Courts and Criminal Matters Bill

Part 6, which I think should take a reasonable amount of time to debate, because I would hate to have to write a whole lot of extra amendments in order to get some points made, is in respect of the Privacy Act 1993. Currently, section 103 of the Privacy Act prohibits these agencies from taking adverse action against any individual on the basis of a result produced under a data-matching programme, unless that agency has given the individual written notice of the adverse effect that may be taking place. So what is being proposed in this bill is that we pass a law that allows the authorities to use that information immediately. It means that people who will be stopped at the airport can be arrested and dealt with. Remember that that will be only 117 people a year.

When it was introduced, this so-called get-tough bill from the Government provided that only 35 fines defaulters a year would be stopped at the airport. Following some pressure from the Opposition, the Government has dropped the threshold, which means that 117 of our country’s worst fines defaulters are stopped when they get to the airport, and they will be expected to pay back $1.5 million. It is not a lot and it does not go very far. What is being proposed here is to give the power to the individual bailiff or police officer to arrest somebody using a warrant to arrest that has been granted. The only way a fines defaulter can be stopped at the airport under Labour will be if there is a warrant out for that person’s arrest. Forget the 25,000 people who owe fines over $5,000.

💬 Peter Brown: How many?

There are 25,000 people who owe fines over $5,000. Only 500 of them have an arrest warrant.

💬 Hon Rick Barker: The others might be paying them off.

I doubt it. Of those people, 500 have an arrest warrant, and they are the people whom this legislation, apparently, will target. Of those 500 people, a maximum of 117 are expected to be caught. What is being provided in this part is power for people to deal with them. What will happen is that a serious fines defaulter, who has an arrest warrant out and at least a $5,000 fine, will turn up at the airport and check in. Little silent alerts will run through the system. That person will go through immigration, and he or she will be pulled aside.

What will the police officer and the bailiff do? Will they say: “You owe $5,000. You owe reparation. You’re not going on that flight to London until you pay your fines.”? Is that what will happen? The provision in this bill should be what worries people. They can go and confirm that the fine is being paid or that an arrangement to pay has been made. If fines defaulters can say that, and if they can show that they have, or will make, an arrangement for their fines, then off they go to London. If they can just say to the bailiff that they will make a deal where they pay it back at $20 a week, off they can go to London.

How ridiculous is this? Under our Labour liberal justice system, a woman who defrauded to the extent of $120,000 is being allowed to pay off that debt at $20 a week. It will take her 107 years to pay off her debt. That is the sort of nonsense we are seeing under this Government.

I tell members that I do not expect that 117 people will be turned away, because what they will do under this Government’s liberal system is to say that they will pay back their debt at $20 a week, and the authorities will let them go off on the plane, when the whole purpose of the legislation is that if they can afford an airfare, they can afford to pay back some, if not all, of their fines. If they can afford an airfare, they should be paying their fine or the restitution they have been ordered to pay to their victims.

💬 Hon Richard Prebble: A Freedom Air ticket could be a lot less than your fine.

A Freedom Air ticket could be a lot less than a fine, but I would rather see that ticket price of $189, with conditions, paid to the victim of a crime or paid to the Crown in punishment, than see it going to the airline. That is the point here. This stuff needs to be tighter. Why are we not making changes to the Privacy Act so that parents can go and pay their kids’ fines?

As I listened to the honourable member, those facts astounded me. I hope I heard him right. He said that over 25,000 people in this country have overdue fines of over $5,000, and this bill, if I have it correctly, is effectively targeting 117 of them per year. I ask the Minister in the chair, Rick Barker, what he will do about the 24,883. Nothing! He has gone blank. He does not have a clue what the Government will do about the 24,883.

💬 Hon Rick Barker: We’re pursuing them relentlessly. Many of them are already paying their fines off piece by piece. Under arrangement to pay is at a record level.

Oh, he has a lot of confidence in arrangements to pay. I tell the honourable member that if he owed me $10, and I could not find him, I would ask his colleagues where he was, and they would tell me. [Interruption] I will put it the other way round. If I owed him $10, he would probably ask my colleagues where I am, and nobody would worry about telling him.

There is a very simple solution to address the problem in total—never mind the 117, but the whole 25,000 people with overdue fines of over $5,000. It is very simple. When people get a fine, it should be part of the understanding that if it is not paid by a certain date, they will lose their privacy privileges, totally. On the date when the privileges expire, the data-matching process would come into play. All Government agencies would have access to their information—from their Inland Revenue Department number to their telephone number, their address, and any aliases. People would lose the right to privacy. It is a very, very simple solution, and the choice is not the Government’s—the Government is not imposing anything. The choice is that of the person who owes the Government money.

If guys are getting away with owing that amount of money, that is absolute daylight robbery. It sends the wrong message to law-abiding New Zealanders, and the Minister knows it—in his heart he knows it. He knows he would like to target the 24,883 people, not just the 117. A simple way to do it is to put a little notation on the bottom of a judge’s order that if a fine is not paid by such-and-such a day, the Government has the right to data match all of the individual’s personal data, no matter what. The situation will be permanent unless he or she pays the fine. If the individual wants to clear the backlog and get back to being treated like a normal citizen who has his or her privacy respected, maybe the Government will say that it will not charge a fee. That would encourage people to pay their fines on time.

This bill addresses just one tiny little aspect of the problem. When I heard today that outstanding fines total over $650 million, I was absolutely appalled. I looked at the pro rata tabulation in the commentary on the bill, and I saw that it simply calculates that of the $650 million owed, in the vicinity of $400 million relates to fines that have been overdue for some considerable amount of time. I looked at figures my colleague Ron Mark gave me some time ago that showed how much people owe. This Government is stuffing around and blowing against the wind.

💬 Clayton Cosgrove: It must be true if Ron gave it to you.

I do not for one moment think the member is saying my colleague was not telling the truth. He would not dare to do that.

I come back to this issue of whether this legislation will work. The privacy issue is one reason why we can see that it absolutely will not work, at all. It comes back to the issue of forcing everyone to be nice to each other, before we even get round to trying to get money off them.

If we look at section 103(2A), inserted by clause 19, we see that a bailiff or member of the police cannot execute a warrant to arrest an individual unless that person has been informed of the intention to execute it. The police could get a warrant then find out the person is going off on an overseas trip. A police officer could ring up the person and say: “Well, Mr Richard Barker, I hate to have to tell you, but when you get to the airport we are going to execute this warrant.” When the police get there, before executing the warrant they would have to give the person the opportunity to confirm whether he or she was the individual named in the warrant.

How will that work when we have already, with a previous Supplementary Order Paper amendment, removed the opportunity to share information regarding aliases? It is well known that crims use aliases all the time. When they are arrested they give a false name. We heard a few examples before. We could have “Myrtle Ardern” and all sorts of aliases being used. Getting rid of the aliases provision and bringing in the Privacy Act wipes out the whole way that this legislation can even be used.

The Hon Tony Ryall drew our attention, in the debate on the last part, to the fact that we will try to catch people who have racked up traffic or parking fines, etc., but he also asked about those people who are fined in the High Court for selling drugs. We have this Customs and Excise Act, so what about the people who are fined—if they are ever brought before the court—for downloading child pornography on the Internet? I say “if they are ever brought before the court” because we have such a useless and hopeless Minister of Police. Not only does he sit around and wait until Time magazine humiliates this country in front of the rest of the world about the number of paedophiles here known to be downloading child porn on the Internet—and the information was handed to us on a plate by Interpol—but he still sits there and does nothing. When he finally does do something, will those people be prosecuted under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act, which the Government has just tightened so that such people can be imprisoned? No. They will be prosecuted under the Customs and Excise Act, which relates just to importing indecent and objectionable material. Such people probably will not even fall under the category in this bill, because the fines they get are so pathetic. They will be able to go off to Thailand, get more of those child videos and indecent films, bring them back, and distribute them on the Internet. They will not even be caught under this legislation.

I come back to the issue I raised before of the cost-benefit analysis. My colleagues in the National Party kindly provided me with the facts on that. It is unbelievable that we are spending this time in urgency to pass legislation that to all and intents and purposes looks good, and looks like it will do a lot, but that, as we find when we drill into it, will be very lucky to catch even the 117 people we talked about before. We are putting everything in our way, to assist those people. Members should look at this. In the first year it is estimated that we will collect $1.5 million, but that it will cost us $1.7 million to do that. It is just like the old Liable-parent Contributions Scheme that was set up. The Government is still hopeless at collecting money owed under that legislation.

I thought I would for a moment remind the Committee that we are talking about Part 6 of the Courts and Criminal Matters Bill, and touch on a couple of the issues raised in that part, particularly around the Privacy Act. Before I do that, I also remind the Committee that the amount of outstanding fines is, apparently, according to all the information I have been given, somewhere around $650 million. We should bear in mind Dr Michael Cullen’s keenness, through the taxation laws and suchlike—and we debated one of those laws in the Chamber a couple of days ago—to close every loophole in terms of the taxation system. We have pages and pages of regulation and ways to catch the overseas crooks who get away with New Zealand’s hard-earned tax. So we would expect that when it comes to the Courts and Criminal Matters Bill, and particularly to the discussion around the Privacy Act, the Misuse of Drugs Act, and that kind of legislation, the Minister would apply the same kind of standard that he applies in the taxation legislation. But what do we have instead? What we have today is 25,000 people with outstanding fines of over $5,000. The Minister, the roaring Dr Michael Cullen, who is keen to make sure that every loophole is closed, has stumped up with what one can only describe as a wet bus ticket.

What sort of signal does that send to society? Hard-working individuals who run small businesses and battle away day and night, good community mums and dads, and “Joe Hard-worker” from New Lynn—and I see that the member for New Lynn is here—will be clobbered by the Government, which will get its hands so deeply into their pockets that they will potentially find life pretty difficult. But when it comes to crims who run up endless speeding tickets or other kinds of fines and do not bother to pay them, the Government will make some minor adjustments to the Customs and Excise Act, the Privacy Act, and other such Acts so that it can collar them if they front up at the airport—and the estimate is that about 117 of these people per year may do that—and they may have to pay their fines. But the Government will make sure that they are not collared if the fine is less than $5,000. If people owe less than $5,000, the Government will not bother about them—they can walk straight through.

The Minister now has an opportunity to amend the Privacy Act, to allow information to flow freely between departments in order to help to catch those who would use the various clauses, loopholes, and suchlike in various bits of legislation to escape the obligation to pay their fines—fines that have been set by the Parliament of New Zealand, which is the representative of all in New Zealand. I ask the Minister to take a call and explain why he does not take the opportunity to make some amendments during the Committee stage to ensure that those crooks are caught and made to pay their fines.

I tell the Minister again—because I do not think the message got through last time—that in the constituency clinics I have attended recently, people have told me what has happened when they have tried to pay a fine on behalf of their son, brother, auntie, mother, or whoever the relative is. They have fronted up to whichever of the various agencies they think will be interested—the courts, for example—and have been told that the agency cannot give them the information they require, because the Privacy Act stops it from doing so. They have been told that they need to track down the person who owes the money, and get that person to turn up with photo ID and verify that he or she is who he or she claims to be. If all of that can be tidied up and the person who owes the money signs a paper, then the agency will accept that someone else can pay the fine.

Can the Minister not see the irony and the double standard in what is going on there? Can he not understand that law-abiding, decent New Zealand citizens whom we want to encourage to get on and do well—to help the Government, under its notion of how to collect tax—are being penalised, while those who break the law, flout the law, and thumb their noses at the Minister are allowed to walk away scot-free? How is it that I can see that and the Minister cannot? What am I missing? Which aspect of this issue am I not picking up?

I move, That the question be now put.