Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. What can we say about this the sister bill apparently of the last one which was to do with tainted property. And we hear this word tainted" being thrown around again with this bill. It doesn't really have a legal definition; normally in the criminal justice arena we talk about someone being accused of a defined crime with a defined role in that crime but here we see a group of laws coming through that are reactionary and do little by way of being tough on crime. The toughness that we want I would think is on crime—not on random people that we might have somehow screened or seen as being a threat without having been accused of a crime; which these laws don't require apparently. So there's a little bit of this—and I do agree strangely with Mr Goldsmith when he says "Firing a firearm for the purpose of intimidation"; you know that bit. That bit seems to come as part and parcel of firing a firearm in public—yes that's true that's bad and we should criminalise something like that. It turns out it is already a crime so this isn't adding a whole lot more. But the thing that worries us in the Green Party is that we are selling apparently as a Government this idea that lowering due process standards lowering the standards of rights in New Zealand and allowing for the police to just go out on fishing expeditions for people that they randomly believe might be bad is somehow keeping communities safe. Well it isn't. It can't because we're not pointing to anything in particular that someone's done wrong; we're pointing to people by association. We're pointing to property that has to be seized because it's tainted. This vagueness breaches the principle of legality. You have to be able to tell that you've done something wrong before you can be sanctioned for it so harshly—to seize property to have your rights to be free from search and seizure protected these are values that a democracy should hold incredibly dear. Today we saw our police force lying about crimes being committed in order to investigate different crimes. And this loosening in the way that police conduct themselves comes from indications in this House that it's OK that we can have a dishonest police force. We can have a police force that's armed so to speak with all sorts of amorphous powers that you don't even have to accuse someone of a crime based on evidence let alone prove it. To take away their property? That isn't going to keep the community safe because we are not even alleging a crime. What is an associate? Well I know what an associate is from my experience in the courts where often we'd get an opposition to bail form that would say "gang associate" and then someone would stand up and say "What's the evidence of this sorry?" and the judge would have to say "What's the evidence of this?" and the police prosecutor would have to say "Well his cousin is in the … " Is that what we're talking about here? Is that the Government's response to crime? We know—because we've had two full independent inquiries last term into our police force and our criminal justice system—who this will turn against and it's not necessarily the people that are causing the violence and the harm. It will be entire communities that are "tainted" to use the language of these two bills by prejudice. We know that those constituencies those communities are also the communities that are less likely to report crime because they have been targeted over and over again by that same police force; they have been harassed they've been searched. We only ever see an unreasonable search and seizure case reported where there is a crime. Where are all the other cases? Where are all the other harms of a community that's constantly targeted by vague law and broad police powers that don't do anything to actually target crime to prevent crime to keep anybody safe?We know from the evidence what does keep communities safe. What keeps kids out of gangs is accessible mental health care; inclusive education; it's drug and alcohol treatments that are available and accessible; it's affordable warm dry housing; it's liveable incomes. Without any of that making new ways for police to search people and take away their property without having to point to a crime—that's bad lawmaking. So we won't commend it to the House."