Ardern Shane: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Ardern Shane: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 02 September 2008. Volume:649;Page:18511. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
SHANE ARDERN (National—Taranaki-King Country) 
: 
 It is a privilege to rise and speak to the clauses in Part 1 of the Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3). Can I at the same time touch briefly on Supplementary Order Paper 241 which we will probably be voting on in this part as well. I note that unlike the emissions trading legislation where there were 785 amendments Supplementary Order Paper 241 has just two amendments. One affects clause 2 and omits the word “August” and substitutes the word “October”. Likewise in clause 18A it omits the word “August” and substitutes the word “October”. As there was pretty much universal support for the bill in the House and in the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee the only conclusion we can draw is that once again we have a very tardy Government that cannot conduct the important business of the State in a timely fashion and so has to come to the Committee of the whole House in order to extend the time by which the bill will receive its Royal assent. I notice that the date—October—is still within the term of this Government. It is amazing that it has not actually kicked it out to December or January of next year but it has not and that is a good thing because this is worthy legislation. 
I will briefly touch on new section 68A “Exemption for tobacco manufactured for personal use” inserted by clause 6A. Subsection (1) states that “Section 68 does not apply to the manufacture of tobacco in a private house or dwelling place” which describes the piece of land or what is known in real estate terms as the “house and curtilage”. For those who might wonder what that term means that is the section or the land attached to or associated with what would normally be described as someone’s house or dwelling place. In other words if I were to decide to plough up 15 acres at the back of my dairy farm and put it into use for growing tobacco for my own personal use then I would not be exempt under this section of the customs and excise legislation. My colleague Tim Groser touched on the reasons why the select committee spent so much time on that and they are very valid because of course it is the area where the Customs Service has I guess a jurisdiction over revenue or the control of the integrity of what should have a customs excise duty and what should not. 
I applaud the committee as I said in the second reading debate for its common-sense approach in arriving at a sensible exemption of 15 kilos of tobacco per annum. Let us see how it goes. It is one of those things we will not know until it is tried. It should not tie up Customs Service staff in needless inspection and trying to track down those who are growing a bit of tobacco for their own personal use. Like the member from New Zealand First I was quite fascinated with the Green Party minority view on this in which it raised concern about the exemption of 15 kilos for personal use and suggested the limit was a bit too high. I like the member would wonder whether if it were another plant that was being grown for domestic consumption in a person’s dwelling place or on land associated with the dwelling place the Green Party would have had such a firm view. One can only conclude that according to the Greens’ philosophy one type of “chop chop” if you like is safer or less health threatening than another. Maybe one of its members will take a call and explain their logic in that. Certainly it is not backed up by medical science to the best of my knowledge. 
I would also like to touch on as I did earlier forfeiture and seizure. I know that this was an area the Customs Service itself spent quite a bit of time agonising over and the ability to use the chief executive’s discretion in the way it is now able to be used is a sensible and pragmatic step in regard to that. I know that there are some cases—and bad cases make bad law as a general approach—where there have been some extreme one-off examples. It is not widespread but there are cases where people feel as though they have not been treated fairly by the system. All of us who are constituent MPs have probably received such cases from time to time and found when we look into them that they are perhaps not as grave as those who bring them to us might have us believe. But sometimes they are and this step potentially will help tidy up that loose end.