Public Finance (Fines Collection Costs—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Justice: I present a legislative statement on the Public Finance (Fines Collection Costs—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill.

💬 SPEAKER: The legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on Parliament’s website.

I move, That the Public Finance (Fines Collection Costs—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

This bill is part of a package of proposals that support the Government’s Budget goal to deliver efficient, effective, and fiscally sustainable public services. The package promotes the effective provision of court and tribunal services and will contribute to the target of getting the Government’s books back into balance. Furthermore, this bill will increase revenue at a time when we’re investing a crucial $2.9 billion into restoring law and order and cleaning up the mess left by the last Government. Our Government is facing up to the reality left behind: New Zealand isn’t as safe as it once was. It isn’t the New Zealand many of us grew up in. This kind of revenue will allow us to invest in addressing serious youth offending, ensuring there are real consequences for crime, increasing prison capacity, and getting more police officers on the beat.

This bill will amend section 73 of the Public Finance Act 1989. I acknowledge the Minister of Finance’s agreement to the amendment. The bill will increase the proportion of fines retained by the Crown which are collected in the courts by the Ministry of Justice on behalf of local authorities and other organisations. The percentage of fines collected which will be retained by the Crown will increase from 10 percent to 14 percent and is expected to increase net revenue by $2.697 million across 2024-25 to 2028-29. This does not include fines collected for Government departments or Crown entities but does include council-controlled organisations.

Provision of collection enforcement services by the ministry for local authorities and other organisations includes a high volume of fines imposed for infringement offences. Individuals who commit an infringement offence such as illegal parking must pay a fine. If a person fails to pay an infringement fee, local authorities can choose whether to use the collection and enforcement services provided by the courts to collect this fee. When fines are recovered by the Ministry of Justice on behalf—

💬 Hon Dr Duncan Webb: It’s a parking tax.

—listen—of local authorities and other organisations—

💬 Hon Dr Megan Woods: We’re listening all right—so’s the rest of the country.

Listen up. When fines are recovered by the Ministry of Justice on behalf of local authorities and other organisations, 10 percent is credited to the Crown in accordance with section 73 of the Public Finance Act, and the remainder of the fine is paid by the local authority. The 10 percent deducted from fines is retained by the Crown, rather than the ministry, but reflects a contribution towards the cost of collection and enforcement services. The 10 percent retained by the Crown from fines it recovers was set in 1989 and has not been reviewed or increased in over 30 years.

The costs of collection have, of course, increased over that time. Local authorities and other organisations who receive most of the money the court collects for their fines benefit from using the service and should be responsible for a reasonable level of costs for the recovery. The increase in the amount of the fine the Crown retains from 10 percent to 14 percent is comparable to the proportion charged by private debt collectors. The recovery rate will remain competitive whilst still helping to cover the costs of collection.

This bill is part of a suite of changes to update fees and costs in courts and tribunals which will increase revenue. These fees and costs will be increased in line with inflation since they were last set, and most come into force on 1 July. There are 26 Orders in Council giving effect to the fee changes. Most of these have not been updated in over 10 years. These collection charges include fees paid to file unpaid infringements for collection and the court costs—these have not been updated since 1998—and the enforcement fee for fines, which was last updated in 2013.

It is appropriate that the costs of collecting and enforcing fines are recovered from those who commit the offences and have unpaid fines. The suite of changes, which includes this bill, will encourage recipients to resolve their infringements directly with the issuing authorities, rather than leaving them unpaid. It is important that where the courts’ collection services are used, the portion of fines retained by the Crown is also increased through this bill to ensure it reflects increases in collection costs. It is intended that this bill will come into force through the Budget night legislation, and the proposed commencement is 1 July 2024. I commend the bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

No wonder there was kind of a smattering of half-hearted applause from the members on the other side there. That was one of the—

💬 James Meager: We’re waiting for the rest of the speeches.

💬 Hon Dr Megan Woods: That’s why you’re losing your long weekend.

We’re very happy to be here and to debate the important issues of the day that this Government want to raise under urgency. One of those, my friends, is that we think we should make the local bodies pay a bit more to the Government for parking fines. We’ve got a parking fine tax. I don’t know where that member got his numbers from saying that this was going to raise millions of dollars, because the disclosure statement that I’ve got off the Table says that this piece of legislation next year will raise $466,000. So here we are debating fiercely a 4 percent increase in—and this is what this Government does: it’s so scrambling around to find money for its tax package that it’s had to go right to the back of the cupboard and find a 4 percent increase. Of course, the irony is that this is a 10 percent levy on collections that’s done through the court system. Of course, you don’t need to increase it and adjust it for inflation because it’s a proportionate levy. It makes perfect sense.

That’s the other thing. I mean, David Seymour must be seething because he’s got his new Ministry for Regulation thing going on and one of his big bugbears is that levies and charges need to actually relate to the costs. What work has this Government done? None. This is just a grab—this is just a grab—and this utterly cuts across the work that David Seymour wants to do. This is just a tax—and it’s not just local bodies, actually; it’s any number of entities, if you read the legislation itself. It’s any local authority or other organisation, department, an Office of Parliament, a Crown entity, a Schedule 4 organisation or a Schedule 4A company. Whenever they go to court to collect a fine, then this levy will be applied. So it’s just a little money grab; effectively, a tax on these other entities.

The other thing—if the Minister had done his homework, he’d know—is there’s a whole lot of exceptions littered throughout legislation as well. So fines under the Dog Control Act are exempt, for example. The Accident Compensation Corporation is also exempt. Fines under the Resource Management Act are also exempt. So it’s a strange little piecemeal thing. But, look, this is the choice they’ve made; this is how they’re going to do it. They’ve chosen to borrow money to increase debt. They’ve chosen this trivial tax package which is giving derisory amounts to our lowest-paid workers and they’ve got to find the money somewhere, so they’re going to dip into the back of the cupboard and impose an extra levy on local bodies.

Of course, we’ve got our spokesperson for local government, the Hon Kieran McAnulty, here and I’m sure he may have something to say because this is how they treat local bodies. They don’t help them out. In fact, here they are; they’ve got increasing rates—increasing rates—and what do they do? They just take a bit more money off them. They’re hanging out our local bodies to dry. Actually, the funny thing is that if there is any money to be made, it’s not by this bit of legislation; it’s by the numerous Orders in Council that the Minister alluded to in his speech. Because what they’re going to do there is they’re going to actually increase significantly the costs that are imposed on people who go to court to argue about their parking fine.

And let’s just—and this is in the disclosure statement—remember who this will impact most. It will impact our poorest New Zealanders. In fact, the disclosure statement itself says this will likely impact Māori and Pasifika disproportionately as well. So there we go again. Either—[Interruption] It’s what it says. You can naysay, but if you’ve done your homework and done your reading, you can see that that’s what it says. At least there is a disclosure statement in this case.

This is another ridiculous, trivial bill raising a few hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we’re doing it under urgency—utterly, utterly unnecessarily, but you’ve brought it here. We’re going to do our job. We’ll have a good look over it, and we’ve got a lot more to say about it. But so far, from what I can see, a silly little bill that the Minister’s brought to the House.

The Government is so desperate to find cuts to fund their tax cuts that ultimately benefit those who already have the means to do well, while throwing breadcrumbs to everyone else. They’re basically willing to reduce the amount that local government is able to have when it comes to the collection of fines, which actually, supposedly, are used to deter poor behaviour. But let’s make it clear: fines, in the first place, were already a free pass for the wealthy to get away with bad behaviour, because if you’re rich, a fine means nothing but a wet bus ticket on the wrist. A fine, if you’re on a low income or if you’re on the benefit—the same people who benefit the least from the Government tax cuts—could mean the difference between being able to pay your rent.

So let’s also illuminate where the Government is coming from: relying on punishments that actually, ultimately, only tend to affect the lives of those struggling the most and allow those who have six-figure salaries or more to get away with poor behaviour, and, at the same time, making it harder for local government to have the revenue to do what it needs to do to provide services to our local communities just to pay for those tax cuts. This is an unserious Government—fiscally irresponsible—that will, at any cost, for the optics of having tax cuts, completely undermine our public services, will undermine local government, and will continue with the rhetoric of using fines, which again are punishments for the poor and a free pass for the rich.

The Green Party thinks that the answer lies in the devolution and the resourcing of services to local entities. And for a Government that talks about localism, this is a bill that does the exact opposite. It’s really interesting just how fiscally illiterate the members on the opposite side are. You know, when Duncan Webb was talking about the amount of revenue that is going to be collected by this bill, the members opposite me said, “Oh, there’s a lot of money for a person.” No single individual is going to keep that revenue to themselves. That’s revenue the Government will be using, so I would encourage the members opposite to me that if they’re going to be interjecting, at least they should not be—or, actually, I invite them to demonstrate their interjections how fiscally irresponsible and illiterate they are and how much they’re committed to actually punishing those doing it the toughest while at the same time cozying up to the wealthy elite, the property investors, the 70 homes - owning landlords who will then be complaining about a potential capital gains tax from the left.

This bill is a nonsense bill. If we want adequate services for our communities—our communities having the right to have good waste disposal services, for example—the answer lies in resourcing our local entities, not depriving them of funds and the Government collecting that to offer these tax cuts. The truth is that this bill comes in the context of the Government making the cost of living more expensive for our communities. This bill is part of a range of interventions that relied on making life more expensive for people. And so the Green Party just simply won’t be supporting this bill. This bill also goes against our principles of appropriate decision making, because at no point, have we seen adequate consultation with local government authorities to ensure that this bill is adequately consulted on with those local government authorities who ultimately will be affected.

The bill relies, like I said at the beginning of my contribution, on punishments that allow the rich to get away with poor behaviour. If we look at the regulatory impact statement, it’s laid bare here that low-income individuals are likely to be disproportionately impacted by increasing costs. And I’ll quote: “These individuals are more likely to be unable to pay on time in the first place and may be more likely to default on their fines and have enforcement action taken against them.” The fines that we’re talking about end up criminalising poor people. For a Government that is so supposedly serious on reducing crime, they’re actually relying on means that end up criminalising people in poverty—a completely unserious Government. But I don’t even want to appeal to their values as if they care, because they don’t care. They don’t care about people in poverty, they don’t care about disabled people who are doing it the hardest, they don’t care about the poor people they’re criminalising, and they don’t care about their so-called localism they promote, because this bill shows otherwise. It’s a completely unserious Government, and the Green Party won’t be supporting this bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Nobody likes fines—getting them, paying them—but, unfortunately, sometimes this happens. Nobody likes to pay a fee in court, but often people end up there. And when that is done and there is a cost associated with that, it should be paid. Now, for too long, 10 years in some cases, and 20 in the case of court fines, the price has not gone up. This is a very fair increase, and I commend it to the House.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Public Finance (Fines Collection Costs—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill. This bill amends the Public Finance Act 1989 to increase, from 10 percent to 14 percent, the percentage the Crown retains from amounts of fines recovered for offences prosecuted by or on behalf of local authorities or other organisations. This will better reflect the cost of the collection and enforcement of court fines and ensure that it remains fiscally sustainable. This seems to be like a very common-sense approach, and since our party is a party of common sense, I commend this to the House.

This rather modest, or some might say pathetic, little bill that’s take that’s taking up the time of this House, chewing through taxpayers’ money—as my colleague Duncan Webb pointed out, is likely to generate $466,000 for the Crown finances in the next financial year. It’ll probably cost more money going through this House in urgency than it will generate in the next financial year. It’s unnecessary.

But I’ll say this: this bill actually tells an important part of the story of this Budget. You see, this Government is desperately trying to claw back every little bit of revenue that it can get its hands on to shore up its crumbling finances. This bill increases the percentage of fines retained by the Crown when the courts gather fines on behalf of councils. The important bit of the picture for the public to understand is that this Government handed over $2.9 billion in tax breaks to landlords, part of a package of $14.7 billion that this Budget gives in tax cuts that will disproportionately benefit the well-off.

Now, net debt, as a result of this, will rise over the next four years by $68.3 billion to more than $220 billion. That’s $12 billion more than the Treasury forecast last December. Now, a member on that side of the House stood up not very long ago and said that the tax cuts are fully funded—the tax cuts are fully funded. Well, the only way you can say that the tax cuts are fully funded is that they are fully funded by borrowing—they are fully funded by borrowing. The Government is giving $14.7 billion in tax cuts; they are borrowing an extra $12 billion. They are fully funded by borrowing—that’s what they are.

So how is the Government trying to make their dodgy numbers add up? Well, they are shovelling costs onto Kiwis like there is no tomorrow. They’re bringing back the $5 prescription medicines fee. They have slashed the public transport subsidies that provided free public transport for our kids and half price for young people. There are extra road-user charges for electric vehicle users, and a 50 percent increase in car rego. They have cancelled First Home Grants. They are scaling back the building of State housing. They have reduced the quality of school lunches, and they have increased tuition fees for students in their first year. And now, there’s no depth too low for this Government to stoop than actually spending the valuable time of this House in urgency, clawing back hundreds of thousands of dollars in parking fines.

The fact that they didn’t campaign on this in the election campaign is misleading. It is dishonest. There was no word of this during the election campaign, but it is part of an organised campaign of clawing back revenue from New Zealanders by imposing a raft of new charges. But there’s more. All of these extra costs imposed on Kiwis are having an inflationary effect. According to Reserve Bank data, fees and charges increased; the inflation for the last quarter was 2 percent—it has doubled since the Labour Government was in office. That is, without doubt, contributing to inflationary pressures that will keep interest rates higher than they otherwise would have been. And that, more than anything—more than the raft of extra charges this Government has imposed on New Zealanders—will hurt hard-pressed families by increasing their mortgage servicing fees. This is a Government that is making bad choices, it is breaking promises like there’s no tomorrow, and New Zealanders won’t forget it.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, now we know why the Labour Party thinks that the tax relief offered by the Government is trivial and miserly and not quite enough, because the Labour Party wants to email every hard-working New Zealander and take their tax cut and donate it back to the Labour Party. That’s what they want to do. That’s what they think is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars—back to the taxpayer, straight back in Labour Party coffers. Shame on them.

This is my first contribution today, which is also 30 May still in Parliament land, and as it is 30 May, I’d like to wish Mike Butterick a very happy birthday for yesterday, for today, for tomorrow, for Monday, for Tuesday—for as long as it takes for this hard-working Government to get through the programme to support the Budget that gives tax relief for hard-working New Zealanders and not the semi-retired Labour Party.

This bill—and I’ll remind the House—is a very concise, very short, very simple, sharp bill; lots of quick, sharp calls because it does one thing: it creates a small increase to the amount collected by the Crown from local authorities, from 10 percent to 14 percent, for cost recovery, basically driven under the rampant inflation from the previous Government. It does one short, simple thing. It is excellent, it is concise, and I look forward to its passage through the House, swiftly or otherwise.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I think that speech there was quite telling. I’m very pleased that James Meager realises that we will still be here on Monday and Tuesday, because they thought that we would give up. They gave up. They were giving 60-second, 90-second speeches, and here we saw another one, but it spoke volumes because he didn’t actually speak about this bill; he gave a speech to the previous bill. He had a point to make. He didn’t have anything to say about this bill, because this bill is a pointless exercise that will actually contribute to them still being here on Monday.

Why on earth are we ramming this through under urgency? This bill is utterly pointless in the context of the Budget and utterly pointless in the context of this urgency, and it actually is a relatively small amount of money in the context of the Budget. It does speak volumes as to why they believe that this bill is so important, because they are so desperate for any form of revenue to try and plug the gap. But the problem is the gap is too big. The gap is so big that they’ve had to borrow billions in order to fill it.

But there’s a principle behind this bill that I oppose, and it is, yet again, the National Party kicking local government. Yet again, the National Party thinks local government are so irrelevant that we can actually take some of what they would consider income and revenue and try and plug the gap that they created by their decisions, because, ultimately, it is their decisions, isn’t it? They are the ones that are deciding to give $2.9 billion to landlords, they are ones who are deciding to reduce the time of the brightline test—they are the ones that are deciding to do that instead of doing things like funding cancer treatment that they promised.

But here’s the thing: in the context of this bill and local government, they promised that they would help every council in the country pay for their water. Matt Doocey stood in this House, in that seat right there—I remember it like it was yesterday—and he promised councils that if National were elected, they would help them pay for their water. We knew at the time it wasn’t true, because we knew that we were talking about $185 billion. They broke that promise, and you can add it to the list, because there is a long winding list of broken promises that result from the Budget, and that is one of them.

Now, after doing that, and after repealing water reform and placing the burden back on councils—and we’re about to debate a bill that actually won’t help councils one bit, and won’t reduce rates bills by any meaningful standard—here they are having another crack at local councils. It’s not bad enough that they have to pick a Minister who’s totally disinterested in the sector; now they have to put the boot in by saying, “Yep, we’ll take $400,000 this year and $500,000 the next year.” Oh yeah, OK, it’s only 4 percent, but here’s some context: Local Government New Zealand came to the Governance and Administration Committee earlier this week, and they talked about the pressure that they are under in terms of the rating system. I asked them whether the Minister had anything meaningful to discuss with them about assisting them with rates, and they said no.

They were excited about the prospect that there might be some shared GST for new builds. Well, that’s not in the Budget, so there’s another thing that they’ve dangled in front of local government and they’ve taken away. What they told us, which is useful in terms of understanding how important this actually is to local government—they used the example of the Mackenzie District Council, who, because of the increase in tourists that have been visiting their district, have had to fund someone to clean the toilets twice a day as opposed to once a day. Now, that small adjustment equates to a 1 percent increase in rates across the entire district. That’s massive. So, yeah, OK, fine, it’s only $400,000, but that’s actually significant for local government, and it’s very significant, proportionally, to small rural councils—the very areas that these people are supposed to represent.

💬 Hon Matt Doocey: Cheer up—it’s not that bad.

And all I get is “Cheer up”.

💬 Hon Matt Doocey: You’re negative all the time—“Negative Nancy” over there.

We’re negative, because you guys have stuffed local government. It’s easy for Matt Doocey to say, sitting there in Waimakariri, who were the lead opponents to water reform, who have all their pipes paid for by the Government after the earthquake, and then say, “No, we don’t need reform.” Matt Doocey has let his district down. Matt Doocey has let New Zealand down, and he claps and he laughs and it’s a genuine display of—

💬 Hon Matt Doocey: Hey, I won my electorate, buddy. How did you go?

Now he’s making fun of people who didn’t win their electorates; I’ll pass that on to Nicola Willis, shall I? They snap and they respond and they have a crack, because they have no answers. It’s typical of this arrogant Government.

I rise to support this bill, that makes a small amendment to the Public Finance Act, but, once again, the Opposition are using every call obsessing about tax relief. They’re obsessing about tax relief, claiming it’s both unpopular and insignificant. Well, three numbers—three numbers: polls show that 75 percent of Kiwis want tax relief, 75 percent; that’s the first one. Second number: 83 percent of New Zealanders and 93 percent of households would benefit, according to Treasury, from tax relief. They’ll benefit from tax relief on 31 July. This is a suite of packages to make New Zealanders’ lives a lot better. They’re looking forward to it, they want it, they support it; we support them. I commend the bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to say a few words on the Public Finance (Fines Collection Costs—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill. Saying it took longer than what it actually does. It’s a trivial little bill that is a waste of our time.

But before I start, may I extend my birthday wishes to Mike Butterick. It’s an interesting fact that because we’re in urgency, the day doesn’t actually end, does it? So some people have birthdays, some people have birth weeks or birth months, but I reckon Mike’s birthday is going to take about 5½ days, maybe six, so I think we’ve got plenty of time—to congratulate him on his birthday best of week. Also, while I’m at it, Mr Brewer—if I was him, I’m not entirely sure I’d be mentioning polls at the moment. I don’t think that that’s necessarily a good way to make a contribution, but nevertheless, I digress.

This bill raises two things for me and only two things. I think, as has been said, it’s the second bill up in urgency. It’s like a jewel in the crown, isn’t it? You know, the No. 2 banner comes up and what have we got? The Public Finance (Fines Collection Costs—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill, which is, essentially, just a parking ticket tax—that is all it is. I mean, we remember, don’t we? It’s not that long ago that both Nicola Willis and Christopher Luxon were talking a really big talk about what turned out to be a pretty disappointing tax policy. Then they talked up this really big talk, and actually they both staked their jobs on it and their reputations on what turned out to be pretty facile tax cuts. And here we are, the second bill up under urgency—which is going to take many, many days, and it could have been introduced on Monday morning rather than Friday—talking about parking ticket tax.

Now, as has been said, this bill was a bit shoddy and it doesn’t really have much of a rationale behind it. The cost recovery impact statement (CRIS), as has been pointed out, said that it took into account private sector fees. That’s all right—private sector fees. You might look at some sort of comparison of what the private sector’s doing, but it’s completely irrelevant. This is about cost recovery, and so even the CRIS couldn’t quite get to grips with what this bill is about. Then it talked about cost pressures, but it doesn’t actually provide any information or any evidence whatsoever that the current 10 percent charge is failing to recover those costs. But the thing that really gets me is that it’s really bad regulation. At a time when we’ve heard huge amounts of hubris, where we’ve got David Seymour spending up a storm setting up his Ministry for Regulation, his citadel of all things good regulation, we’ve got this shoddy little bill coming through, which is clearly just bad regulation.

As colleagues have previously said, this is all about choices. There was a choice to put this up second on the order. There was a choice to show and use this House’s time to do things that actually mattered, just like there was a choice and the ability to not make so many broken promises, as we’ve heard over the last couple of days. So, in all seriousness, let’s just think about that for a minute. For pensioners that are sitting at home thinking to themselves they were going to get some relief, which is such an oxymoron, they’re getting $4.50 a week, and that’s per couple. Then you’ve got minimum wage earners who are earning 50c more an hour. These are the choices that were made. This is the bill we’re debating instead of things that are more serious. If you want to debate things that are serious, why are we here talking about parking ticket taxes?

But the one that really kicks it for me is the fact that patients were led to believe, over a period of time, that 13 new cancer treatments were going to be available to them. These are real people with real lives, with real diseases, with real hopes, who were led to believe that this was going to happen, and yesterday, during this Budget process, that was ripped out from underneath them, and that is deplorable. But never mind, here we are again talking about parking ticket taxes, something that is completely irrelevant. It is a waste of our time. We’re going to be here for hours looking over something that is the Government’s choice, and I think it’s a complete waste of time. We do not commend it to the House. I look forward to hearing many, many more contributions from that side of the House about how they can justify not just this but all of their actions over the last couple of days.

Mr Speaker, thank you. The Public Finance (Fines Collection Costs—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill increases the retention by the Government by 4 percent. A small amount, the members across say, but every small amount helps the Government coffers that have been left in dire straits and in shambles, and every little bit helps. This bill will not only help get the Government Budget in balance but it will also engender accountability and responsibility for people to pay their infringements and fines and penalties. I commend this bill to the House.

This bill is set down for second reading immediately.

Second Reading