Crimes Amendment Bill

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT to speak on the Crimes Amendment Bill. ACT is very proud to be part of this Government, which really has tackled law and order. Over the term, we’ve done a number of changes. This is now the latest of these changes. We are obviously going to be extending citizen’s arrest powers, which I think is great and is going to tackle retail crime. We’re dealing with people smuggling and trafficking offences and penalties. I know that’s actually something that’s supported across the House, which is great. They’ve also added some new offences related to coward punches, response on first offenders, and actually putting in place a new penalty regime around theft to actually try and again address retail theft.

This is just the latest suite of changes that this Government is making to really tackle law and order, make sure New Zealanders feel safe in their homes, their places of business, and in their communities, and I commend this bill to the House.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the Crimes Amendment Bill, and, firstly, to applaud the effort that this Government has put forward to restore law and order and confidence in our communities, so that they can live safely within their neighbourhoods, within their homes, within their businesses.

This is a complex piece of legislation and has been navigated with careful consideration and thought throughout. It is bringing together a number of pieces of work that is collectively about bringing together a stronger response to the safety of our communities. New Zealand First has been a long and strong advocate for law and order in New Zealand and it is why we included significant components within our coalition agreement with National to ensure that we were recognising the issues that we had long since campaigned on.

We have supported the bill and we will continue to support the bill, but we have, as a party, invoked our agree to disagree on two key areas of the legislation. That is not because we disagree with the offences that have been included, but that we do not believe they have gone far enough. We have been the advocates for protecting our first responders. We are the party that is committed to defending and protecting the hard-working Kiwi battlers that enable us to live in this great country. But, unfortunately, in the development of this legislation, the important component that we considered necessary in the protection of first responders was a minimum mandatory sentence.

It is important to ensure that when we bring in legislation, we carefully consider the impacts of that legislation and we do recognise the challenges and difficulties of minimum mandatory sentencing. But we believe, in this case, it is relevant, and that is why we included it specifically in our coalition agreement commitment and we thought it was so important. We recognise that a lot of work has gone into bringing this legislation to the House and we do not want to denigrate the work that has been done and the huge issues that are being tackled in this piece of legislation. But I think it is important, on behalf of New Zealand First, that we recognise that it hasn’t quite finished the job, that more work needs to be done.

That leads me into the discussion about the coward punch legislation. Our coalition agreement commitments specifically referred to the introduction of coward punch legislation to create a specific offence. It was always our intention to ensure that to make that offence achieve the outcome it needed to do, it also required a minimum mandatory sentence component. We tried in the committee of the whole House to put forward amendments in this which were unsuccessful. Again, this is an area where we believe that our work has not yet finished and there’s more that we need to do.

Coward punch is, of course, a difficult piece of legislation. It is a difficult offence because of the nature of its criminality, of the mens rea and the actus reus that brings this offence to its fruition. But I think it is important to recognise that the harm caused and the defencelessness of the victim have to be considered in this debate. So that is why we have invoked agree to disagree. We think that the job is not yet done and we think more should be done.

In reference to the other pieces of the legislation, I would like to really highlight the fact that we have challenged the offences around trafficking and that we have changed the way criminal prosecutions are decided, and that we have removed the need for the Attorney-General to consent. I think that is moving forward to the changing environment that we have and the fact that trafficking is not always across borders, and therefore the international component that would require an Attorney-General consent is no longer relevant.

This has been a difficult piece of legislation to traverse. There have been a lot of submissions in this space and a lot of recognition of the impacts of this. But it is consistent with this Government’s commitment to law and order, to allowing people to be assured that they are living in their homes, they are working in their businesses, and they are moving around their neighbourhoods with a degree of comfort and safety that they deserve. So on that basis, we do commend the bill to the House, we do endorse it, we realise that we have more work to do, and I commend the bill to the House.

I rise today on behalf of Te Pāti Māori and the people of Tāmaki Makaurau to voice our unyielding, absolute opposition to the Crimes Amendment Bill. Is this really all that this Government can come up with to protect our communities? Seriously. This piece of legislation isn’t a shield of protection for our communities; it’s a political sledgehammer wrapped in the illusion of justice. It doesn’t cure the disease of crime; instead, it builds a bigger, darker cage of symptoms. This Government is trying to sell Aotearoa information that falls short of the facts. They claim that harsher sentences and lower thresholds will somehow keep us all safe, but we have to look at the hard truth and not the hollow headlines.

Let’s start with the changes to retail theft, shall we? Under this bill, stealing an item worth less than $500 could land any single one of the people of Aotearoa in jail for a full year. In a cost of living crisis, where some whānau are resorting to this type of petty theft, taking kai from the shelves of supermarkets to feed their tamariki, their parents, and themselves; instead of providing short-term relief, investing direct into our foodbanks and front-line community services or sorting out the supermarket duopoly, this Government would rather throw mums, dads, and kids in jail for a whole entire year. How the hell is that OK, e te Whare, when this House knows from the Office of the Auditor-General himself that it costs taxpayers more than $200,000 per year to send just one person to prison and keep them locked up for one year—those on remand cost the country around $150,000. So let’s set the record straight. The fastest growing industry under this Government isn’t opportunity; it is incarceration.

Here we have another example of this Government weaponising the law against the poorest among us: te pani, te rawakore [the orphaned, the impoverished], and—guess what!—te rangatahi, our young people. This isn’t justice; it’s a tax on poverty. But the most reckless, short-sighted part of this bill is the changes to citizen’s arrest and property defence. This Government want to deputise the public. They want the people of Aotearoa to do their dirty mahi. Even the business community is against this. Retail New Zealand—hardly a radical leftist group—has aggressively submitted against this bill. Their chief executive, Carolyn Young, gave us a chilling warning that this legislation will spark an explosion of “violence on violence” in our stores. The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions laid it bare: they called this bill an active workplace hazard. Even legal experts have dismantled this bill’s headline grabbing coward punch laws. They warned us that by making the criteria so hyper-specific it will actually be harder for prosecutors to secure a majority jury verdict.

This bill is a symptom of a Government that has run completely out of ideas. They’re treating the symptoms of a broken system, while actively feeding the root causes: poverty, inequality, and systemic neglect. Last night, this House hosted a formidable group of wāhine toa who have solutions, real lived experience. They launched their book, penned by State mōrehu Paora Moyle and presented with integrity by Wāhine Toa Mongrel Mob leader Paula Ormsby. I give rise to Paula’s kupu from late last night that there is no such thing as a hard-to-reach community, only whether we are willing to truly reach them.

Aotearoa doesn’t need any more cells; we need more support. Whānau heal communities; prisons separate them. Justice without healing leaves every single one of us carrying the hurt for generations. When whakapapa is ignored, the justice system becomes another form of intergenerational trauma.

Te Pāti Māori will not stand by and allow this House to trade human rights for political points. Te Pāti Māori opposes this bill because it’s built on the failed philosophy that harsher punishment equals better outcomes—it absolutely does not. The bill is a step backwards into a darker, more violent past.

Bill English—somebody that the other side of the House recognises as a leader—said that prisons are a moral and fiscal failure of society. The amendments to the Crimes Act, particularly those that increase the penalties for shoplifting, are a perfect example.

Now, when we talk about the justice system, it’s almost hollow to talk about the costs of it, but it seems like dollars are the only thing that that side of the House are interested in. So let’s ask ourselves why it makes any sense for somebody who shoplifts property worth more than $1,000 to be put in prison for a maximum term of up to seven years, costing $1,410,360 to keep that person incarcerated? If somebody shoplifts between $500 and $1,000 worth of property, their imprisonment term will cost $201,480. If somebody shoplifts for property valued at less than $500, their prison term will cost $49,680.

Now, that side of the House likes to argue that prisons are in place to protect the community from the most violent, serious offenders, right? There is some truth to that—there is absolutely some truth to that. But the problem is that half of the people in our prisons are in there for non-serious, non-violent offending—a claim that I made that I was absolutely torn to shreds for, which Corrections data backs up. It’s a complete waste of money. It’s a total waste of money to have people in there. This bill makes it worse, because this will increase the prison population, at a cost where the items that have been shoplifted are completely dwarfed by the amount of money that taxpayers will have to put into imprisoning those people.

I’ll put a face to the people who will be imprisoned by increasing penalties towards shoplifting: it’s women. I don’t know if the House realises, but there has already been a dramatic increase in the number of women in prison before these changes were made. In fact, I believe it’s an increase of 24 percent of women being imprisoned for crimes of poverty—for crimes of trying to feed their families and shoplifting. Shoplifting is the most common charge for women. It’s not violence; it is crimes of dishonesty and crimes of poverty. I can guarantee you that not one woman shoplifts because it’s fun and because they get a thrill from it. It is because they are desperate to feed their families. People have projected what these changes will mean to the prison population. These changes mean there will be a 63 percent increase in the prison population from these changes alone. What an absolute waste of the court system, which should be prioritising reducing violence in our communities, dealing with family violence, sexual violence, and actual serious crimes. But our courts, which are already backlogged, will now be taken up by somebody shoplifting a Red Bull. Well done! You can all go home and pat yourselves on the back now for tackling the real crimes. Because here’s the thing: just because you make something a crime, doesn’t stop it from happening—just because you make something a crime, does not stop it from happening. So you get up there and you say to victims: “We’ve made coward punches illegal. We’ve made all of these things illegal”—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Please don’t bring the Speaker into your debate.

TAMATHA PAUL: Sorry, what?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Please don’t bring the Speaker into your debate. I am not responsible for shoplifting.

TAMATHA PAUL: Right, well, the Government is going to make these things illegal. It does no service to the victims—it does no service to the victims. What it will mean is that our prisons are getting fuller and fuller and fuller and have to be built for billions and billions of dollars, to house who? To keep who in custody? Shoplifters. Someone who shoplifted a loaf of bread, someone who shoplifted some meat—that is economic insanity.

Not to mention the flaws of our criminal justice system that doesn’t even rehabilitate people. Our recidivism rates in this country are an indictment on our so-called criminal justice system. Congratulations, because the Government will be backlogging our prisons and our courts even more, so that they can punch down on poor people who are just trying to feed their kids. So well done, Government—I hope you feel really proud of yourself!

Boy oh boy, the scaremongering on that side of the House on this piece of legislation has hit an entirely new level. One of the parts of this legislation I am so proud of is the protection it is giving to our front-line men and women, our first responders, who are the ones that run towards danger. Yet we have political parties, like the Green Party and Te Pāti Māori, who are voting against this legislation.

The priority of first responders is not a priority for them. They’re saying, “We’re going to back the criminals who are committing those crimes. We’re not actually backing the men and women who put on that uniform to help protect our communities and keep them safe.” What a shame. The record will show that they have voted down this legislation and have put the priority of the criminals ahead of our first responders in this country. What a shameful day. For people like my brother, a police officer, the Green Party and Te Pāti Māori are saying, “We’re not putting you first. You’re not a priority to us. We are saying that we are going to back the criminals who are committing the crimes and not make them a priority.” What a shameful day.

What about the men and women who have been smuggled and trafficked in this country? This legislation is bringing in greater accountability and greater protections in that space. They’ll be voting against that as well. Why? It is so frustrating and disgusting to see that political parties can’t get past the fact that they don’t want to improve legislation that is going to protect men and women who have been trafficked and smuggled in this country. That’s what this bill is doing: it’s protecting men and women across our country who are so vulnerable, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’d like to congratulate the chair of the Justice Committee on actually giving a speech in the House. That was a minute and 30 seconds long—I think it’s the longest he’s ever spoken, so how about that!

He’s fair to point out, on the modern slavery provisions, that we support them, but you can’t put one good thing in a piece of legislation—I was going to use some colourful language around arse ends, but I won’t.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): I think you just did.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: But you can’t put one thing into a piece of legislation that is full of absolute rubbish and then say, “Well, you’ve got to support it.” The rest of the bill is pretty much unadulterated rubbish. I mean, if we look at the changes around citizen’s arrest, there’s only one good point that the Minister makes, which is the arbitrariness of the time. But in terms of giving expanded powers of citizen’s arrest to use force, including on children, and then having a framework where you’ve got to call the police and do what the police tell you, is absolutely unworkable and quite dangerous.

We know that this will be in force soon, and yet the police have no idea what to do with this provision. They don’t have any operational guidance as to what they’re going to do when someone calls them up and says, “I’ve got my knee on the back of a 6-foot-3 guy and I’ve got some cable ties around his wrists. He’s pretty angry. Can you come?” And they’ll say, “Well, we’re a bit busy attending to another serious matter.” They don’t know what they’re going to do in those kinds of situations.

In terms of defending property, this piece of legislation deletes a prohibition on striking a person who was a trespasser, not just moving them off the property but it more or less explicitly says that you can strike or do bodily harm to the trespasser. So it is State-sanctioned violence, and it’s truly alarming that this Government’s answer to civil order is to give citizens the right to strike and do bodily harm to other people. That’s their answer.

I do want to talk about the provision on causing death by strike to the head or neck. This is an example of terrible lawmaking for entirely political purposes. The three-headed monster that is the current Government simply can’t agree on what to do with this. So what we have is a mishmash piece of legislation which creates this new manslaughter offence with all kinds of elements to it. But it’s really important to recognise that you’ve now got what the Government, and particularly those two smaller parties, would call a “coward punch” offence that is harder to prove than manslaughter but has exactly the same penalty. So you might as well have, you know, other offences of shoplifting in a disorderly manner with exactly the same penalty as shoplifting. So you’ve got to prove something extra but it has no different result.

So there’s a really legitimate question to ask, and it’s this—and it’s a pity Tom Rutherford can’t answer this one—what is the point? If it’s a coward punch and it’s not murder, then it’s already manslaughter. So manslaughter by coward punch already exists, but the legislation is creating this complicated coward punch framework where you’ve got to prove that they weren’t suspecting it, prove they didn’t have an opportunity to defend themselves, prove that it struck them in the head or the neck—wherever that exactly starts and stops—and all of those other elements, and an intention to do grievous bodily harm. You’ve got to prove all of those things. The irony is this: if you punch someone and didn’t intend to cause grievous bodily harm and they die, it’s still manslaughter. So, in fact, the original manslaughter offence is more effective than the coward punch offence in capturing the right category of offenders and offences. So it just perplexes me.

And, of course we had in this House the most extraordinary situation in committee stage where both minor Government parties put amendments on the Table that cut across Government policy. The National Party voted alongside the Labour Party in saying that’s a dumb idea and we don’t do minimum mandatory sentences for those kinds of offences. So at least they saw some sense there. Of course, in committee there’s a letter that’s on the record where the Minister essentially says to the committee, “Look, these offences are problematic and I’d invite you to look at them very carefully.”, or words to that effect, which, of course, was code for “Please get rid of these offences. Please make them go away.”

But do you know what? The National Party members on the committee couldn’t bring themselves to do it. They couldn’t actually do the decent thing and say, “These coward punch offences don’t make our law any better. Coward punches are a genuine issue. The law should address them properly, but this is not the way to go about it.” And so we’re in committee and we’ve been invited by the Minister to solve the problem for him and recommend to this House that that part of the bill not progress. Understandably, New Zealand First and ACT both wanted to press on, but the National Party couldn’t see sense and couldn’t actually do what the Minister wanted: they insisted on proceeding with these ridiculous and duplicative offences.

I just want to talk a little bit about the shoplifting offences as well, because these infringement offences are quite unusual. It’s actually not shoplifting or stealing; it’s actually leaving the premises without paying—many people have in fact done that. Now, it’s not theft if you don’t have dishonest intent. So if you accidently leave without paying, then it’s well established that that’s not a crime under the Crimes Act. But under this offense, if you do that, there is no mental element—you don’t have to have dishonest intent. This was put to the Minister at committee stage by me. I said, “Do you have to have a dishonest intent? Is there, in fact, any intention element to this offence?” He stood up quite clearly—and to his credit, very clearly—said, “No, there is no intent element.” So if you accidentally take something out and you haven’t got a reasonable excuse to have done so, then you’re going to be guilty of this infringement offence for which a fine can be imposed. It is quite extraordinary that we now have an offence in respect of taking, which has no intention element. It could be entirely an omission, but because you haven’t got an excuse, you didn’t have a positive belief that you’d paid—perhaps that might be a reasonable excuse, “Oh, I thought I had paid, I put my card in, I didn’t know it didn’t go through”—that’s probably a reasonable excuse. But putting it in your bag thinking “I’ll pay that when I get to the check out” and you pay for those two things, but not that one, that’s not a reasonable excuse, you’re going to be in all kinds of trouble!

Hon Member: Why not?

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: One of the members says, “Why not?” Because it’s not a positive state of mind. This is a strict liability offence, if that person had gone to a decent law school, he would know that having to actually prove a positive belief of your innocence is the defence to a strict liability offence. This is a strict liability offence. We’ve got real problems in here. We’ve got a Government which seeks to address some of these problems but does it in the most ham-fisted manner. Of course, the other thing about this is the police don’t want this either, and the reason they don’t want it is they haven’t got the IT system to back it up. They actually don’t have the resources to issue infringement notices for non-traffic matters. So you’re going to have this infringement offence system and it’s going to be impossible to administer because the police don’t have the resources—the IT infrastructure—to issue these infringement notices. Once again, a flurry of activity from the Government to make themselves look busy but absolutely ineffective, and I’m looking forward to that member’s call next.

I think about the shop owner that I visited during the campaign in 2023, and then further on in 2024, who was robbed numerous times, and asked me in her tears and said, “Where is this justice for them?”. Where is the justice? Where was the last Government who put victims first, maybe, to actually protect those hardworking New Zealanders? That’s why we were elected in 2023, to come in to restore law and order, to put the country back on track, and to fix the basics and build the future. I commend the bill to the House.

SPEAKER: This is a split call—Dan Rosewarne.

Thank you Madam Speaker. There are parts to this legislation that deal with genuinely serious issues. Human trafficking is a horrific crime. The exploitation of children deserves a strong response—no one on this side of the House disputes that. The problem is that, taken as a whole, this bill is more focused on looking tough than being effective.

One of the clearest examples is the expansion of the citizens arrest powers in clauses 4 through to 7. Most New Zealanders understand the frustration that retailers feel when they are repeatedly targeted for theft. We all want safer communities, and we all want offenders to be held accountable, but the question Parliament should ask is whether pushing ordinary members of the public into potentially volatile situations is actually a good idea. At select committee we heard repeated concerns about escalation, mistaken arrests, injuries, vigilantism—retailers, legal experts at community organisations, they all raised these concerns about asking untrained people to detain alleged offenders. Even officials acknowledge that those were risks and accepted that police will need to issue guidance because the public may increasingly find themselves in situations that were previously left to trained law enforcement.

Our view is that we should be investing in police and crime prevention, not creating circumstances were shop staff and members of the public are expected to fill the gap. Another example is in clause 20, the so called “one punch offence”. Every member of this House understands the devastating consequences that can follow a coward punch, and we’ve all heard stories from families who have lost loved ones. But good law making requires more than good intentions, and the Hon Dr Duncan Webb highlighted that in his contribution. What struck me during the select committee was that officials themselves recommended removing the separate manslaughter one-punch offence from the bill because it would be harder to prove. It could create confusion for juries and may actually make prosecutions more difficult. They concluded that the existing manslaughter provisions already captured that conduct. If officials are telling you that this new offence may make the law more complicated or add little practical benefit, then we should actually listen to that.

I am also unconvinced by the Government’s approach to creating a range of new offences where existing offences may already exist, and we see that in clauses 22 and 23, where they create new offences for assaults of first responders and corrections officers. Anyone who assaults a police officer, firefighter, paramedic, or corrections officer deserves to face consequences. These people do difficult jobs under difficult situations. But the question isn’t whether the behaviour is unacceptable; the question is whether creating yet another offence actually improves outcomes. Existing assault provisions already apply and existing courts already have sentencing powers. The Government has spent a lot of time creating a new offence—it’s a label, and not nearly enough time is given to demonstrate how it will actually change behaviour.

I also want to touch on clause 25, which creates a new offence of theft in an offensive, insulting, or disorderly manner. Again, everyone understands the concern about brazen retail offending, but even here the departmental report identified overlap with existing robbery and assault offences and recommended changes to the drafting. That seems to be a reoccurring theme throughout this bill: announce a new offence first, figure out how it fits into the existing law later. The wider issue for us is this: the Government talks a lot about consequences, tougher penalties, and getting harder on crime, but what we hear much less about are the things that actually reduce offending in the first place. Those are the concerns we have on this side of the House, and for that reason, we don’t support the bill.

It’s interesting—the last speaker talked about reducing crime. Under the last Government, their record was appalling: ram raids were up 500 percent; violent crime jumped 51 percent. Under our Government ram raids are down 86 percent, so there’s 49,000 fewer victims of violent crime. This bill means that criminals will soon face stronger penalties for attacking first responders, coward punches, and human trafficking. These are horrendous crimes, we’re dealing with them with this bill, therefore I commend it to the House.

Thank you Madam Speaker for the opportunity to speak on this bill, the Crimes Amendment Bill. This is a bill that Labor does not support. When I think about the impact that it will have on New Zealanders now, as well as future generations, I can only say that I hope this represents a number of changes that will get assigned to the scrap heap at the election. There are some changes in here which make sense and that Labour could have supported and built some sticky consensus around—changes like the tougher penalties for human trafficking, which are good and would happily be something that we could continue to support—but things like the citizens arrest provisions are dangerous.

No one is asking for these. This is the perfect example of where a party like National, that is out campaigning right now to revisit our entire democratic order, in proposing a referendum on the efficacy of MMP, should hold up and reference. This is the bill where National has had to bend over backwards for the people who are really calling the shots in that coalition Government: Winston Peters and David Seymour. This is a bill that no National Party has ever stooped so low to introduce to this House as a part of the ordinary legislative process. It is worrying not only that it has been led around by its two minor coalition parties, who did not seek a mandate for these changes, but that some of its own backbench now think that this is what National stands for. This is not National politics. This is not the proud record of Prime Ministers like Keith Holyoake, who offer New Zealand some impact from a place of centrist, sensible politics of the National Party. This is not the proud record of a party that has claimed the centre and governed in the interests of most New Zealanders who elected them. This is petty minor party politics that has leaked into the normal legislative process. The worrying thing is that some National MPs think these are their values now.

Where does that leave us? This leaves us in a position where we are considering legislative changes which will not make things better for the average New Zealander. When backbench National Party MPs stand up and say, “Well, I’ve spoken to shop owners and they want tougher penalties for crime.”—we also want to work with the National Party to find tougher penalties that actually work, that are tough not only on crime but on the causes of crime. I have never spoken to a shop owner who said to me, after their roller door was attacked, like the one last week in the main street of Manurewa, or the shop owners who have dealt with the hammer attacks of teenagers who walk in their shop, that they wanted to see more powers for them to chase and apprehend the people who attacked their wives and children who work in their shops.

I have spoken to shop owners who say very clearly to me that they want those crimes never to have happened. The last Government put in place programmes like Kotahi Te Whakaaro in South Auckland, which have been disbanded by this Government and had their funding stripped. What was that? It meant that a group of people from the Public Service and from local associations—local leaders who knew our communities—sat around a table every morning and considered every youth offence that had come in overnight, every ram raid, every hammer attack, every incident, and they worked out where the police should be involved, what should be done with their families, who should support those families to get those kids back on track, what should be said to the principals, who should also have responsibility for these kids while they are at school, what kind of social work support should be in place, what kind of Corrections support should be in place.

All of that had an 80 percent rate of improving these young people’s chances and keeping them out of a life of crime. The recidivism rates under a traditional justice system are so much worse than the efficacy of something like Kotahi Te Whakaaro, but we now have a Government that is, frankly, not coming up with these ideas under its traditional frameworks and its traditional values and its traditional ideologies but one that is being led by chasing headlines in Facebook tiles on a Sunday night. What will the impact be? Sixteen- and 17-year-olds who are consigned to the scrapheap because of crimes that they have done in the worst moments of their lives. The worst days of their lives they will be judged for for the rest of their lives. Not only now do the police have new powers, but so does the chap who runs the dairy, so does the chap who works at Dick Smith and that’s his first job. That’s the answer of this Government, not only to judge our young people by harshest standards but to let everyone do it. What kind of a New Zealand is that? What kind of a vision for our future says to our young people that everyone in your community will judge you by the worst thing that you have ever done and that they will use violence against you and we condone that. It is a sad vision for Aotearoa and it is something that I hope is repealed after 7 November, when we have a change of Government.

I want to specifically address some of the things that I think are a worry in this bill, so that we have some way of looking back on these things. The citizen’s arrest provisions in this bill were submitted on by a range of businesses, but I want to really highlight and thank Retail New Zealand and its chief executive, Carolyn Young, for her advocacy not only at the select committee stage but with Ministers and with other spokespeople within the community. It is important, when Retail New Zealand was appointed by this Government to advise on these changes, including as specialist advisers in its retail crime group, that they took a stance that was brave and stepped out of that appointment by Government to be able to make some comments that they felt represented their members best.

Those comments were measured. They were about setting out how more violence at the store level would be more dangerous for the people who worked within those stores. For their members, who range from big box retailers, like Harvey Norman, right down to the very smallest, where it’s one person in the shop or one person and their family members, they could not see a way through to make this law something which was actionable in a safe way. Those comments were further supported by unions and other employment advocates, and by businesses too. This was something that nobody asked for and that there was no mandate for, because the real-world impact of this change will mean that there is more violence within a store context and that employees now have a very complex area to navigate, because they are responsible for the health and safety not only of their workers but of other people within their stores as well.

It makes it more difficult to run a small business in New Zealand. This makes it more difficult to understand not only the law but the norms, the cultural expectations, of someone who works in a shop. It’s hard for even trained security guards to know how to de-escalate someone who is causing a ruckus in their shop and who might be causing violence. Though there are more tools to be able to address this, useful New Zealand businesses like Aura, which are promoting better mapping and technological tools which help people to de-escalate and to notice the signs of violence erupting in their stores before they happen, we’re still not there. We’re still going to be asking, through this law, the 18-year-old, for whom this is his first job, to take pretty extreme actions. That is not the sort of setting which is going to result in less retail crime; it’s going to result in more use of physical force in these stores, which will be bad not only for the people who use them but also for the store owners.

I really just want to touch on the strike to the head or neck coward punch offence. This harm and the provisions around manslaughter are simply confusing. They will be harder for the Crown, which has to act as a responsible and honourable litigant, to be able to bring prosecutions of manslaughter and of grievous bodily harm under the normal provisions. Often Crown prosecutors will want to run a case that is made out and has bigger impact at sentencing on the grounds that it was a coward punch; now it will be harder for them to do that, because they won’t be able to make out all of the reasons why someone should be sentenced more harshly because of these factors, if they’re not running the provision, as the Government has formulated it, of the coward punch law.

I agree; I find myself agreeing with the Hon Casey Costello when she says the job is not done yet, because addressing this sort of behaviour is important and shouldn’t be something that our young people are facing and are worried about outside of nightclubs. You shouldn’t have to worry, if you are a mum, that your 19- and 20-year-olds, when they go to uni, might be subject to this kind of fight that could end of the life. That is something we should be addressing, but this is not a law that does that; this is a law that looks like it does it and will end up having worse outcomes for prosecutions. This is a bill that doesn’t work. It is a dog’s breakfast, and we should repeal it.

We had someone from the Green Party say that I can guarantee you that not one woman shoplifts for fun. Also, I don’t know if she’s talking about her former colleague Golriz Ghahraman, but I think she was shoplifting for fun. I don’t think it was easy for those shop owners, those business owners. One of my first speeches in the House was that I have no shame about standing up for the rights of victims, and I still say that today, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry to our shop owners in South Auckland that have to listen to Labour and Greens and Te Pāti Māori say that their rights are actually not important. I’m sorry to firefighters, to police people, to nurses in ambulances that have to listen to them saying across the House that their rights are not important when they’re bashed by people that are violent and off their face on drugs. On this side of the House, we actually support victims. I commend this bill to the House.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Crimes Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

Ayes 67

New Zealand National 48; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.

Noes 53

New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 13; Te Pāti Māori 4; Ferris; Kapa-Kingi.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a third time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill and the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill.

Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill

Committee of the whole House

Debate resumed from 5 August.

Clauses 1 and 2 (continued)

CHAIRPERSON (Maureen Pugh): Members, the House is in committee for further consideration of the Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill and for consideration of the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill.

We start with the Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill. When we were last considering this bill, we were debating clauses 1 and 2, “Title” and “Commencement”.