Crimes Amendment Bill

Thank you very much, Mr Chair. It is marvellous to be able to summarise my contribution to this debate. What I was saying before the dinner break was I was congratulating this committee for its collaboration on this particular Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 185. I was acknowledging Ian McKelvie for bringing this issue to the House and the Minister Andrew Little for taking this on and seeing a way forward on what is a very important issue. What we saw in the select committee process was that it was universal across the agricultural and primary sector, across rural New Zealand, that livestock rustling is a big issue. What they couldn’t understand is why, up to this point, it had not been recognised as a crime. That’s what Ian McKelvie tried to achieve, and it’s what this Government and its Minister in Andrew Little has delivered.

It sends a really good message. After all the hoo-ha and nonsense that people see in this place so often, when MPs here want to do so, they can get together, they can work together, and once again we’ve shown that at times—sadly, not often as much as we’d like—we work together for the interests of rural New Zealand. This Government once again is delivering for the places outside our urban centres, and I strongly endorse this SOP in the Minister’s name.

Mr Chair, thanks very much. I appreciate the opportunity to speak. I’m going to speak on the Crimes Amendment Bill—a riveting bill—and I’d like to speak on Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 185, the cattle rustling section.

💬 Kieran McAnulty: Livestock rustling—get it right.

Livestock. I’d like to acknowledge Ian McKelvie, our rangatira, our kaumātua—or, as Alfred Ngaro would say, our koro, which means “old man”, apparently—because this is his bill, or, essentially, the makings of his bill. It was a private member’s bill adopted by the Government. But I’d also like to acknowledge Andrew Little for displaying some common sense and including it in the bill. I appreciate that.

Being a rural farmer myself, this SOP really stuck with me, because in Northland, mostly during the night, we suffer a lot of this sort of theft and loss—farmers do—all over the place. There was a situation where a farmer had a couple of cows slaughtered. They just cut the legs off the cow—the best parts—and left the body in the paddock. One of the cows was pregnant, in calf, and they viciously killed the calf and just left it for dead—so, thousands of dollars of loss for a farmer, and quite devastating. I mean, I have breeding cows. I don’t know them by name—there are 160 of them—but they’re very valuable to me. So it’s not only the monetary loss; it’s the loss of the years of breeding and just the sheer horror when you come across animals that have been slaughtered in such a way.

Another incident we had up in Northland was some sheep being killed. It happened during the day. A pig hunter saw a couple of guys dragging a pregnant sheep across the paddock. The farmers got in their vehicles and did a bit of a—what do you call it?—vigilante-type situation and blocked the car in. One guy took off running with a gun. He had a rifle, so it was a pretty horrifying situation. Luckily, the other one stayed with the vehicle and they got them. This sort of stuff is something we don’t recommend. It puts lives at risk. Being an ex-policeman, we’d rather have people take vehicle descriptions and that sort of thing, descriptions of people, and call the police.

One farmer on average loses 200 sheep a year. That’s $20,000 worth. Cattle—Federated Farmers estimate $120 million per year in losses. So animal theft—

💬 Ian McKelvie: Not worth much in Northland!

—thank you, kaumātua—especially in Northland is an ongoing, serious problem because it’s a lower socio-economic area, and so we have a lot of people who are just jumping the fence and stealing stock willy-nilly and slaughtering them in the paddocks.

I know a Pouto farmer, Ian Russell. Over 20 years, he’s lost 700 cattle and 2,700 sheep. Those are huge losses. He installed cameras to try and catch the offenders. The culprits discovered the cameras and they burned down his $600,000 woolshed. It’s a real problem, especially in the north. So Andrew Little and our kaumātua in the back there, Ian McKelvie, coming up with this law change—I for one really appreciate it. Entering agricultural land with intent to commit a crime: 10 years—the same as burglary.

Now, burglary—you know, you have to break into a shed or enter an enclosed yard. That’s burglary. But all my valuable stuff on my farm is just over a fence, in the paddock. So if you caught someone on your property, even at night, and you knew what they were up to, the only thing you could really get them for is trespass—two years. Even then, you have to warn them and they have to come on again before you can actually do them for trespass. So it’s a very, very frustrating situation.

So now the police will have the tools. If you catch someone on your property within circumstances of committing an offence, this law is going to be perfect. And if they’re carrying a weapon: aggravated burglary—14 years. And it also includes the rights to impound and seize vehicles or trailers. So this is common sense, it’s practical, it’s fair play, and it’s great for the rural community, so I support it 100 percent.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I thought I was going to be too slow to get up, but I got there. It’s a pleasure to take a call on the Crimes Amendment Bill. Obviously, from my perspective, I’m particularly pleased to be taking a call in support of the Minister Andrew Little’s Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 185, which is, in effect, a strengthening of a bill that I had in Parliament as an amendment to the Sentencing Act. It came into Parliament, interestingly, just over 12 months ago, so it’s taken 12 months. That shows the progress of making law. I want to congratulate the Minister for picking it up in this manner, and I thank the Primary Production Committee for encouraging this course of action. I had a great deal of help from the other side of the House in getting it there, and my own support of that as well.

So the course of action was, interestingly, supported by all submitters who submitted to the original bill when it came to the Primary Production Committee early last year. The interesting thing about this for me is that the SOP creates, effectively, two new offences for theft of livestock and other animals. The Minister did explain briefly, earlier in his contribution, what the “all other animals” inferred, but I want to use a bit of an example—not quite the one Matt King would have used.

It extends the crime to include all sorts of animals, not just livestock. Ironically, the definition may not have included a racehorse or a pet dog, and I think the Minister referred to that, but the best known example of this, of course, is a racehorse who was probably the greatest racehorse to ever race in Europe. For the Irish in the room, that will be a reasonably good story. The horse was called Shergar. He was stolen from his box in the middle of the night, ironically by the IRA, which I suppose isn’t surprising given he was in Ireland.

The IRA actually thought he was worth a lot of money. He was worth a lot of money—some £10 million he was valued at. They also thought that he had one owner in the Aga Khan, so that was the reason they stole him, because they stole him for a ransom. The problem was he had 38 owners and they couldn’t get an agreement on whether they would pay a ransom or not. Some of them had insurance; some of them didn’t. Some of them probably didn’t need the money—probably the Aga Khan didn’t need the money—but it was a very interesting example of exactly what the Minister is talking about.

But it goes on from there, because Shergar was effectively gunned to death by the IRA. When you think about that, it’s very similar to the story that the Minister told earlier about the little pony down in Otago. They’re sort of tragic things, because those don’t only affect the people that are concerned, but they must have—and I don’t understand whether they do or not—a massive effect on the animal. Of course, this bill to some extent addresses that issue, and that was very much a part of the discussions we had in the course of altering the Animal Welfare Act a couple of years ago, because the sentience of animals became quite a topic. So that’s a very good reason—with two odd examples, I suppose—of why you would want to change the bill and create the new offence of theft of livestock and other animals.

The other interesting one that’s been added to this is the entry on to agricultural land with the intent to commit an imprisonable offence. What that amounts to, of course, is an interesting point, but it could be anything. So this offence, it sort of gives the police much more power—and I think Matt King referred to that—but it also gives them the opportunity to prosecute people for going on to land as they would currently be able to prosecute them for going into your house with an intent to commit a crime. I think that’s a huge improvement in the legislation to protect farmers in the event of these very unsavoury kinds of events occurring because it is—as I said in an earlier speech I made on this topic—very frightening for those people down a one-way street or a one-way road in the middle of the night, well isolated from the rest of the world, to have people sneaking around their properties and around their house, often armed. You get a bit of a fright.

So livestock rustling’s become much more prevalent as food prices have risen and the security around urban businesses have made other forms of theft a little more difficult and a little less rewarding. If you think about it, you could steal a ring out of a jeweller’s shop and you take it down to the pawn shop, and you’ll probably get about a tenth of its face value, whereas, if you steal a cattle beast—and they stole a couple of them in Whanganui just a couple of weeks ago, and they found them on the spit at Castlecliff Beach with only a few bones left. It’s quite possible that those cattle beast would have been worth a bit more than they were in Northland, Matt, but probably a couple of thousand dollars, and they may well have doubled in value by the time they got to wherever they were sold off in bits. So it’s quite a profitable business if you’ve got the energy to do it.

The other thing about these crimes is they are often created by people with plenty of energy, and you’d think they’re worth preserving, those people, because they’re not, in my view, necessarily the same type of, I suppose, crook—for want of a better word—that you might find committing some other kinds of crime, because they do require a fair bit of energy.

The other issue that I think we’re really challenged by in this—and the Minister, again, referred to it briefly in his speech—is the issue of trying to catch these people. The second change to the crime entry under agricultural land does give the police a big head start as opposed to where they were before.

Whilst I don’t think some of these crimes are particularly serious, the big issue that’s come up, I guess, in the last 12 months with the M. bovis affair is that biosecurity risks of livestock travelling around the country are significant. So for livestock to be travelling around the country in a stolen truck and with a torch in the middle of the night and being dumped anywhere in the New Zealand is hugely challenging—challenging for the farming community and challenging for the biosecurity risk of this country. M. bovis won’t be the last issue that we have that affects livestock in that respect.

So that’s a big challenge, I think, for our rural communities. It’s a challenge for our police, and it’s also a challenge in the manner in which we can capture or, eventually, capture and prosecute the people that do this. So that, I think, is a really large challenge for us all.

As I said in the introduction to the Sentencing (Livestock Rustling) Amendment Bill over a year ago—in fact, it was 21 January 2018—theft of livestock from farms is estimated to be well in excess of $120 million a year. Those estimates were put in at a time when stock were not worth what they’re worth in Northland now, but, in fact, they’re worth a lot more than that, and so that could be quite significantly more money involved in this than that. In fact, I’m sure there will be a lot more money involved in this than that, and, as one travels around the country, you hear all sorts of stories of these kinds of things going on.

The other thing that that this bill effectively encompasses in one form or another is all sorts of things that were never covered under the original Crimes Act, and that’s the potential of theft of beehives—all sorts of things that nowadays have become extremely valuable. I suppose we might see the day—we might have seen it actually—when a mānuka plant is probably worth more than some of those other plants that they travel around the country with at night. I’m not sure it has been, but it might be.

So you see that all sorts of things change in agriculture very quickly—or change in rural New Zealand or rural provincial New Zealand very quickly. And as we’ve heard so much about, I suppose, the transformation of our economy, the rural economy is certainly transforming at a great rate. The things that challenged us in the days of the Mackenzie country, when the Mackenzie country was named—and, of course, in those days they used to hang rustlers no problem at all, but we don’t do that now. But the things that have changed since those days are absolutely significant and make quite a difference.

These types of crimes are not only a threat to animals and to their property; they’re also a threat to people. And I think that one of the things that really concerns me, I guess, is in the more remote parts of New Zealand where these types of activity take place, and they take place a lot because you might find that you’ve got someone who’s, effectively—well, they may not even be poaching but they’ll be out hunting. They won’t know they’re, effectively, poaching—I suppose that a definition of poaching might be they’re on land that doesn’t belong to them or they’re not permitted to go on to. It often happens in Department of Conservation land, where you get all sorts of people without permits to go there out hunting and things like that and they’re next to or adjacent to people who live there. And it’s quite frightening for those people.

So I think it has a very nervous effect on these people and, to some extent, a psychological effect on it. So we want all New Zealanders to feel safe, whether they’re rural New Zealanders or not, and I think changes to this bill in the SOP will reassure rural New Zealand—and not only rural New Zealand—that this Parliament cares about those sorts of things and wishes to make some improvements to it. I think this has given some very real teeth to the police and to rural New Zealand, for that matter, to protect themselves in a much better manner than they have. It also sends a pretty strong message to potential rustlers that if they’re caught, they can expect to get some pretty serious treatment. I think that the treatment they get, obviously, would be dependent on the crime.

So from my perspective, I think it’s a very good addition to the bill. I congratulate the Minister. Thank you for putting it in there. And just very briefly on the Minister, the first time I ever had an association with the Minister was when Timaru had nicked McCain Foods off Fielding. So you’ve just got to be very careful. But that was some 15 or so years ago. You’ve got to be careful.

Thank you, Mr Chair. Can I acknowledge the Minister in the chair, the Hon Andrew Little, this evening and thank him for bringing this Supplementary Order Paper through and thank him for working so constructively with the previous speaker, Ian McKelvie, MP for Rangitīkei. This is a good change, and, as we’ve just heard from the previous speaker, he worked hard on a member’s bill and officials rolled their sleeves up and got amongst it with members of the Primary Production Committee and thought there is a better way to get the outcomes that, indeed, Ian McKelvie wanted but the whole select committee wanted. So I acknowledge Minister Little for picking this up.

I was thinking about rural communities because this law change is going to help them. Often, rural communities live in places that are very isolated. When they come to find that some of their livestock have indeed been rustled and taken illegally, they feel extremely vulnerable. I guess the challenge with all of this—we’re the lawmakers in the Parliament this evening, pushing this law change through, which I wholeheartedly support—back to, I guess, the Government and society is making sure that we have the available policing resources to actually respond

💬 Hon Stuart Nash: 1,800 in three years.

It’s good that Stuart Nash has picked up National Party policy in the election campaign, and the real challenge back to the Minister is ensuring that those police are in provincial and rural New Zealand.

The difficulty for farmers, until the National Party came in to respond to stop rustlers and report it very quickly through to the police, was cellphone coverage. And what did National do? Well, we broadened the Rural Broadband Initiative so that now farmers in most places—admittedly, not everywhere—can respond a lot quicker.

The challenge for farmers, of course, is they—when you think about sheep—might have mobs of one to two thousand ewes in a flock, and they won’t necessarily know that five have gone missing. They don’t go out there every day and count them. It’s not like a dairy farmer, that has a pretty good idea milking his or her cows every day of exactly how many are in the herd. Suddenly they get their sheep in, which they might only do once every quarter to drench them, for shearing, for dagging, or for weaning, and suddenly they realise this flock was 2,000 and now through stock rustling—and when I’m talking about stock rustling I don’t necessarily mean someone just bringing the sheep into the corner and slaughtering a couple. Unfortunately there are well-organised people that are out there with stock trucks loading them out of yards in the early hours of the morning or, indeed, bringing the horse float in and shoving 20 very valuable ewe hogget replacements on board and cutting their throats. These types of crimes need to be dealt to.

The people that are doing this will be dealt to if, indeed, there is evidence. And that’s the next thing, rural communities need to work together. Because often the talk in the pub or the rugby club, well, that needs to be followed up on. It doesn’t just happen with one individual, often there are numerous people that are doing this.

I’m pleased on the definition, Minister, that you have that nice and broad for agriculture purposes, because I was thinking back to avocados, remember the price that they got to just this season, and—

💬 Dan Bidois: Eight dollars!

Exactly. So what do people do? They just think, “Oh well, I’m driving past an avocado orchard, I’ll just pop in and take a little bit of fruit.” Well, they’ll be done under this. Then, of course, we’ve got the mānuka honey industry. Beekeeping is worth about $300 million of exports to New Zealand. It’s growing. It’s the gold rush. It’s like infant formula was. There are hives everywhere. And, in fact, what do people do? Well, they think it’s OK to rock up their trailer or truck and take these hives. They will be dealt to under this.

The other thing that I think is really topical is cannabis reform. Minister Little’s going to be overseeing the referendum, and we’re waiting to see what the question is. But some of these cannabis growers, in fact many of them, just hop on to farmers’ land where the maize crop is growing—those of you who don’t know what maize is, it’s a corn crop, ideal for growing cannabis in amongst the rows. So therein lies another challenge—back to Stuart Nash making sure we’ve got the police resources.

Finally, can I commend Ian McKelvie, his idea getting it up. And can I acknowledge Andrew Little for supporting him to make the change that is necessary.

Thank you, Mr Chair. We are debating a rather unusual range of amendments to the Crimes Act in Part 1 of this bill. There’s the repeal of blasphemy, which is actually an important step in the direction of enhancing free speech. We need to be able to differentiate between what is bad language, which isn’t appropriate, and that which should be unlawful and a criminal offence.

The bill also deals with the issue of an accessory after the fact, and quite appropriately a repeal that allows a wife, husband, or a partner to be exempt of breaking the law around either hiding or assisting a person who has committed an offence. With the third provision, which has been also through the select committee, is the important issue around getting rid of the—I think it’s 800 years old—800-year-old provision where death must be within a year and a day.

Now the provision I’m particularly interested in, and the committee does need to take some time this evening to debate, is Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 185 in Mr Little’s name around the issue of stock rustling. And it is very unusual for Parliament to be asked to accept an amendment that has not gone through the select committee like the rest of the bill. It’s on that issue that I have some questions for the Minister. Now, I want to acknowledge, as my colleagues have, Ian McKelvie for this excellent amendment and for the sort of very grounded and sensible comments we had from my colleague Nathan Guy, who is so connected and practical around the issues facing our rural communities.

But I’m confused, and let me explain why. The Minister of Justice has come in to this role almost repeatedly over the last 18 months saying that his agenda is to reduce the penalties, that Parliament has for the last 20 years committed this awful business of continuously raising penalties. He’s given very bold commitments that this Government is going to reduce by 30 percent the number of people in prison. And so I’m a bit—I know my colleague Simeon Brown has tried to move some quite sensible amendments around the issue of psychoactive substances and increasing the penalties for those things that do enormous harm. But here’s the bit where the Government’s justice policy is a bit of a shambles. Here we have the Minister of Justice introducing a bill that is going to increase the term of imprisonment for a person found guilty of stock rustling from two years to seven years, and in respect of where they enter onto agricultural land with the intent of causing damage to buildings or property or livestock or machinery the person could be subject to up to 10 years.

Now I’m actually with my colleagues, Nathan Guy and my colleague Ian McKelvie, that people in rural communities are vulnerable and we are on this side of the Chamber are a law and order party, and that when people breach those laws I think those penalties are entirely appropriate. The part that I’m stunned by is that a Minister of Justice, who said that he is going to spend his time reducing penalties for crime, is backing us. And look, I’m happy to win the arguments. We are the party that won the most votes at the last election. We’re the biggest party in this Parliament. We love it when our policy is adopted. But I’d like the Minister in the chair, I’d love the Minister in the chair, to provide some explanation.

Now my colleague Greg O’Connor, who’s on the justice select committee, has been continuously arguing, along with his Labour colleagues, that their policy is one to stop increased penalties for such offences. So this is so out of step with the promises that the Labour Party has made with the very agenda that they’ve set at their justice summit with their constant criticism of us on this side of the Chamber that want to have appropriate penalties for crime. I think introducing an SOP in a committee stage where he’s proposing to increase the term of imprisonment from two years to either seven years or 10 years requires some sensible explanation. And that’s where I would invite the Minister in the chair to say how does this fit in with your broader justice policy, and how does this fit in with your criticism of previous Governments that have increased penalties.

Thank you, Mr Chairman. I’m more than happy to respond to the contribution that’s just been made. I think the question, if I interpret the question from the Hon Dr Nick Smith, is how to reconcile this Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 185 with what he describes as, or characterises as, a coalition Government approach of wanting to have a more effective justice system. Perhaps the starting point is to say this: bombast and nonsense does not constitute an argument. Unfortunately for Dr Nick Smith, he thinks that if he comes here and is bombastic enough and if he fudges enough, that constitutes an argument. The real pity about Dr Smith is he doesn’t just not listen to the Government members; he doesn’t even listen to his own members.

So the first point he actually made—I thought he was going to get on to a very important point, which is about why this hadn’t been in front of a select committee. Of course, it has been a front of a select committee. His own colleague Ian McKelvie said that, said that it had been the Primary Production Committee, said that it had been debated, and said that there were issues that officials had pointed out. And it was because of that and the work that Kieran McAnulty did with Ian McKelvie that we were able to come to a resolution. The upshot was that we were able to attach it to this bill with the agreement of colleagues.

Then we come to the point about, well, is this somehow inconsistent with a policy. What this coalition Government stands for is an effective justice system, a system that responds effectively and properly to criminal offending. And the reality is when it comes to livestock rustling and the impact on the rural community there is a huge gap. It is wrong that if you go into a yard in a metropolitan area, in an industrial area, climb over the fence, get into the yard—just being there is going to get you a much more serious potential penalty than if you leapt into a paddock in the wide open with some sort of criminal intent. If you then nick something from that industrial yard in the metropolitan area you’re going to get penalised much more heavily than if you leap into a paddock and nick a beast. And that was wrong—and that was wrong.

That’s why the Hon Nathan Guy’s contribution was actually extraordinarily helpful to the committee and to those who were looking on, because it explained that, actually, that criminal offending in the rural sector—there’s almost an epidemic of it now. You see, as Matt King has pointed out, the reports from up north and the reports from down south. There is a horrific level of livestock rustling and of livestock theft, and the law should send a signal that that’s not acceptable and it will be responded to seriously and firmly by the law. None of that is inconsistent with an approach that says that when we deal with offenders, we want to change their behaviour.

Now, I actually don’t know what the underlying problem is with people who draw up huge B-trains to a farm and start nicking all the livestock. That is different to somebody who’s grown up in a wretched life and who has been exposed to family violence in their early childhood, and whose only learnt response to stress in their lives is to lash out at others. I don’t know what the livestock rustler does or what drives their criminal offending, but we know that they’re a bunch of people whose criminal offending is a result of things they’ve learnt that we can teach them to unlearn. We’ve just got to give them the attention to do it.

We know that there are people whose offending is driven by drug addiction and a whole bunch of other things, and there are people who have been out of work for so long that they’ve lost any sense of hope or any sense of will to want to make a contribution. We can turn that stuff around. That’s why we want a justice system that is effective in doing its job, and none of this, which is about sending a proper, firm signal to those who would offend against and encroach upon the rights of those who live in our rural communities and who run and manage our farms and provide our food and our protein and what have you—those two propositions are not inconsistent.

So I’m very pleased to be picking up and sharing with Ian McKelvie and Kieran McAnulty the sense of reward about bringing this change here. I know, as those members and others have said, it will make a big difference to rural communities, and boy, do they need it when it comes to livestock rustling today.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I’d just like to reiterate the kind words that Andrew Little said about Ian McKelvie. I think, as chair of the Primary Production Committee, it was something that Ian McKelvie was fortunate to get drawn out of the ballot. It was a bill that he took through to the committee, and I do want to acknowledge that the Labour members on that committee were very helpful—especially Kieran McAnulty—in making that bill actually transition into something we’re seeing here today, because the bill as it stood was always going to be difficult to get through this Parliament because it was going to be a major amendment to the Crimes Act in the sense of looking at some options around defences, or the rationales behind how you would incorporate it. It really came down to this option here—that is, the most practical option—and Ian McKelvie, to his credit, made that happen. He didn’t give up on it, he found that solution, and, in the end, the Minister made that happen through this bill. So I think it does show that Parliament can actually achieve some things.

But the reality is also that it is a bill that the Labour Party would not wish to have not let go through this Parliament, because they also wish to see that protection for the provincial communities, and if they had denied the bill in the select committee process—which was quite feasible—then there would have been on their heads the fact that they had not allowed some kind of sanction for that kind of crime to be more explicit in our law. So in the end, they were forced to do it by good public opinion. Our good MP Mr Ian McKelvie made the most of that opportunity and forced their hand, and here we are today, seeing it through the House. So a good win to the process, and a good use of political judgment by my good colleague.

💬 Kiritapu Allan: That’s two minutes.

Is there something you’re saying over there? Oh yes, Kiri Allan was one of the members of that committee, as well, and I think she needs some credit, too. She’s a good member of that committee, and worked hard with Kieran to actually make that happen as well. I can’t remember if there were any New Zealand First members that helped in this process, but that’s normal for them.

💬 Ian McKelvie: Not since Prosser.

Mr Prosser—yes. Well, his career in New Zealand First ended well, didn’t it? You know, I think he still wants to come back, but they’re not making room for him, for some unknown reason. They don’t like freedom of thought, I think, is the problem in New Zealand First at the moment, and Mr Prosser is not going to have his day in this Parliament again, unfortunately, due to his speaking out against the almighty leader and the champion of the provinces.

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): And the member needs to come back to the bill, please.

Yeah, I was just giving some context, Mr Chair, because it’s important that people see that side of the parliamentary process, as well, because this is a very public part, but the private parts that they don’t see are quite interesting, as well—to look at the context of pieces of legislation—and that’s really important.

I do note that the Minister had a very interesting approach to the criminal justice field, and, as somebody who’s working in the corrections field, it’s going to be interesting to see how he actually promotes those changes in people’s behaviour. Saying that it’s a matter of turning around and teaching to learn—those were his catchphrases in his speech just now. So we’re waiting with bated breath to see how that may actually translate into Government legislation and an approach to the issue of criminal justice.

The stock rustling aspect is really relevant to communities, because one of the things Ian McKelvie raised when we discussed this is we’re dealing with small communities where often the rustler is known or will be living in that community, and there may be a whole lot of social and other financial reasons why the person engages in that activity, but at the end of the day, in small communities, everyone still has to live together. It’s not going to be an offence where you’re going to be necessarily in jail for a long period of time, generally, and that person will be coming back into the community and people will engage and probably have to work and live in the same small area within the small community.

It’s important that we also recognise that it’s not generally a situation where somebody from outside comes in; it’s often a case where it’s somebody from within that area. So you do need criminal justice policies that do actually enable that person to assimilate back into that community and take a full role.

I move, That the question be now put.

Thank you, Mr Chair. It’s great to be back in the House and on my feet, as it’s my first opportunity to speak in this year—2019.

This Crimes Amendment Bill has quite a theme running through it, really, with the Minister of Justice’s Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 185 picking up Ian McKelvie’s member’s bill around stock rustling. Going back—as was mentioned—to Mackenzie’s days, it was punishable by capital punishment, in fact, and it was taken very seriously. Somewhere along the way, during the lawmaking process, it got left out in the way that burglary and other theft crimes were picked up, and it really was left out on its own.

We were struck through the select committee process by the submitters who came in, and we saw how threatened some of them had felt in their own homes when a car or a truck could be heard out somewhere, or maybe a shot—what do you do? In the dark, do you go out by yourself—or the worst case, again, would be to go out armed—to try and protect yourself? That’s obviously a slippery slope, when we start to go down that path to try and protect our own goods and our own homes.

Good on Minister Andrew Little for picking this up and putting it in an SOP and into the Crimes Act. We struggled with this in the Primary Production Committee. We had lots of submissions that were heartfelt, as I said, and then advice saying, “Well, this isn’t going to work. You’re not really going to change much. As it’s written, it’s not going to work. If we try to change it, we’d be outside the scope of the bill.” We were all frustrated by the fact that we all wanted to do something, but it was quite evident that the vehicle for doing that was not going to be that member’s bill. But picking it up as an SOP and putting it into the Crimes Act was actually the way to go with it.

Then, when we look at the spousal immunity for being an accessory to the crime, I imagine that dates back well before Mackenzie’s time, that law. It’s way past its use-by date, and it’s great that this Supplementary Order Paper has been picked up and that that will no longer be the case. It’s right and proper that that comes on. I just think it’s ironic that, again, it sort of links back to days well and truly gone. And blasphemy and libel—I imagine there’ll be lots of blasphemy after your stock’s been rustled, I’m sure—that dates way, way back, and most cultures have a version of blasphemy and in our case it’s a Christian blasphemy and in others it’s of course the other religions that are prevalent in those countries. And it is a huge imposition on freedom of speech. It’s outdated. It should go, and I’m really pleased to see that it is going. But I am concerned that the new blasphemy that’s becoming very popular in the Western World today is hate speech. And again, I’d really caution—and I’d be very concerned if we ever move to try and impose a modern version of blasphemy in the form of a hate speech law, to impose on people’s freedom of expression. It is something that’s key to our democracy. So while it’s good to see this in here, I just caution all members: let’s be careful that we don’t end up in a position where we try and reinvent this blasphemy-type law in another form. So I think that that’s absolutely critical.

I want to spend the last few seconds I have on my feet to talk about the year and a day law, as well, referred to in Supplementary Order Paper 192 that’s in here. I think Dr Nick Smith’s SOP is absolutely critical in this, and I think it’s also—

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): I think that’s in Part 2.

Yes, I realise it’s not in this part; I’m just linking it back in terms of the period these things all come from, and I think it goes back to 1200 or something like that. So all of these SOPs have a link in time, if you like—not back to exactly the same time, but it is ironic that we end up with our Acts that get outdated over time. It often takes a very long period for us to come to the conclusion that we need to change them. This Crimes Amendment Bill is doing that across the board really. I think it’s a fantastic and timely bill, and I commend it to the House.

I move, That the question be now put.

Thank you, colleagues, for wishing me happy birthday on my 19th birthday today—ha, ha! Thank you, Mr Chair, for giving me this opportunity to contribute in this debate on the Crimes Amendment Bill, which repeals three provisions. It’s great to see that the Minister of Justice himself is in the chair, and I would like to make some requests to him at a later stage. I would also like to touch upon Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 185. The bill was originally under the name of Ian McKelvie and the Minister has taken it as part of the Crimes Amendment Bill. I don’t have a rural background, but I have been to many farms. Recently, there was a delegation from India with whom we went to see one of the sheep farms, and the visiting delegation was amazed to see that only one person at that farm was able to handle 5,000 sheep. But when we were talking to this gentleman, he mentioned about stock rustling and how people come and pinch some stock, and that was really disappointing because the impression from those people who were from India was that they were really very amazed to see how, in the whole systematic way, the whole thing is organised so that one person can handle such a big flock of sheep. So that was one issue.

Later on we went to see some of the kiwifruit orchards, and over there my friend had some beehives and he mentioned that sometimes they are being stolen—once they are up to the limit, they get stolen. So those are the things which are happening, and our country is based on agriculture and horticulture and it should not be happening. The farmers should have confidence in whatever they are doing, and they should be able to maintain it. As the Minister himself mentioned, when somebody enters a car yard or a yard and steals something, he is punished. Whereas, somebody who enters a farm and steals something, he doesn’t have any consequences. So I think, Minister, you have taken the right decision by adopting this into the Crimes Act, and I hope the people will have a lot of confidence in doing their own business rather than looking after or putting up security measures where they can have some attention.

Another issue which is very important is the recent outbreak of M. bovis. If the stock is moved around without consent and the stock is infected, that can pass on to other areas, and that is another issue which needs to be addressed, and I hope this will be addressed to this.

While you are in the chair, Minister, I would like to request of you that I have got a member’s bill, which is the Kirpan Authorisation Bill. And I hope that in the next amendment to the Crimes Act, as we discussed, you will insert that into the Crime Amendments Bill, and that will be a very good step towards the issue being raised by the Indian community. I hope that that will be part of your next amendment bill. With these words, I conclude my speech.

Thank you very much, Mr Chair. I’m pleased to have the opportunity just to change the course of the debate a little bit, only in respect of the fact that I will be speaking, perhaps briefly, not necessarily for my full, allotted time, but on the subject of spousal immunity. Various other aspects of the Crimes Amendment Bill have been pretty well covered, I think. Not to say that there won’t be more to say, of course—that’s for you to judge and not me. But without a lot having been said on the repeal of section 71(2) of the Crimes Act, I just wanted to place on record at this the committee stage the implication of what the House will be doing in—eventually it seems—passing this bill. Just to go through briefly some of the key elements of that under the three main headings, if I may. The first is consistency. The second is modernity. The third is efficacy. And then finally I will, if time allows, just briefly touch on one cost that does go along with this, not to suggest necessarily that that outweighs the other benefits.

But under the heading of consistency, I am indebted to the Ministry of Justice who provided advice to the Justice Committee in relation to this matter. They point out that this repeal, among other things, would be to bring consistency with other parts of the law, including the Evidence Act, where spouses and civil union partners don’t have immunity from being compelled to give evidence on the basis only of their marital status, and elsewhere in the Crimes Act, as well, spouses can be said to have conspired with each other to have committed a crime and that’s no defence in itself.

So just to take a step back, having covered that consistency point, just for the sake of clarity, if anyone following this is unclear, what we’re talking about is an accessory after the fact, which is to say a person who’s assisted in the commission of a crime but not participated in it such that they themselves would be charged with the crime. So that person who, if they’re married to or are a civil union partner of—and I use those terms deliberately; a point on which we’ll come back to in a moment—knowingly assists someone who has committed an offence and has given them succour, or refuge, and assisted them essentially to escape arrest after their commission of that. And so we talk about the assistance being after the fact, that is to say, following the offence having been committed.

So just to go to my second point, if I may, which is modernity. So that’s basically making more modern or up to date the concept of our criminal law, and this is really the bit that is being repealed, which is the spousal immunity, which is actually almost exactly spousal, as opposed to other relationships which in 2019 we’d regard to as being akin to that. So the wording of the Crimes Act at the moment says that a person whose spouse or civil union partner to whom that applies is the relevant person. In this day and age we have a wider concept of what a person would look like who would be able to enjoy such protection, and so part of the consequence of repealing the section of spousal immunity will be that we will remove that narrower sense that one might have expected to prevail in 1961 when the Crimes Act was passed, notwithstanding that there’ve been updates since then but, certainly in 2019, I think probably, generally speaking, there is appetite for having a broader sense of that if it were to remain and, in fact, it’s to be repealed.

And then my third point is, I promised, under the heading of efficacy. So this is just really the reasonably obvious point that if we’re removing immunity from what would otherwise be an offence, which would be to be an accessory to a crime, then we make it more likely—I suppose, on the law of averages—that crimes will be detected, because what we are doing is we’re making it harder for people to harbour those who have committed a crime and for arrests to be escapes and so forth.

I’ll just finish my time by touching on the cost, as I foreshadowed at the start. The relationship of people who are married or in analogous types of relationships is a special one and, I suppose, we should acknowledge for the sake of the record that there is a cost in that we don’t allow people to have that defence essentially—although it’s not a defence; it’s actually a standalone section in itself—but just to acknowledge that as that deliberate decision we’re making, but we’re saying that the other benefits such as I’ve outlined do outweigh that and hence we are supportive of that on this side of the Chamber.

I move, That the question be now put.

I wish to further contribute in this committee stage to clause 6 in respect to the questions around the repeal of the death being within a year and a day provision, and the reason I want to make a considered contribution on Part 1 of the Crimes Amendment Bill is to give some history as to where the provision came from. I want to give some background as to why that may have been relevant then but is not today, and then to talk about how important, in a modern context, it is that this improvement in the law is made.

Now, I was quite surprised at the Justice Committee to find there the death within a year and a day came from a common law judgement in the English courts in the year 1276. That’s a wee while ago—about 800 years.

💬 Chris Penk: Before your time.

It was before my time, I assure Chris Penk I was not a member of the House in 1276, but the interesting bit was this: what the judge determined was that someone should not be held accountable for a death for an event that occurred more than a year ago because it was too difficult to be able to connect the causal affect. It actually arose in a poisoning case, where someone was accused of poisoning a person and they then died 18 months later, and they felt it was unjust. Of course, I would remind the committee that in 1276, the penalty for committing such an act was being hung, drawn, and quartered. So it was pretty tough, and it was appropriate at that time.

My point is that society today has become so much more sophisticated and complex, and that actually, there are lots of things that New Zealanders can do that may not cause an immediate death but, down the track, can be incredibly dangerous. For instance, if you are manufacturing a piece of equipment like a car, and you negligently include a provision in that item of the car—it may not be that someone’s instantly killed but it may well be that you could be criminally responsible for an accident that occurs 10 years later because you knowingly included it in the design of that vehicle. Today we live in an incredibly complex world of technologies and, actually, whether it be in terms of drugs, whether it be in terms of electronics, traffic lights, all sorts of systems, actually today, in this scientifically advanced and technological society, there can be a real connection between a criminal act of gross neglect and a death some years later that it would be inappropriate for people to be able to use this very ancient and archaic provision to not be held responsible.

I also want to make the point that actually, this is really important. This provision is only where people die. This is about death and about criminal acts associated with death. And so it is not some minor issue. During my time in various ministerial portfolios—some people may remember the awful Cave Creek tragedy that occurred on the West Coast. Actually, the acts of neglect there that caused those deaths were more than a year after the events that occurred. We could all look at the tragedy that continues to cause controversy in respect of the Pike mine. Actually, if you look at the Royal Commission’s conclusion, some of the acts of neglect that occurred around the safety systems of that mine occurred more than 12 months prior to the explosion that resulted in the death of the 29 brave miners and, again, in my view that is an example of why this one year and a day law needs to go. I have also made the point very strongly—in fact, this provision in this bill has been triggered by the frustration of not just the CTV families but all New Zealanders—that the presence of this provision and our Crimes Act enables the engineers on the CTV building to not be held criminally responsible.

So what I want to emphasize is how important and significant it is that this provision is to be repealed, that it is archaic, that it is out of date, and we should not be allowing people to avoid criminal responsibility for death as a consequence of this provision.

I move, That the question be now put.