Hipkins ChrisPOLICING (COST RECOVERY) AMENDMENT BILLIn CommitteeDebate resumed from 11 October.Parts 1 and 2 and clauses 1 to 3 (continued)CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I rise to oppose the provisions of the Policing (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill and I want to turn particularly to new section 79B(2) in clause 4 Part 1 of the bill where it defines what a demand service" is because this allows the police to charge for what are regarded as demand services. Subsection (2) basically says that the demand service "(i) constitutes policing; and (ii) is provided only on the request of an individual or organisation; and (iii) is provided to the individual or organisation requesting it and is of direct benefit to that individual or organisation (even though provision of the service may also be of indirect benefit to the public as a whole);". So that pretty much includes most things that the police do. But then it goes on to specifically exclude: "(i) the response of the Police to calls for service relating to potential offending: (ii) the conduct of criminal investigations: [and] (iii) the prosecution of criminal offences." The point I want to make here is that pretty much everything to do with crime prevention could be covered by that definition. Anything that does not involve responding directly to potential criminal offending or criminal offending or the prosecution or investigation thereof could be a service that the police would recover costs for. So if a school approaches the police and says "We want you to come into our school and do some crime prevention sessions with our kids." the police could charge the school for doing that. That is a basic function of the police and this legislation would allow them to charge for doing it because it does not fit within the exclusions that this bill sets forth. Let us just run through that again. Would the police going into a school to do a crime prevention lesson constitute policing? Yes it would. Is it provided only on the request of an individual or an organisation? Yes it would be on the request of the organisation which is the school that is requesting it. Does it benefit the organisation? Yes it does benefit the organisation. So it is a service that is a demand service and can therefore be charged for. Would it be covered by the exclusions? Well is it a response to a call for service relating to potential offending? No it is not. Is it the conduct of criminal investigation? No it is not. Is it the prosecution of criminal offences? No it is not. So it is regarded as a demand service but it is not covered by the exemption and therefore it could be charged for. So the question I have is: why would the Government put in place provisions that allow for police crime prevention work to be charged for if those crime prevention services are requested by an individual or an organisation? It seems to me that the whole emphasis of policing strategy for some time now has been around crime prevention. It is much better to prevent crime before it happens rather than to have to investigate and deal with it afterwards. Why would the Government propose legislation that would allow for a user-pays environment for all of the police's crime prevention work? By my reading of those provisions in this bill that is effectively what it is doing. There are no provisions that I can see here that would suggest that a crime prevention programme requested by an individual or an organisation is not to be regarded as something that the police could charge for. I am not saying they would charge for it in the first instance but why would we create a law that would allow them to do so when preventing crime and protecting the public must be one of the core responsibilities of the New Zealand Police? So I am strongly opposed to these particular provisions. I want to turn then to the other issue that I have a particular concern about and that is the police-vetting process. This is probably the most likely police service that we would see charges introduced for if this bill is passed through the House. Let us consider which are the types of organisations that use police vetting—in particular organisations that deal with young people. I want to start with early childhood centres and then move on to schools. We have some requirements in regulation for early childhood services to have all of those staff who are working with young people and children—babies even—police-vetted before they are allowed to work in those early childhood centres. That is a Government regulatory requirement and it is a damned good one. It is one that we should continue to uphold. What this bill would do is it would allow the police to charge for those vetting services that early childhood centres may be requesting. For private early childhood services there is a private benefit to that one could argue but there are community-based services such as kindergartens that receive all of their funding from the Government—or they now receive a little bit of funding from parents but predominantly their funding comes from the Government. So ultimately the cost of the police vetting is going to be met by a different branch of Government by effectively cutting funding from early childhood services because it is transferring the cost of a service currently provided by the police on to early childhood services without increasing the funding to early childhood services correspondingly. The same provisions apply to schools. So in the case of schools teachers are required to undergo police vetting to renew their teacher registration requirements. Here is an interesting one: the Government as part of a collective bargaining round agreed to cover the teacher registration fees for teachers renewing their practising certificates. Will the Government also cover the police-vetting costs if the police introduce that? It seems to me that it is finding a back-door way to undo a commitment that it has made to cover the cost of teachers renewing their practising certificates. It is a very good provision that we have in our education system—that those people who are working with young people should have a police-vetting certificate. I then want to turn to another issue around schooling. I have talked about teachers. Schools will have police-vetting requirements for their support staff as well but what about those volunteers who work with young people? There have been a couple of cases in the media recently around coaches—so parents who coach sports teams—and whether police vetting should be required there. Or if a school wishes to use police vetting for positions that it does not have to vet—at the moment schools do not have to vet parents who volunteer to coach sports teams but they may choose to do so—under this bill they would be discouraged from doing so by the cost that could be imposed and ultimately the question then comes back to the very basis on which we fund policing in New Zealand. Is it consistent with the public interest to discourage those individuals and organisations that could benefit from using police vetting in order to protect young people or their clients or their customers? Is it in our best interests as a society to discourage them from doing so by imposing additional charges? My view is that it is not so I have put forward Supplementary Order Paper 126 which would specifically exempt schools and early childhood education services from the charges for police vetting because ultimately that is a transfer of costs on to schools and early childhood services. It is not going to improve child safety and student safety and it is ultimately going to result I think in a compromising of that. So I look forward to the Minister's response to those two issues."