deal with.

The reality is that this Government has been very reluctant to introduce this piece of legislation—the third already that National members have tried to get variations of this legislation through this House, and have been voted down by the Labour Party in the past. Changes could have been made but they weren’t. Despite many promises, it’s at the very end of the fourth year of this Government that this piece of legislation has been introduced. We will support it because it is a step in the right direction and we’re finally making some progress, although we do continue to have concerns around the limitations of what has been introduced. The need for better warrantless search powers for police to actually get the weapons and find the weapons I think is a missing piece, and we will be now looking to include that during the select committee process, and I do hope the Government has an open mind on that issue.

We also heard from the previous speaker, Arena Williams, and a number of other speakers around it being important to also focus on the causes of crime, and I couldn’t agree more than that. This piece of legislation, which hopefully will make it harder for some of our most hardened criminals in this country to get access to firearms and will give the police more powers to deal with those people, it will make a small difference. It’s not going to solve all the problems. It’s certainly not going to stop some of the most dangerous criminals in this country getting hold of firearms, and doing real damage, and killing people, and maiming people, and making lives miserable across this country. They will still carry on doing that. Hopefully more of them will be caught and punished for doing it, but it’s not going to solve all the problems on its own.

What we do need to do in conjunction with passing legislation such as this is to make progress on dealing with the deep-rooted causes of crime, and to enforce the law effectively today. And that’s why, again, if we were to criticise this Government on law and order, we could point to the absolute lack of progress on dealing with some of those long-term, deep-seated causes of crime, such as: there’s no better crime prevention strategy than ensuring that every child has a decent education. Yet, after four years, only 60 percent of kids are regularly attending school—making no progress on that. Or housing: 4,000 kids being raised in motels, alongside gangs and drug dealers and in a totally inappropriate place to be raised as a child, which is a direct result of a complete failure of housing policy. So when you talk about crime and crime prevention policy, and four years later, into the fifth year of the Government, we still have Ministers—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s really naive to think that this Government is soft on crime, is soft on gangs. This Government takes New Zealanders’ safety seriously, and while we appreciate the support from the members from the other side of the House, I’d like to push back on some of the assertions that we are soft on crime. And I think they can’t get over the fact that the bill that they came up with last year was flawed, as my colleague Arena Williams alluded to. It was only going to target certain people, and leaving criminals basically roaming around, doing whatever they want.

Can I start with a quote from the Hon Poto Williams that “Owning a firearm in New Zealand is a privilege not a right.” I have no doubt this bill help to accelerate efforts under way to combat firearms and the crimes that are related to them. This bill aligns with the Government’s priority to keep New Zealanders safe and it delivers a key part of the Government’s commitment to reduce firearms violence to date. The Government has taken 60,000 military-style weapons off the streets, established the ministerial arms advisory group to assist in these reforms, and by June 2023 we will have a comprehensive register in place that will help fill a 30-year deficit of information when it comes to firearms in our community, and the list goes on.

This bill will enable the courts to make a firearms prohibition order (FPO) for any person over 18 years of age who has been convicted of a serious criminal offence, and the people who are subject to a FPO would not be able to be around firearms, stay where firearms are available, join or visit shooting clubs or ranges, or participate in any activity that involves firearms. These are significant restrictions, and I have no doubt that they will help reduce the crimes significantly. The impact of firearms offences to some communities is quite obvious, especially in our Māori whānau. It’s almost doubled in the last 10 years, and it’s about time that something is done about it.

Tonight, many of the victims of firearm offences or firearm crimes, crimes related to firearms, will be watching this debate with interest. This will include families of the 51 shuhada killed in the Christchurch mosque in 2019 and those who were left with injuries. By doing this tonight, we are sending them reassurance, telling them that never again will incidents of this magnitude happen in our country, and we’re telling the other victims of firearms that we’ve got your back. On this note, it’s worth mentioning that this bill also deals with terrorism-related offences under the Terrorism Suppression Act.

This bill is a good bill and it will play a significant role in reducing firearm-related crimes. I would like to commend the Minister for the hard work to bring this bill to the House. I commend this bill to the House.

I’ll just step in and announce myself. Oh, no—oh, jolly good, thank you, Madam Speaker. Ha, ha! Hey, look, thanks very much—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): I knew the member was there.

Oh, jolly good. Thank you very much. Well, multitasking is a skill, I’m sure; it’s not one that I have. Hey, look, the National Party is supporting this, which won’t be a surprise, through to select committee. The primary reason, as other colleagues have touched on, is that we have been pushing for and putting forward bills over multiple parliaments for firearm protection orders. So this is a good step. I’d say it’s more of a whimper than a bang, and I might try to elaborate a little bit on that. But first and foremost, I think it’s an observation that the Government’s side has been incredibly defensive around all of this, failing to explain first and foremost why they have, effectively, voted down a number of previous bills and ideas put forward. They mentioned the likes of my good friend Brett Hudson and, of course, more recently, Simeon Brown put forward a very good piece of legislation. They—that is, Labour—threw it out, which is rather ironic because we get lectured in this House often about how we should, basically, just vote most legislation through at first reading without thought, so we can fix it up at select committee. But it is ironic, as I say, that that only applies to laws which of course the Government wants.

So they’re going to struggle, I think, and they have been struggling tonight—Labour, that is—to explain why they voted down firearm protection orders, particularly in light of the second defensive point coming from the Government. They’re very keen to say that they’re tough on crime, and as an excellent colleague of mine has opined to me this evening, Labour seems to believe that if they say something, it happens: that their words are efficacious, almost sacramental. They just say something and boom, it happens. “We’re going to fix child poverty.”—didn’t happen. “We’re going to solve KiwiBuild.”—well, that didn’t happen. And around firearms: “We’ll just say that the community’s safer.” Not really the case, is it? You go to any of our electorates—certainly come to mine in Tāmaki at the moment: crime’s up, violent crime’s up, guns are being discharged left, right, and centre. I will admit Tāmaki is pretty much one of the safest areas in the country, so that’s a great starting point, but this is even happening there now. It tells you this is a Government which has lost control, and we know that gang numbers are heading towards 8,000. I can tell you that within the Corrections portfolio, the gangs are in control in many ways, and yet this Government and its members tonight have the audacity to stand here and tell us they’re doing a fine job, because they took something like, you know, 60,000 firearms off legal, lawful New Zealanders, without forgetting the obvious point which this bill is trying to address: it’s the gangs primarily and other illegal people who have the weapons. But as I say, it’s a good bill, somewhat headed in the right direction. There’s some good elements to it, but there are two pretty fundamental weaknesses which we would like to see addressed.

First and foremost, we want the police to be able to proactively issue these. There’s no point in having these FPOs solely—you don’t want these FPOs or firearms prohibition orders only issued after there’s been an incident. There’s no point after someone’s been shot to then go in and take a firearm and the licence off a person. I mean, if that’s happened, yes, we want that power, but you also want to be able to proactively remove access to firearms. If the police, and we have high trust in the police, or others even—we could actually expand the law. It could be a court order—who knows?—to say, “You know what, actually? If a person acts, she shouldn’t have access to a firearm.” We want some proactivity in this space.

The second element—and other colleagues I’m sure have talked to it, but the Police Association, Chris Cahill and the team have also talked about wanting to be able to have, basically, warrantless searches, to be able to go into homes that they suspect have firearms and an FPO should be deployed. Again, it sort of makes sense if you’ve ever been on sort of an operational side, or have an operational mind. There’s no point in declaring to the person from whom you want to take the firearm off that you’re coming. We know from unfortunate experience that most of the times when police are raiding gang pads and the like, the weapons are gone. So what’s the point?

So, again, this is a good bill overall. It sets the right tone; it just hasn’t got the whole music score rightly laid out. So we’ll take it to—or we hope that the House votes it through. We can do a bit of quick math—we should get there. We’ll see it through to select committee, invite the public to have their say. It will be very welcome to hear their particular views, but as I say, at least two things from the National side of the House: a bit of proactivity powers being given to the police—and look, I’ll admit we’ll have to make sure we structure around that, but they want some proactivity. The other is actually that we can explore a little bit further the search warrant side of things.

So, overall, not bad. Could do better. But as I return to one of my opening themes, we on this side of the House do not buy—and I actually think New Zealanders on the ground do not buy—the rhetoric from this Government that they are somehow safer under a Labour Government. If you don’t believe me, one needs only go and look at the statistics, borne out anecdotally and quantitatively, to see that things are getting worse. So, yeah, we’ll leave it there. I think I gave that a shot.

While guns came into New Zealand well before World War I, it was that large influx of ex-military guns that flooded into the country after World War I that really lead to the first structural response to regulating our guns. Over the years there have been times of crisis that have called for a focus on how we mature that gun law.

My colleague Golriz Ghahraman spoke to the events of March 15 and the horrific acts that happened, and that resulted in action being taken on this side of the House. The banning of semi-automatic firearms, magazines, and parts—as my colleague Ibrahim Omer mentioned, 60,000 military-style weapons being taken off the street. That might be baulked at by the other side of the House, but it is significant. Those are weapons that reload extremely quickly; they presented a huge risk.

Our Government is committed to reducing gun violence and to providing the police with the tools that they need to address gun violence in a responsible way. My colleague Arena Williams talked about the National Party bill that came in front of us—the Justice Committee—last year. It was flawed. We did try our best to fix what were, essentially, gaps within the bill but it was still incoherent. The previous bill that came before the House was not comprehensive. Again, as my colleague said, it would have only covered gang members with convictions. To be honest, it felt a little bit more like it was crafted for the purpose of a media release targeting a specific group as opposed to good law designed to help keep people safe.

By contrast, this Government’s bill will include serious firearms offences. I won’t go through the definitions. I won’t go through the scaled penalties—my colleagues have done that. I would just say that as a member of Justice Committee, I do look forward to listening with open ears, receiving the advice that we’re given from officials, but also considering the steps that other countries have put in place in Australia, in Canada, in the UK. There is a fascinating breadth of experience in the firearms prohibition order space. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is, That the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill be now read a first time.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

The question is, That the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Bill be considered by the Justice Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Justice Committee.

I declare the House in committee for consideration on the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill, the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill, the Commerce Amendment Bill, and the Maori Commercial Aquaculture Claims Settlement Amendment Bill.