Turei Metiria: Wanganui District Council (Prohibition of Gang Insignia) Bill — First Reading 
Turei Metiria: Wanganui District Council (Prohibition of Gang Insignia) Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:646;Page:15760] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 I will take just a short call on the Wanganui District Council (Prohibition of Gang Insignia) Bill to advise the House that the Green Party will be opposing it as we made very clear when the issue was first raised. We have heard a lot of speeches from people supporting the bill saying it is not actually a solution to the problem. This begs the question of why the House is wasting its time and good public money—taxpayers’ money—in promoting and dealing with a bill that will not be effective at what it is trying to achieve. 
The fact is that this is a feel-good mechanism by National—very similar to the sorts of things that Labour does actually—that looks good but does nothing. It will not solve the problems with gangs because those problems are significantly more complex than one’s fashion sense. Frankly the bill does not deal with the issue of what a gang is. It identifies a particular subset of gangs—those that wear patches—as being the problem. What about all those other gangs that cause problems? What about the members of white power gangs for example who do not wear patches but have their own funny little uniform of no hair big boots and tight pants? What will this House do about them? Will it ban boots and tight pants? Will it ban the shaving of people’s heads? No the House cannot do that because it will not be effective. It could not possibly do that. So why should we pick on just the gangs that we can identify through their patches? The answer to that is that it is easy and it sounds good to the public. What about all those gangs of young guys that roam around rolling people? Those gang members do not wear a uniform. They do not wear anything that identifies them. They operate as a little group; they commit crimes as a group working together to roll somebody or to steal something. What will this House do about that? What will National do about that? Frankly it will do nothing. 
Ron Mark described the opposition to this bill as being somehow anti-democratic. Apparently we are not allowed even to have an opinion about issues like this. The parties that are opposing this bill are suggesting that there have to be other solutions that will work and that it is not good law to be promoting legislation that will fail. This bill will not do anything about gangs. It will not do anything at all. It will not deal with gangs because it focuses only on the very small selection of gangs that can be identified by patches. It is a completely useless waste of time and the public of this country and the ordinary communities deserve more from this House. The public deserves more from the people it elects to make laws. It deserves to see us put our efforts into laws that will actually be effective. The members of all of those parties that vote for this bill should be ashamed of themselves—ashamed of the waste of time ashamed of the waste of money ashamed of the discrimination that this bill implies and ashamed about their frankly useless approach to trying to deal with the serious issues of crime in our community.