Little AndrewHon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): Thank you Madam Chair. I think the member in the chair Simeon Brown makes a very good point which is that he considers that his party at least by passing this bill is not standing by while people die. In fact by passing this bill that is exactly what this House is doing. It is standing by doing more of the same and achieving the same hopeless result. The inflammatory member the Hon Dr Nick Smith opposite who sits there chirping away saying that everybody over here has got blood on their hands and they are standing by watching people dying—but actually it was his Government that passed the last legislation that has been an absolutely dismal failure and now they want to do more. And so they sit there beating their chests using the dreadful old rhetoric and the silly hackneyed old rhetoric of tough on crime soft on crime." and that is the disappointing thing.That is where they are letting New Zealanders down right there because New Zealanders expect better. What New Zealanders expect is that when they see people dying because of the consumption of substances that are so dangerous and so toxic actually we will do something serious about it. The member in the chair and indeed Mr Patterson when he spoke said "Right that's it. We're going to catch all these people." Well if we've had 25 or 45 people who died under the last Government's watch using these substances the so-called suppliers have not been convicted in relation to those deaths because they simply are not caught. The reality is that if administering a toxic substance like this is causing death then that actually is prima facie an allegation of manslaughter. If people are having administered to them stupefying substances there is a crime related to that. We can charge people for those sorts of crimes right now even without this legislation. There is recourse that we've got in our criminal statutes that allows us to deal with it in event that we catch somebody peddling the stuff.What it comes down to is this—and I don't expect members opposite to understand because they live in an ivory tower. They live in a comfortable middle-class world. They don't support middle New Zealand—we know that. They don't want them to get their own houses. They live in this comfortable blinkered world. They don't know what is going on in large parts of New Zealand but in large parts of New Zealand there are young people who are totally disengaged—some who've been kicked out of home—who resort to these substances and die as a result. And yes their parents get passionate about it. There's a lot more going on than that. But young people who are disengaged marginalised have given up hope resorting to these substances—there's a number of other things going on which is why anybody with experience and expertise who has looked at this issue and looked at this bill has been very consistent in saying that threatening longer penalties isn't going to change people's behaviour. You've got to have the means to let people who need help get help. There's not a lot of distinction between those peddling the stuff and those using it. They are actually largely one and the same people with the same problems and the same challenges.Hon Maggie Barry: What about Sroubek? Answer that one.Hon ANDREW LITTLE: I know members opposite like Maggie Barry don't care about people who don't live in the kind of comfortable middle-class world that she's grown up in and lives in. She doesn't care about those people. The National Party never has. They don't care about them. Their only response to people who do it tough and do it hard and find themselves resorting to these substances and killing themselves is to beat their chests and say "Let's get tough on crime. Let's lock them up for longer." We've done that before. We've done it in other instances. We've done it in other cases and it doesn't work. When you've got people who are so desperate they resort to substances like this they don't care what they're consuming. They are reckless about what they are doing to themselves. There's something else going on. If this House is serious and members in this House are serious about their moral duty to every New Zealander to make our communities safe and safer we wouldn't be wasting our time on silly gestures like this. We'd be focusing on what the real problems are and where the real solutions lie. The real solutions lie in a problem like this in making sure that those whose lives are so desperate get the help that they need—those who have been kicked out of home get the help that they need—and not silly threats and they get good help and information."