Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour)
: Labour supports the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Bill in the second reading, and right through to its completion. This was a Labour bill introduced in my name; it was picked up by the current Government, which is carrying it on. I congratulate the Government on that. I say to Mr Young that I am big enough to thank National for the work it did on this legislation when in Opposition, alongside the Government of the day. In fact, a joint approach on the issue of the proceeds of crime has led to this bill being supported by most members in this House. Would it not be nice if just now and then, instead of the grandstanding and the written-out speeches, there could be some acknowledgment that Labour in Government did a number of very important things in terms of law and order? Unfortunately, the total political approach that we often hear from National speakers does not allow that to happen.
I thank members of the Law and Order Committee who took part in the deliberations on this bill for the work they did, and for bringing back to this House a bill that is in better shape than it was when it went to the select committee. That is why we have select committees; that is why they are important, and that is why we send legislation to them. We know that in our democracy, which is without another House or Upper Chamber to scrutinise legislation, the importance of select committees is huge. That is why we send bills to them. This bill was sent to a select committee; it was not introduced and passed under urgency. It went to a select committee, the public of New Zealand had a say on it and helped with the changes in it, and we now have a bill, I believe, that will pass by the overwhelming majority vote of this House.
The truth is that New Zealand, like many countries, has an organised criminal gang problem. The problem is not unique to New Zealand, although sometimes when we hear people speaking about it we would think that New Zealand had invented it, and that we are the only country with the problem. Those who have studied this problem, and who have taken the time to travel to other countries to talk to people in other jurisdictions, tell us that New Zealand, like many countries, has an organised criminal gang problem. It is a problem that cannot be addressed by quick-fix, one-off bills or some sort of smart approach where we take one particular resource and say that it is going to be the panacea. In fact, this is a very complex problem indeed, and one that will take all our collective wisdom and resources to resolve.
Let us look back at the history. Perhaps the person who started trying to address this issue was Sir Robert Muldoon. He thought the way to get alongside the gang issue in New Zealand was to get alongside the gangs—to actually work with the gangs to see if their behaviour could be changed. There are those who believe there is some merit in that. But we know that since those days of the 1970s and 1980s, gangs in New Zealand
today—organised criminal gangs—are highly sophisticated organisations. They are not there for the good of New Zealand; they are there to make money from the misery of other New Zealanders, and I deplore the fact that they make their money from the misery of our young people. They make their money out of peddling drugs to young people. They are organised criminals.
Our approach to this issue has to be one that has many facets to it. In Government, Labour looked at what we could do. It was not just to have one piece of legislation—
Hon Phil Heatley: You did nothing!
Hon ANNETTE KING: —it was quite a number of things, I say to Mr Heatley. In fact National has picked up, by reinstating this bill, one of those pieces of legislation. The issue needed to have legislation, it needed to have an overall strategy to approach organised criminal gangs, and it also needed the police to have the powers to carry out their surveillance and their work. Those three legs of the stool were what Labour put in place to address this problem. As I said, it was not a new problem; the previous National Government had had the problem, the Labour Government before that had had the problem, and we can go back through the decades. So the previous Labour Government put in place an overarching approach to organised criminal gangs in New Zealand—a strategic approach that had with it partners working with us, from local government to our police, our corrections system, our non-governmental organisations, and our communities, because gangs live within communities and they are intergenerational. We can go into parts of New Zealand today where the third and fourth generations of young people are now in criminal gangs, so we needed to have an overall strategic approach to our gang problem.
We also needed to ensure that the police had the powers they required. That is why we established the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand to attack the issues of organised criminal gangs and financial crime in New Zealand; they overlap, in fact. The old idea that only white-collar criminals ripped off people is not the case today; in fact, many of our organised criminal gangs wear white collars, and they have their money laundered through the fronts of businesses, and so on. So an agency was put in place that had powers that rested with the police—additional powers—for them to be able to undertake the work they needed to do, from surveillance to the tracking of these people, and the getting of overseas intelligence so that we could see what they were doing, we could see where the precursors to the drug P were coming from, and we would be able to follow up in an international sense. That is why the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand was put into place.
The third leg of this approach was legislation—legislation that we believed could be effective, not legislation that looks good on the books but is not going to do anything. I believe that a law that just makes patches illegal is not going to do that, but this bill will add to the arsenal of legislation to help in that approach with gangs.
Let us look at what the problem is. Currently, the Proceeds of Crime Act 1991 allows the Crown to confiscate the profit made from crimes after someone is convicted of that crime. But the profits of crime can be spread amongst many people, not all of whom are able to be convicted of the crime. So they get the proceeds from that crime and they spread it amongst other people, but they are not able to be convicted of the crime. Organised gangs are an example of outfits that do just that. That is why this bill will add to the arsenal of legislative approaches that we need to tackle gang problems.
I also think we need to look at other jurisdictions to see how they have handled this problem. In January this year Phil Goff and I went to South Australia to look at its legislation. That state has put a lot of effort into tackling organised criminal gangs to reduce the harm they are doing in its communities. I believe that we ought to look closely at South Australia’s overarching legislation and the approach that it is taking.
There are many lessons for us to learn from that. There are many examples that we can pick up and put in place here in New Zealand to tackle a problem that we all should be concerned about.
We support this bill firstly because it was our bill, and it was part, as I said, of the arsenal of legislation that we were putting in place and part of an overall approach. We support it because we believe that it will work. It has worked in other places where this sort of legislation exists. In fact, it exists in places like Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Those countries have passed similar laws to this one. The legislation has already been tried so we believe that it will work. We believe that it will help in the fight against organised criminal gangs. Therefore, we will be supporting this bill to its conclusion.
PAUL QUINN (National)
: It gives me great pleasure to stand and join the love feast that has been going on this afternoon. Aside from the Greens, who for reasons known only to themselves are voting against this very important bill on crime, and law and order, it is great to see that we are joined as one on these very important issues. I note the previous speaker’s comments about sharing some of the glory. I would be happy to do that, but I think in so doing we need to remind ourselves that the previous administration promised, in its 2005 manifesto, that it would pass into law a civil fortitude regime to allow gangs to be stripped of the proceeds of crime, having introduced legislation earlier in that year. It is interesting to note that in July 2006 that bill was dumped without being debated, and nothing more was heard of it until March 2007, nearly 18 months after the election, when Labour introduced the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Bill, this bill.
It is important to note that, although acknowledging the words of the Opposition, it is actions that count. It gives me great pleasure to be able to stand here and say that this is a Government of action—when it says it is going to do something, it actually does it. We are committed to repealing the Proceeds of Crime Act 1991 and replacing it with this legislation, which provides not only for the confiscation of property where the owner has been convicted of a criminal offence but also for the confiscation of the property of those people who have tried to distance themselves once removed and send their lackeys on the job. I shall share some important cases with members a little later.
In pursuing this bill, this Government realises that we must hit gangs in the pocket, where it will count. The difficulty is that serious criminals, who are intent on making large sums of money, operate in an environment of extreme violence. They protect their wealth, and perceive that they have worked hard to acquire their assets. Therefore, sending them to jail for 1 year or 10 years is a badge of honour. It is a flea in their ear. They take a joy trip into jail, in the knowledge that when they come out, there will be a small fortune waiting for them to sit back and enjoy. The thing that really gets to them is when we start attacking their assets. If we put those assets at risk, these criminals become extremely resistant and confrontational.
One of the aspects of the bill I shall cover a little later, which is a major change from the initial bill when it was tabled, is the recovery agent. The previous administration had intended that the recovery be done by the Serious Fraud Office. Some members who were members at that time might remember this. I find it interesting, of course, that they had done a deal with an honourable Minister of the time to do away with the Serious Fraud Office—at the time we were anticipating giving $3 million to fight this. But $3 million against gangs such as the Mongrel Mob, NZ Red Necks, and Black Power just does not do it for the country. In terms of one of the principal changes, which I will talk about a little later on, we now have it in the right place and properly resourced for the police.
The other thing I want to reflect on is that the reason the Government has given this bill high priority is simply that law and order is one of the critical issues that we went to the country on. It gives me great pride to be able to stand and say that we have been able to achieve all of the commitments that we made at the election and that the people voted us in on. Let me go through them, for members on the Opposition benches.
Hon Kate Wilkinson: We’d like to hear it.
PAUL QUINN: Members would like to hear it? We introduced legislation to remove the right of the worst repeat violent offenders to be released on parole, clamped down on criminal gangs and their drug trade, toughened the bail laws to make it harder for criminals awaiting trial to get bail, tackled increasing violent youth crime by bolstering the Youth Court with a range of new interventions and sentences, required DNA testing for every person arrested—the list is exhaustive—gave police the power to issue on-the-spot protection orders, and introduced legislation to compensate victims. The list goes on. It would take too much time to cover all of them. All I can say is that this administration has taken in its stride the responsibilities of governing, in contrast to the previous administration. It is like a velvet glove. It has just fitted in.
I want to focus on the policy objectives.
Jacqui Dean: Repeat that.
PAUL QUINN: The member wants me to repeat that? She would like to hear it again. No, after all, it is a love feast. We are being kind to each other today.
- Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.
