Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): It is interesting listening to this debate and reflecting on how closely it follows the submissions we heard at the Law and Order Committee. We have heard from Mr Bakshi and others this magic figure of $7 which keeps popping up. At current demand—half a million times $7—that is about $3.5 million that we are arguing about here. In the context of the entire Police budget that is not a big amount of money.I do not for one moment believe that actually the intention of this bill is to enable a $7 charge on vetting across the board. This is opening the door for wholesale charging for all sorts of police services. The definition in this bill of what constitutes a demand service" is broad enough and inclusive enough that in time—think about things like search and rescue which arguably is not about offending is not about criminal investigations and is not about prosecuting offences; it is a service provided to New Zealanders and indeed guests—visitors—to New Zealand. On occasion it is a service that is necessary as a result of their own foolishness but more often it is about people simply venturing into the outdoors. How long will it be before people who are rescued—and there is police involvement—are handed an invoice at the end of that? Is that the New Zealand that we want? I do not really think so.The Minister of Police and indeed other speakers have suggested that $7—well it is hardly worth fussing about is it? It is a very small amount of money. So it is but in fact using vetting as the first opportunity to use these new powers to charge for police services is a peculiar choice. It is in line with the old saying that no good deed goes unpunished. We have a large voluntary community sector in New Zealand. We have a lot of people who volunteer their time their skills and their experience to work in all sorts of community organisations. Now we are going to say to those people: "Well thank you for being community-minded and for contributing in some way to a voluntary organisation and by the way we are going to clip the ticket. We are going to charge you for giving up your time." We must not forget as well that one vetting will not cover multiple organisations. If a person happens to volunteer for two or three organisations—working with children working with elderly people working in some way with vulnerable people—that ticket will be clipped on each occasion. For older people on fixed incomes for young people with low incomes or for students earning but still wanting to do some voluntary work—these are the people who are going to be hit.It is very peculiar politics actually to use vetting as the initial point of entry into this whole brave new world of charging for policing which is and ought always to be a core public service and one which should be resourced properly. We have heard good news from the Minister recently: apparently we are to get some more police officers. That is to be congratulated. It is 18 months late—it was 2 years ago even that most other people recognised and certainly the New Zealand Police Association did that the police force was overstretched and under-resourced and not least of all in rural areas. But this legislation is not the solution to that. I think most New Zealanders would much rather that we have a well-funded and well-resourced taxpayer-funded police force rather than this privatisation by stealth—using this piece of legislation with this very innocuous little $7 fee as an opening to a point where we will in future almost certainly see quite significant charges placed on people.We heard from the NGOs and we heard from the voluntary sector that this relatively small amount of money—the voluntary service providers are going to be very unwilling to say to their volunteers "By the way you need to sign the cheque." and often in many cases they will pick up the cost of this vetting if it does go ahead. The cost will not remain at $7 or $8.50 for long or at whatever it might be; inevitably it will go up. So those hard-earned dollars those hard-won dollars that the voluntary organisations appeal to philanthropists for and to fund-raising means—all of that—a lot of that money is simply going into this money-go-round to pay an invoice for a service that ought to be funded in the normal way through the Public Service vote.This legislation is unreasonable and as I say I keep coming back to the point that I do not really understand the politics of it—and Mr Faafoi touched on this. Had the first target been concert promoters or large sports events where there is a commercial interest you could almost understand that."