Financial Review Debate — New Zealand Police

We have been very weak in how we deal with gangs and criminal organisations in this country. They have grown from street gangs in the 1940s. The first started on Independence Day 1946 in a town called Hollister in the US. Eventually they spread their tentacles to New Zealand, and we are doing very little about it. The gangs have become well-structured and well-entrenched. They have bonds that in many cases replace those of the traditional family, which in many cases are dysfunctional. They are supported with the finances collected from illegal activities, such as prostitution, gambling, theft, and drugs.

The point, of course, is that we are not talking about a romanticised group of lovable leather and tattoo - clad rogues on steel horses; we are talking about criminal organisations whose tentacles of criminality are digging into our communities, taking our money, our sense of lawfulness, and our hope. These gangs have left a trail of despair and social destruction, and this Government, as others before it, has done diddly.

Our Minister of Justice was quoted in the Dominion Post in October last year as saying that changes were needed. What has happened? Absolutely nothing. We have a system where those who are making methamphetamines are reoffending while on bail because our justice system is so clogged up that there is at least a 2-year wait for trial. One of the reasons is that there is a huge, unrestrained increase in the supply of and the market for P.

We are not equipping our police to handle the problem. If we want the police to do the job, then we have to give them the tools to be able to do it. That is not what we are doing. We are pussyfooting around. We have heard talk about trying to do something about taking the proceeds of criminal activity, but it is not enough. We need, I believe, the Western Australian model of confiscation—confiscation on a civil basis without conviction. But all we get from the Minister is that he does not want to put such a system into place because of our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. While it is true that we would be going against that, the nonsense is that the Internal Revenue Service already has these powers. All that United Future is suggesting is to give these powers to the police to execute what they need to do to get rid of our criminal organisations and gangs once and for all. They should be able to take away the profits from those people who prey on us and who feed off us, destroying our communities, our families, and our children.

Unfortunately, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act seems to be standing in the way of this politically correct Government. Whose rights does it protect? It protects the offenders at the expense of the rest of us. We are the ones who end up suffering. The police want these powers. They want to be able to do the job they have been entrusted to do, but the Minister in the chair, the Hon George Hawkins, and the Minister of Justice are not giving them the ability to do that. That is part of the problem. We are pussyfooting around and we are not doing what we can to help the police do the job. We expect them to clean up our streets, but how can we?

Some people on the left whom we have heard from today suggested that it was cheaper to keep offenders in a Hilton rather than a jail. That is probably what the Greens really want. They want to close down the jails and put people in Hiltons, to give them a reason not to offend. What message would that give to the rest of the community, to those who are lawful? It would tell them that crime does pay. On that I kind of agree. Crime should pay, and it should pay and pay and pay. The best way to do that is to give the police the powers to confiscate criminals’ assets and the proceeds of crime. We will do that only if we start being tough and taking the steps that the Minister in the chair and the Minister of Justice are not willing to take. It is like telling a gardener to go and hoe a garden but denying him or her the tools to dig the earth. It is pointless and wasteful. We will end up in a situation where the police are out-numbered, out-gunned, and out-resourced by the very gangs they are supposed to be trying to restrain. It is pathetic. This Government should take a good, cold, hard look at itself and at what it is allowing gangs to do to communities and to our families and kids. It should wake up to the fact that these gangs do not play by the rules. Neither should we.

Sometimes it is very pleasing to work on the Law and Order Committee, and sometimes it is jolly frustrating. The reason I find so much of it to be frustrating is that we seem to be very long in the talk about what this Government is going to do about crime and about what Labour was going to do about crime when it was in Opposition. I have a wad of press releases about 4 inches thick stating what Mr Hawkins, Mr Goff, and Mr Mike Moore would do when they finally got to the Government benches. Well, 5 years down the line we are still dealing with the problems they promised they would resolve. No amount of shilly-shallying and wishy-washy arguments from the police will convince me that in some areas the police are simply not achieving the results we want them to achieve.

For example, in our review we discussed the improving trend in respect of burglary, but the bottom line is that over the last 12 months the burglary of dwellings was up by 4 percent. That is the bottom line. The bottom line is that whilst we sit and crow that another $6.8 million is being pumped into dealing with methamphetamine, the police asked for the establishment of four teams to deal with home laboratories and this Government gave them only three. Worse than that, the South Island has to share the same facility that Wellington and the lower North Island use—this on the back of the fact that with those scarce resources the police have cracked more methamphetamine laboratories than we would ever, in our worst nightmares, have feared possible. What does that say? It says that the police predictions were exactly correct.

The methamphetamine threat was portrayed well by the Police Association. The Government was told about it. The Commissioner of Police went to the Government and asked for the funding. The Government short-changed him, and then had the nerve to boast that it had increased the funding by $6.8 million. That sum was identified as not being enough to deal with methamphetamine, and on the back of the results we are seeing we now know it is not enough. No amount of crowing will disguise the facts that the police did not get the resources they need, that methamphetamine is a growing problem, that organised crime is behind it, and that the problem is threatening the very well-being of our youth and the safety of our communities.

Let us look at the interventions. There was a lot of talk from the Government about what it was going to do to intervene. Yes, some good things have been done. There are regulations going through to restrict the sales of pseudoephedrine. But New Zealand First warned this Government about immigrant crime. It warned that with regard to certain people of certain ethnicities, one could see a propensity of certain crimes being carried out by them. What have we seen? Well, hello now, surprise, surprise, the Customs Service people, doing a good job at the border, have seized hundreds of thousands of pills and drugs that form the base product for methamphetamine production. Again, there was a failure to heed the warnings, and I have to say to this Government that no amount of political correctness will avoid the fact that certain ethnicities need to be monitored for particular types of crime.

I have a simple question to ask all the Māori MPs in Labour: why do they sit there and allow Māori crime to be analysed, debated, and recorded in the most minute detail, whilst they let the Minister of Police and the Minister of Justice turn a blind eye to Asian crime, to Somali crime, and to the crimes committed by all the other ethnic groups that we now have coming to this country who have their own propensity to a particular crime fetish? Ignoring that will not make it go away—it is there. The discussions I have had on private trips to New South Wales confirm that there is a Lebanese crime problem. It does not go away because someone says that it is racist to talk about it. The police need to be steered into recording the details of what those people are doing. If Government members do not accept what I am saying, they should look at the figure for kidnappings, coercion, and extortion—a 600 percent increase in that one crime alone.

💬 Dail Jones: How much?

A 600 percent increase, and the vast majority of that crime is committed by Chinese students or immigrants. Members should look at the gambling dens. There is a whole backlog of issues there that, if we do not get to grips with the downstream effects of the huge gambling debts being incurred by Asian New Zealanders, will come back to bite us when we see them recoup those losses or pay their loan sharks the massive interest they owe them by illicit means. How will that happen? By extortion, bribery, kidnapping, and that sort of thing. That is where we have to improve our interventions with regard to crime.

Report noted.

Clauses 1 to 12, and schedule agreed to.

Bill reported without amendment.