Hayes John: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hayes John: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 02 September 2008. Volume:649;Page:18521. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JOHN HAYES (National—Wairarapa) 
: 
 The Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) is about border control. A good bit of my electorate covers the borders of this country. It stretches from Turakirae Head across on the other side of Wellington Harbour almost up to Cape Kidnappers. It is very important for the people in my electorate that we have good sound border control and it is very important for the well-being of the people in my electorate that we have good common-sense Government. If we do not New Zealand is left with a choice of becoming either a retirement village or an educational institution for other countries. More than 80000 people a year leave this country because of bad governance because taxes are too high and because wages are not high enough—as reinforced in this morning’s  
Dominion Post 
 by the headline “Kiwis get half the pay of Aussies in same jobs”. 
That is why I support this legislation. It is good legislation. It is not the theatre of the emissions trading legislation it is not the theatre of the Real Estate Agents Bill and it is not the theatre of the legislation that we were discussing this morning the Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Bill which the Government pretends will provide affordable homes to people in my electorate. That will not happen. 
It is really interesting what one can learn when one trawls through the impact of this bill on other legislation. In particular I have some comments that I would like to point in the direction of my colleague from New Zealand First Peter Brown. I draw his attention to sections 10A and 10B of the Protected Objects Act 1975. They are about the importation of protected foreign objects. One is not allowed to bring them into the country. This is the point: if a protected foreign object is in this country a foreign Government has 3 years from the time it knew about it to instigate court proceedings to reclaim that item or 50 years from the date that it was brought into this country. I make that point because I think we need to revisit the issues around our own electoral funding arrangements. Where political parties try to mislead the public of this country a law that gives only 6 months for them to be fined for their actions is patently not strong enough. I think the next Parliament needs to come back and look at the Protected Objects Act and work out how we can have laws in this country that protect the integrity of our electoral process and the funding thereof—something that we have not seen recently in the case of our colleagues in New Zealand First. 
Coming back to the legislation before us this morning I would really like to reinforce the point that we need to put far more effort into improving our legislation across the board. Only by having good legislation and good governance in this community will we keep people in this country. From the perspective of people in the Wairarapa where I live I think the first thing our people want to see is reduced taxes. That also applies to excise tax because our winegrowers around Martinborough Bideford Matahiwi Valley and north into Hawke’s Bay are paying far too much excise tax which is targeted to the inflation rate. In years of low production—and we have had a couple of bad droughts—it puts a huge imposition on our winegrowers. When I see that happening and when I think about it in the context of the excise tax on tobacco that we are collecting through the Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) I think there is room for tidying up our act on behalf of our winegrowers. 
We need to reduce the quantity of Government intrusion into the lives of people every day. This legislation will do that. At one level we are doing it by allowing the Comptroller of Customs to make sensible decisions about the disposition of the service’s resources in order to quickly protect our border. On the other hand we are also being very straightforward in putting into this legislation the penalties that will apply to people who infringe the law. As I pointed out in the House earlier today that approach does not apply to our alcohol legislation where penalties can be fixed very quickly by bureaucratic fiat. That has to be stopped. Our next Parliament needs to tidy up the legislation in terms of the penalties that apply to people who infringe our law as it applies to alcohol. We must get rid of the nanny State because if we do not we will find that people will continue to vote with their feet as they have been doing. I think this legislation is a very good example of how we can do something sensibly. We need to apply this model to many other sections of our legislation. 
With those comments I thank my colleagues on the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee for the way that this legislation was considered and put together. I also thank the officials who did a very good job in answering the many questions that our select committee raised in our consideration of this legislation. I commend the bill not only to the House but to the people of New Zealand as an excellent example of good law.