Harawira Hone: Summary Offences (Tagging and Graffiti Vandalism) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Harawira Hone: Summary Offences (Tagging and Graffiti Vandalism) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:647;Page:16077] 
HONE HARAWIRA (Maori Party—Te Tai Tokerau) 
: 
 Tena koe Madam Assistant Speaker. Tena koe to Nandor—that was a choice korero. While Mr Tanczos was speaking one of my colleagues in National made a quip about how one could have got arrested “Black while driving” in the US. That was just a passing joke but I recall one of the things that Nga Tamatoa raised back in the 1970s. There was a law on the books right up until the 1960s in this country whereby one could be arrested for being out at night with one’s face darkened. It did not say anything about artificially darkened either. Apparently it used to be an old English law to stop people from putting soot on their faces and going out burgling. It was a law used to arrest Maori in Auckland if they could not think of any other reason. 
I do not mind saying right up front that I am not a fan of tagging—none of us are—not today not yesterday not tomorrow. It is ugly it is offensive and makes one’s town look like crap. People do not want to stop in those towns because they see the existence of tagging as a clear mark of the existence of crime. I personally do not mind some of that cool looking stuff like they did for Sir Edmund Hillary but I do not like ugly tagging. Up my way some places really attracted taggers like the skateboard bowl in Kaitaia and some of the parks in Whangarei. Some of the taggers keep coming back again and again but the locals are working on trying to overcome it and involving all sorts of community groups as well as schools police etc. I know that Tai Tokerau is pretty much the same as everywhere else in the country with this problem as far as tagging goes although the Maori Party candidate for Te Tai Tonga Mr Monte Ohia tells me they have a pretty good initiative being run down there by the Kahurangi Employment Trust to keep Nelson tag-free and litter-free by helping the taggers move on. 
But tagging is the reaction of the poor to alienation anger boredom frustration and low esteem. It is pretty basic really. One reduces tagging by reducing the factors that lead to it: some really complex stuff such as poverty poverty—and poverty. But what have we got? We have a bill to fine kids up to 2000 bucks and to fine people $1500 for selling spray-cans to under-18s. Just to hear Mr Tanczos talk about kids wandering around with crayons and pens made me think: I got home in the weekend to find my mokopuna had artistically scribbled all over my sofa; I was thinking that if this bill had been passed I would have rung a cop! But how progressive is that? How intelligent is it? How innovative is it? Guess what—the select committee actually wanted to take it even further to make the penalties even tougher! But I repeat: when the jails are already full where does one put the taggers? 
Chester Borrows 
: You were not there. 
HONE HARAWIRA 
: One does not have to have been there to know how senseless the recommendations were. One has to ask oneself the question: does getting tough really work? Last night I saw a programme on drugs in New Zealand and if I learnt one thing from it it was that trying to bash something out of existence just does not work and it is the same all over the world. Look at the mess George W Bush has got the whole world into with his “make my day” brand of gunboat diplomacy. Is Afghanistan a better place for the presence of the Yankee war machine? Is Iraq? If the US invades Iran will that solve anything? Will that stop people hating the United States? Of course it will not. 
We in the Maori Party favour the Barack Obama approach actually—negotiation building relationships and dealing with reality rather than dealing out of fear. Because we know that punishment and tougher sentences simply do not work. Take this Government’s current prison construction programme. It has been building prisons all over the place yet we already know from projections that by the time the last prison is built every bed in it will already be filled. So what happens to the next prisoner the next tagger and the next prisoner? I will tell Mr Mallard what the answer to that is. One just goes and builds another prison of course! Then when that one is full and full 2 years out one arrests somebody else builds another prison and builds another prison. That is the lunacy of tougher sentencing. It is a pathway to nowhere. 
Where are the programmes to change the behaviour to reduce crime? Where are the programmes to reduce the causes of crime? Nowhere. Why? It is because this Government is committed to the knee-jerk policy-making that is taking us all to hell in a handbasket. We need to stop thinking that stiffer penalties jail for 12-year-olds more prisons and more police powers to chase kids who might be graffiti artists will actually succeed when all the evidence tells us that it will not. Look at that dickhead of a judge who sent that kid to jail for tagging because the judge thought it was culturally offensive. Culturally offensive! Is that part of the law now? Because it sure was not the law when a bunch of us in Ponsonby and Otara went up to the Auckland University and gave those racist fools from the engineering society a bit of a tune-up for having offended Maori and Pacific Island culture for decades. It was we who nearly got sent to jail when it should have been those boorish drunken cowards from the mean streets of Remuera. 
Culturally offensive! What a bloody joke! That is where this whole thing has gone haywire because here we are about to criminalise taggers for what is called environmental pollution while allowing the real polluters of society to bypass the cost of their carbon emissions. How come we let big industry in the form of the agriculture and transport sectors get away with not paying for the cost of their pollution but we will slap our kids down without even blinking? How come the kids have to pay but big business does not? How come the tagging legislation gets shunted up to No. 1 on the Order Paper while the legislation to disestablish the Serious Fraud Office gets dropped down to No. 3 and the climate change carbon killers get another 5 years’ holiday? 
Yes tagging is ugly it is offensive and it is soul-destroying but with a bit of paint and a bit of effort one can clean it up. But backsliding on our commitment to climate change like Labour is doing by giving the big polluters a longer holiday or like National wants to do by getting Australia to take the lead cannot be just brushed over. If we get climate change wrong there will be no tomorrow. We will not get a chance to paint over the problem because we will all be toast. 
This bill is an overreaction to a minor problem in our society. It is punitive it is pointless it is unproductive and it represents a paucity of intelligent thought. This bill lacks vision it lacks courage it lacks consideration for the consequences of the penalties it lacks any sense of hope it lacks wisdom and for those reasons the Maori Party will not be supporting it.