Franks Stephen: Land Transport (Unauthorised Street and Drag Racing) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Franks Stephen: Land Transport (Unauthorised Street and Drag Racing) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:607;Page:4606] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT NZ) 
: 
 I believe that my colleague Deborah Coddington put it exactly as it is. ACT supported the impounding of vehicles of disqualified drivers because as an objective fact a driver is either disqualified or not. There is no excuse for driving a vehicle if one is disqualified. It is perfectly appropriate and consistent with policing for convicted criminals to have their vehicles taken. What we now have is a law that pretends to say and encourages the police to think that they can impound a car for someone who is accelerating unnecessarily. Can someone please tell us again? Accelerating unnecessarily! Anyone in a V8 is doing that. People could have a four-cylinder car. The United Future party says that this is preventive policing. That was a phrase that the Gestapo quite liked: “We are arresting you and giving you a little bit of torture because you were thinking about being bad.” 
What this does may seem trivial to those who want to throw things like rights of victims rights of the public and references to deaths but when there are deaths we have very longstanding law about liability for deaths. We have law about careless driving. We have law about speeding. We have law about all the elements that are concerning people. What we do not have is any commitment on the Government side to enforce existing law. What we have is a great rush to pass new law every time there is a bit of criticism because that is much easier than putting on a few policemen to enforce existing law. It is much easier than collecting fines. It is much easier than getting rid of a youth justice system that tells young people that they can be insolent with impunity. 
We know what this does. This is a sham. This is slogan law. It does one new thing. It says that putting oil on the roads is now an automatic offence. All the rest only work if there are other offences already being committed. It is an absolute sham to say that this deals with wheelspinning. It does not. People can wheelspin all they like up to 50 kilometres an hour. It does not deal with drag racing. People can drag race all they like up to 50 kilometres an hour—unless of course they are involved in dangerous or careless driving in which case they are already culpable. It does not deal with burnouts as long as people stay within 50 kilometres an hour if they are in an urban area or 100 kilometres an hour if they are outside the town. It does nothing about boom boxes I tell Dr Smith. It does nothing about trashing of parks. It does nothing about private property. It does nothing generally about enforcing the existing law. 
So ACT knows that this does not get us a single vote. ACT does not come to this legislation in the populist way that parties that are willing to be utterly insincere about the law do. We oppose this because we stand for law that works and this does not. We stand for law that means what it says. In fact it is very hard to know whether any member in this House even has a clue what it says because none of them even bothered to refer to it during the debates at any stage. I do not think that any member supporting this law referred to any of the words or attempted to deal with the legitimate questions or arguments of ACT. 
We oppose it because we stand for punishment for crime not for upsetting a policeman or for giving a policeman room to attack a person because he or she has an unnecessarily powerful car and can unnecessarily accelerate. We stand against this law because we are tough on crime not on breaches of etiquette not on the clothes people wear or the size of their mufflers—as Mr Martin Gallagher suggested or was it Mr Connell they sounded the same? We are tough on personal responsibility and accordingly we oppose law that is simply a slogan. We are tough on lawbreakers and driving while disqualified is lawbreaking. We think zero tolerance should mean exactly what it says that there should be a consequence for every crime not bulk discounts not wiping off of fines not community work that has no work and does not do anything for the family not family law conferences that do not involve any families and do not mean a thing. We are tough on this because we think that the police should be upheld and supported in enforcing existing law. 
When Parliament rushes through in one evening the stages of a bill that are supposed to be separated by Standing Orders by enough days for a little bit of prudent reflection possibly even a bit of embarrassment when members hear their own speeches then we believe that that law can be supported. In this case it is a scandal.