Ardern Jacinda: Vehicle Confiscation and Seizure Bill — First Reading 
Ardern Jacinda: Vehicle Confiscation and Seizure Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:654;Page:4123] 
JACINDA ARDERN (Labour) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call on the Vehicle Confiscation and Seizure Bill. I begin by acknowledging the commonality that exists in this debate across both sides of the House. In this particular case I think we are all in agreement that a sector of our society is behaving in an absolutely abhorrent way that is to the detriment of our communities and is potentially very very harmful to various sectors of our society. We have already heard about the negative consequences of that behaviour from a list that was read out in another member’s speech. 
But I also acknowledge that this is an issue of degrees. We can start at the very small lesser end of the scale. Coming from a town like Morrinsville I have seen and even experienced the lesser end of the scale. As a teenager I once foolishly chose to teach my sister how to do a burnout on my gravel driveway. It was a foolish act given that my father is a policeman and it did not take him long to figure out who the culprit was; I raked the driveway for almost 3 hours. This is an issue of degrees. We are not talking about the foolish acts of young people doing rark-ups on their parents’ driveways; we are talking about a group who are flouting the law and as has been pointed out have no interest in abiding by the law set out in this House. I think that is a really important point to keep in mind when we analyse whether this bill will impact on the serious situation we are trying to grapple with and I will come back to that point when I go through some clauses that I think deserve particular scrutiny. 
It is also important to keep in mind that we have been here before. As has been pointed out by my colleagues we already have legislation that is tougher than what our counterparts in Australia currently use—that is the Land Transport (Unauthorised Street and Drag Racing) Amendment Act 2003. As we all know Clayton Cosgrove introduced that legislation to deal with the very group of people we are trying to deal with again today. That amendment Act allowed two very important things. First it enabled the police to impound vehicles on the spot. It may be a matter of our needing to go back to the police and ask them why that provision is not being used frequently enough. Perhaps a safety issue is involved whereby impounding a car on the spot causes an unnecessary risk to the personal safety of police officers in heightened potentially violent situations. We should perhaps be putting these questions to the police. 
The second provision in the amendment Act is that the courts have the power to confiscate vehicles on a first offence. We have already heard some of the statistics repeated in the House tonight. In 2006 alone there were 9600 offences in which mandatory confiscation could have applied. But it did not. We have already heard that the rate of confiscation was a mere 2 percent. Lianne Dalziel has already brought up the question of why we have not seen a higher rate of confiscation under the Land Transport Act as it currently stands and I have to say I am very disappointed that the regulatory impact statement in the explanatory note of the bill does not touch on the gaps in the existing Act and reflect on why the courts are not using this mandatory power more. I would have given a lot more kudos to the Government if it had asked where it is going wrong now because I think that might have meant that we would be debating something that had a little more teeth than the bill we are currently looking at. 
Let us reflect on that. We currently have the power to enact mandatory confiscation. Mandatory implies that all those 9600 cars would have been confiscated but they have not. There is one provision that allows a court the discretion not to confiscate. What is that? A judge is able when considering confiscation to take into account extreme or undue hardship. That is not an unusual provision; it is something that we see for instance in the Sentencing Act where a judge has the discretion to take into account the situation of the individual before him or her when factoring in reparations and the payment of fines. It is not unusual that we give judges that discretion. Currently that discretion has obviously meant that cars are not being confiscated frequently. If this Government is truly serious about being as tough as possible on boy racers why has it not looked at that provision? Currently the bill keeps that discretion for the courts. I am not arguing either way as to whether that is good or bad but I would have at least expected the regulatory impact assessment to say why in 98 percent of cases judges are not mandatorily ordering confiscation of cars. What is going on in those 98 percent of cases? There has been no analysis of that and I think that is a failure on behalf of the Government. 
So what is different about this bill? If all of those provisions actually remain the same that discretion is still there and we are likely to see very little change as a consequence then what is different about this legislation? I want to spend a bit of time reflecting on the much talked about crushing aspect of the bill. It is contained primarily in clause 8 of the bill where new section 129A enables courts to order the destruction of motor vehicles where an offender who is convicted of a street racing offence has two previous convictions for similar offences committed within the last 4 years. The court may order the destruction of a motor vehicle if the offender was driving or was in charge of it at the material time and if it is owned by the offender or a substitute for the offender. The court must not order the destruction of a motor vehicle if it would result in extreme hardship to the offender or undue hardship to any other person including to a substitute. 
Let us just run through what process we would see happen what procedures must happen and which hurdles must be overcome in order to see the ultimate end point that the Minister is hoping to see: the crushing of vehicles. What will happen? The first criterion is that two previous convictions must have occurred. Members should keep in mind that this bill is not retrospective so it is saying that starting from Royal assent two convictions must be incurred by an offender for similar offences. We are expecting to see someone convicted through the courts of two similar offences. Second those convictions must be received in a certain time frame; hurdle No. 2 is that they must happen with a 4-year period. Third the court can then order destruction if the person who is driving the vehicle also owns the vehicle. I would have liked to see more analysis in the explanatory note of this bill of the situations of those who have come before the court where they already own the vehicle. In 98 percent of cases a judge is not ordering confiscation. Is that because in 96 percent of cases those people do not in fact own the car? Why have we not seen any analysis of that in the explanatory note? That is the third criterion; it is the third hurdle to toughness if you will. The fourth hurdle to toughness is the issue of undue hardship that the judge is able to take into account. 
Those are four reasonably tight hurdles to overcome before we will see the Government reach its ultimate end point of crushing vehicles. It may well be that in this case the Government was after the ability to say that it was going to crush cars but without actually reaching an end point of doing so. I do not want to be too cynical about it though; that might not be its intention. But if it was not surely we would not have seen such a high bar set by the Government before the end point of crushing was reached. 
Of course I acknowledge that we have an issue in New Zealand that we need to tackle. I am not denying that. But what would I have liked to see? I recently had the privilege of spending some time with a group of young people at a WE-Speak conference which is where young people in Christchurch come together to discuss the issues in their community. They raised this as an issue; they want to debate it.