Hague Kevin: Border (Customs Excise and Tariff) Processing Bill — First Reading 
Hague Kevin: Border (Customs Excise and Tariff) Processing Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:658;Page:7120] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 I would like to say that it is a pleasure to take a call on the Border (Customs Excise and Tariff) Processing Bill but I have to say that it is not. The Green Party was not advised that this bill would be coming up and it is one that we have not seen before. I had my first look at it approximately 5 minutes ago. That is not a good enough process; it is an affront to democracy. It is a process used by this Government because it wishes to avoid debate and scrutiny of the bill at its first reading. I believe that is shameful and for this reason the Green Party will be voting against the bill. We will vote against it purely in protest against the process that has been used. We have not had the opportunity to scan the bill’s content and determine whether the content is worth supporting. 
In the few minutes that I have had when moving between my office and this House in which to scan the bill—and that is all I have been able to do—it seems to me to be a bill that like a number of Government bills does several things. Most of its content is unobjectionable. It closes loopholes. It deals with inadvertent consequences of previous legislation and processes and actually takes us further. But it also introduces the machinery of Government that is required for the SmartGate system. I want to spend just a few minutes commenting on that particular point. 
John Key as our Prime Minister has made a big deal over the 8-minute saving in travel times for people travelling across the Tasman and has justified the SmartGate system on that basis. But the point I make is that the SmartGate system as it applies to customs and to biosecurity involves a greater risk to this country. Controlling our border and guarding it against various types of risk—and virtually everything that takes place under that umbrella of customs and biosecurity is about guarding the border—is one of the most fundamental functions of any Government. In fact probably even those neocon philosophers that Steven Joyce no doubt reads at night—they would certainly put me to sleep—like Robert Nozick would say that protecting the border border security is one of the fundamental functions of Government. Yet what the Government proposes is a new approach to customs and to biosecurity that does away with the universal approach that we have adopted up to this point and substitutes an approach based on risk profiling. In risk profiling we say that we will not actually use our full process with all of the people coming through our border. We will say on the basis of what we know so far that we think this type of person is more likely to pose a risk and we will concentrate our resources on screening that person for customs or biosecurity risks. We will use a lesser process for those people who do not fit our profile. 
If I were a smuggler the first thing I would do is try to choose as my mule someone who did not fit the profile. Certainly the evidence we have seen from the trial that the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry has undertaken in relation to risk profiling suggests that those who fit its category of low risk in fact nonetheless constitute some risk. If we focus our resources only on those people who meet our profiles as the Government intends to do under this bill with its SmartGate system and through its biosecurity measures then we will increase our risk associated with customs breaches and biosecurity breaches. We are not a nation that can afford to take those risks. 
This afternoon in question time I questioned the Government about some biosecurity risks we were taking around our totally unnecessary importation of palm kernel—the importation of a product from a country where foot-and-mouth disease is endemic. Malaysia has outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease virtually every year. Palm kernel is a product that we import from Malaysia and we have it on reliable information that it comes to our shores contaminated by soil. Reliable information from Governments around the world—not including ours incidentally because we have not done any review of foot-and-mouth disease risk since 2002—identifies soil in which the virus can survive for many days as a vector for foot-and-mouth disease. In other words the disease is present at the product’s source and it is present in a vector that is a regular contaminant of a product that we import. We inspect shipments of palm kernel only visually which is a technique that cannot possibly detect micro-organisms. Our only method for controlling biosecurity risks in those shipments is fumigation at source with phosphine. We learnt that quite a number of our shipments somehow miss out on that process and that of the 312 shipments received some 38 which were supposedly fumigated at source none the less arrived in New Zealand with insects and on one occasion with a gecko. 
We know that the biosecurity precautions that we do take around palm kernel are pathetic for controlling even the pests that they are designed to deal with let alone the massive threat to our primary industries and indeed to our clean green “100% Pure New Zealand” brand with which we market ourselves for tourism and trade on in all of our primary industries. The threat to that brand is massive. Our Government’s response is to say: “Well you know we can’t be 100 percent sure about anything so rather than taking this risk seriously we are just going to keep the blinkers on and keep pretending that we can get away with this and hope and pray.” That is the approach that the Government is intending to take more broadly now not only on the issue of palm kernel but also on biosecurity threats from those products imported to New Zealand. 
Last year approximately 386850 shipping containers that came into New Zealand received no biosecurity inspection at all. This Government’s response to that situation is not to take it seriously. Instead it cut the funding to those departments it cut the staffing in these departments and introduced new systems that mean fewer people coming through our borders will be subjected to any kind of risk assessment or any kind of scrutiny. It is not good enough even for that reason alone let alone taking into account the fundamentally poor process that has been used in this case. The Green Party will oppose this bill at its first reading.