Rich Katherine: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee Third Reading 
Rich Katherine: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:626;Page:21497] 
KATHERINE RICH (National) 
: 
 National wholeheartedly supports this part because it will assist Customs Service officials to do their job. When I speak with pharmacists people in the Customs Service and pharmaceutical representatives they tell me that the issue is less to do with problems regulating the products once they get into the country and more to do with border security. People bring in large quantities of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in order to produce P once they are here and put forward the argument that they are bringing those substances into the country for personal use. 
 Quite clearly if someone turns up to an airport with suitcases full of that stuff they are not using it for personal use. But it has been incredibly difficult for customs officials to prove that and I think we are seeing here some tightening up of their abilities to deal with problems at our borders. We need to get a handle on the amounts of those substances that are imported. Although we can work with pharmacies to ensure that regulated substances are marketed and sold in a managed way we can do more by assisting customs officials to be able to deal with the wide range of problems they face when people try to bring those substances into the country. 
This part clarifies what the Customs Service is able to do. It is quite detailed in that it lays out what can and cannot be done during a strip search or rub-down search and what can be required of a person coming into the country with suitcases full of cough medicine. It makes very clear what the Customs Service can ask a passenger coming into this country to do or not to do. I think that will tidy up some of the problems that have been faced in the past and some of the challenges that have been made when people have come through customs with quite clearly more goods than they would ever possibly use in a lifetime. 
The issue is why there is that level of detail. In the past it has been proven that the level of detail in legislation—when it comes to strip searches as one example—is very important. When the law is not clear people will come in challenge it and get off in many cases on a technicality or because the law does not speak in a very detailed way about a particular incidence. That is why section 13EC “Definition of strip search” inserted by clause 27 goes through in quite some detail what officials may require a person who is being searched to do. It is very clear that it is a very full list. Hopefully we will not see any loopholes and people being able to get off quite serious charges on technicalities. 
Detail is important but I am not sure that we need the level of detail in some aspects of the bill. I draw the Committee’s attention to clause 29 which specifies that the Commissioner of Police and the chief executive of the New Zealand Customs Service must report to Parliament on the number of rub-down searches and strip searches undertaken by members of the police. I just wonder why we need that level of detail when every member of Parliament knows that through a parliamentary question or a question in the House we have access to that information. Why does it need to be specified in law? We live in a country that is increasingly over-regulated and I would like the Associate Minister of Health just to describe and explain I suppose why in that particular provision we need to be quite so specific. It may be something to do with the police and their ability to provide information that perhaps needs to be specified in the law. I am not sure. 
Some good points have been made in this debate by my colleagues particularly about resources for the police.