Gangs and Organised Crime Bill

This is a very short part of the Gangs and Organised Crime Bill and it amends the Local Government Act 2002. Section 216(a) of the Local Government Act 2002 currently provides that a District Court may grant a removal order if the court is satisfied that the property is occupied or regularly used by known or probable offenders. Section 216(b) provides that a District Court may grant a removal order if a fence, structure, or vegetation is either facilitating or contributing to the concealment, avoidance, or commission of crime, or is intended to injure a person. Part 2 proposes that an additional ground for the District Court to make a removal order is if it is satisfied that a fence, structure, or vegetation may reasonably be regarded as intimidating. This proposal will provide the police with an additional tool to have fortifications pulled down on properties used by known or probable offenders, but it also acknowledges the impact of gang forts on their direct neighbourhood.

Anything that causes local government to act expeditiously and aid the cause of the local community wanting to rid its neighbourhoods and suburbs of this walking, criminalised cancer known as gangs ought to be supported. I am no fan of much of what local government has done in relation to the Building Act—an area that I have some experience in. I found local government to be sluggish. The place was riddled with building inspectors who found things to justify their jobs but little to justify delivering the service. This is why, when I had the brief opportunity to promote a bill as a part of former Prime Minister Helen Clark’s team, it was rapidly embraced by members on the opposite side of the Chamber. I filled a void. Those members came with great promise but precious little results. But that matter is for another time. It is for the historians to write up the great things that the Helen Clark Government did, which will grow in stature as time moves on. The gangs, unfortunately, grow while we are distracted.

When New Zealanders move into a suburb or a neighbourhood, they create a home for their kiddies. They start to invest time and energy in schools and they look to beautify the localities where they live. Then all of a sudden a plague of locusts—or, as the Māori say, a tātarakihi—descends upon the area, and just as in biblical times the locusts sucked out the livelihood of the people by destroying the crops, these people begin to crop. They move into an area and choose dwellings or neighbourhoods where the trees, fences, or other accoutrements give them the privacy to carry on their criminality. Ordinary Kiwis do not know much about gangs, but they know when they are working in “Strugglers’ Gully”. When their TV, car, kid’s bike, or other taongas that they have amassed over a bit of time from dough that has been saved to actually afford those things start to get ripped off, they want those people out of their faces. That sort of behaviour not only lessens the value and the safety of their property but, most important, it lessens the security of where they live. So if the Gangs and Organised Crime Bill is to empower local government by allowing the court to remove gang fortifications, then we should all support it.

Of course, this is an obligation on the courts. We can imagine that District Court judges, not unlike their senior colleagues in the High Court, will be preyed upon by a different form of locust, known as the legal profession. Legal professionals go out of their way—unwisely, in my view—to represent many of these gang characters. They try to allow them to escape the full reach of the law when they have been peddling drugs and ruining the lives of young people. To illustrate my point, in Kaitāia the gangs that I am predominantly concerned about hurt their own the most. I read the local newspaper and gagged through an article to do with my senior National Party colleague John Carter, but that is another story. Then I found that the Tribesmen gang—if ever there was destruction of a proud word and the notion of a tribe, there it is—are now using dope, marijuana, cannabis to reward juvenile criminality. Boys aged 10, 11, 12, and 13—around that tender age—are running away from the whānau, etc. and being rewarded with marijuana if they go out and steal things. The people providing it belong to the gang. So when the parents go and find out who the hell is giving their young fella dope, they are confronted by a fortification. They are confronted by the intimidating presence of that gang culture. It could be someone who is ripe for a heart attack. In fact, I hope that everyone who is involved in Tribesmen criminality has heart attacks by the end of this week. They will get not one sliver of sympathy from me. They are taking young, dislocated boys and giving them dope so they will go around Kaitāia and other parts of the north and tāhae—rip things off. That is the role model that they are growing into. It will give my neighbour Wayne Brown something more useful to do: after he has stopped irking most of the local ratepayers, he can start assaulting, with the full force of the law, the gangs. He is likely to grow in our Māori estimation. Kia ora tātou.

Part 2 is a practical measure. Labour supports it. I know that my colleague Clare Curran, a Dunedin member of Parliament, recently has had representations from a local school, I believe, where down the road, quite literally, there is a gang headquarters. I have not seen it myself, but I am told that it is relatively fortified—or, if it is not, that it will be. These structures put a level of intimidation upon communities.

There are those in this place who say that gangs form part of the culture and fabric of our country. I think Dr Sharples has been heard to say that from time to time. I tend to disagree, respectfully, with him. I think there are basic community norms. We are not talking about the height of pot plants, what colour we can paint our house, whether we can wash our car out the front, or have a barbeque, or park. We are talking about a high degree of intimidation. Gangs set up in communities, and often, as in the Dunedin example, not far from schools. As my colleague Shane Jones has said, they set up there for quite deliberate, nefarious reasons—so that they can prey on communities, particularly the young, and entice them, as he said, with dope and other things.

So suddenly a quiet community, which is law abiding and includes a local school, has some sort of great edifice that has been fortified far in excess of what we would expect for a bank, police station, or, in some respects, an army base. Those fortifications are generally ugly—ugly in an aesthetic way, and ugly in terms of what goes on inside and around them. They become magnets for other activity, sometimes from rival gangs, as we know, because we saw a year or so ago in Wanganui what can happen, and it happens in other places. Reprisals and turf wars take place. Who is sitting nearby, next door or three doors down, a block away or three blocks away? It is communities and often local schools.

We think Part 2 is a very practical measure. Their eminences in the court, the judges, as Shane Jones said, will have all sorts of interesting arguments presented to them to err on the side of being conservative and not to provide the means with which we can rip, tear, and destroy these fortifications. I think part of destroying them is exposing what is going on inside and around those headquarters. Indeed, that may provide some motivation for the gangs to move on. Sadly, it will be to another community, but if this measure goes through—and I assume it will—there will be universal pressure to deal with gang headquarters. We support the part.

Part 2 agreed to.

Part 3 Amendment to Sentencing Act 2002