Wanganui District Council (Prohibition of Gang Insignia) Bill

I am pleased to take a call on this bill. It is my first call on this bill, but, unfortunately, it will be a little technical and dry—not unlike me, I know.

This is a very important bill, though, and clause 5B, regarding the public notice of by-laws and the availability of copies, refers to section 157 of the Local Government Act 2002, and states that this section will apply “to a bylaw made under section 5 …”. So I went to the Local Government Act 2002—which, ironically, I believe National voted against—and looked up the relevant section, section 157. Subsection (1) states: “As soon as practicable after a bylaw is made, the local authority must give public notice of the making of the bylaw, stating—(a) the date on which the bylaw will come into operation; and (b) that copies of the bylaw may be inspected and obtained at the office of the local authority on payment of a specified amount.” Section 157(2) states: “A local authority must—(a) keep copies of all its bylaws at the office of the local authority; and (b) make its bylaws available for public inspection, without fee, at reasonable hours at the office of the authority; and (c) supply to any person, on request and on payment of a reasonable charge, a copy of any of its bylaws.”

The reason I have alerted the Committee to the contents of that particular section of the Local Government Act is that when we compare what is required by clause 5B with what is required by clause 5A, and when we consider the overall intent of the bill—which is to potentially ban the display of any gang insignia—we realise that, first of all, we have an issue with somebody potentially not being aware that an insignia has been banned from a specific place, if that person has not seen the sign. It becomes an issue where the local authority, the place where these by-laws are kept, is within the area in which the gang insignia may be banned from being displayed. If the sign is not seen, or if the sign is not there, people would need to go to the local authority in order to find out that information. Members of a gang who were displaying their patches might inadvertently break the law in order to find out what the law is. In order to access the by-law, they would need to go to the local authority to read the by-law, and they would not necessarily know that by going there they were breaking the law.

So this issue is very important, and that is one of the reasons why it was really important that we supported Metiria Turei’s amendment to clause 5A(2), which basically removed that subclause. At the moment, as the subclause stands now—unfortunately her amendment was not passed—no prosecution under clause 6 and no arrest or seizure under clause 7 may be challenged on the ground that a notice was not affixed in accordance with subclause (1). So it means that people could be completely unaware they were breaking the law when they went into the council to find out what the law was. Under this bill, they can actually be arrested for that.

💬 Hon Steve Chadwick: It’s crazy.

It is absolutely ridiculous. And that highlights, overall, another reason why this bill simply does not make sense.

I come into this debate particularly sceptical of gangs. I am not a fan of gangs. My view is that public safety has to be the primary consideration. But we have to focus on what will work, rather than on something that, maybe, sounds good in theory, but simply will not work. Ultimately, we actually know that National knows that this bill will not work. If those members thought this bill would make a difference and would work, we would not be discussing a local bill on a members’ day; we would be discussing a Government bill, and it would apply to the whole country, not to just one district. But we are not. We would be fixing it across the land, and not in just one small part of it. Of course, we are not doing that, because ultimately the Government knows that this bill will not work. The Government is happy for us to take up the House’s time to discuss it on a members’ day. The Government’s legislative agenda is not being compromised as we go through this bill clause by clause. But the Government is not willing to say: “Yes, we think it is a sufficiently good idea that we’re going to put it on the Order Paper as a Government bill and apply it to the whole country.”

I come back to clause 5B. This clause highlights the technical problem with the bill—there are many technical problems, but this is quite a key one—which is the fundamental idea that if someone is going to be arrested for breaking a law, that person has the right to know what the law is and a right to know that he or she, potentially, is going to break it. As it stands in this bill, people do not know that.