Borrows Chester: Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Bill — Second Reading 
Borrows Chester: Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:652;Page:1375] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 It is a privilege to be able to speak on the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Bill which of course the new Government has brought on and which languished for a long time under the stewardship of the previous Government. That was a shame because it showed that the previous Labour Government took its foot off the throat of gangs in this country. There were a number of indicators of that. One of those indicators was the expiration of the 2004 Organised Crime Strategy which was never replaced by the Labour Government until the death of Jhia Te Tutua. I look forward to the sentencing of the murderers of that wee child on Friday. That brought into the public consciousness the scourge that is gangs. In actual fact what had happened was that the executive had just patted gangs on the head and let them get on with business. Gangs were not coming to the attention of the police or the public very often at all because it was bad for business. Then there was a turf war. It happened to be in Wanganui. A number of incidents went on for about 18 months and resulted in the tragedy of the death of Jhia Te Tutua. Thankfully the Government of the day then shook itself off woke up and started implementing some legislation including bringing this bill before the House. It had been sitting around for a long time doing absolutely nothing. 
The new Government has given this bill legislative priority because we are committed to clamping down on gangs and disrupting their behaviour. We need to hit gangs in the pocket because money is the lifeblood of gangs just as it is the lifeblood of the rest of us who try to operate within society. We need to compare and contrast the new Government’s record on gangs with that of the Labour Government. In addition to this bill the new Government has introduced legislation that provides for tougher penalties for membership of criminal gangs expands police surveillance powers in respect of gang communications and provides greater powers to remove gang fortifications—all within the first 100 days of office—and we have only just finished debating another bill the Corrections Amendment Bill (No 2) which will also deal with the criminal activities of gangs in jail. 
In Government Labour failed to deliver on its 2005 election promise to hit gangs where it hurts by removing the proceeds of crime. In the 2005 election Labour made all the promises to introduce legislation but then pulled the bill in July 2006 when the bill was dumped without being debated. Nothing more was heard of it until May 2007 18 months after the election when the Labour Government introduced the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Bill. The bill then languished on the order paper for another 18 months awaiting its second reading. If the Labour Government saw the bill as such a huge priority I ask why the bill sat there doing nothing. Silence. There is no answer. It sat there doing nothing initially for 18 months while it waited for something to happen; then the bill was introduced and the Government sat there for another 18 months knowing that it had support within the Law and Order Committee. 
 I was very pleased to be part of the select committee that considered this bill. We were under the chairmanship of the very able Martin Gallagher with strings being operated by Jill Pettis who unfortunately is long departed. We know that there are a number of strategies within the bill. The Hon Phil Goff said at the time of the introduction of the Criminal Proceeds and Instruments Bill: “The Bill will have an immediate impact on becoming law”. He also said that millions of dollars a year would be confiscated from gangs. They might be under this Government when we finally get this bill passed. But the Labour Government was so besotted with the Electoral Finance Bill and the emissions trading scheme that it forgot all about this stuff. 
This kind of legislation is the nuts and bolts of Government. The first priority of Government is to keep members of its society safe and Labour abrogated that responsibility by walking away from it. Time and again Labour promised long but delivered short on promises to attack gangs. It is clear that Labour’s priorities were never—and never will be—to make hard decisions to tackle gangs. They put gangs in the too-hard basket and have left the new Government to clean up that mess. We are quite happy to grab hold of the issue to get our hands around the throats of gangs and to deal with them because they are an insidious blight on our society. When one lives in communities that are being controlled by gangs—as I have—one understands just how deep and intense the hold of gangs is on local communities. We saw on the front page of the  
Dominion Post  
last week about the activity around Farmer Crescent at Pomare the inability of the police to be able to get in there and make those people safe and the fear that the other residents in that community have in coming forward and exposing the sort of pressure and intimidation that is heaped upon them. Every other provincial city in this country has pockets of gang activity where members of those little groups dig in and have little potholes of gang heat within those communities that are very very difficult to police. One cannot blame the police for staying away in their ones and their twos from those sorts of areas and strongholds until they are able to be there in number. 
It is interesting to note too that this legislation created some difficulties for the way in which those accused of being the recipients of the proceeds of crime were able to access legal representation. For instance one point the committee debated at some length was the fairness or otherwise of a person who has the ownership of land or property being able to use that as security to raise a loan to represent him or her. What this in effect did was take away a property right before an order had been made within the court—the property right to borrow against land for the purposes of mounting a defence to a claim before the court. The committee was divided on that. Some of the committee believed that people should be able to use the security of property to provide money to mount a defence and some did not see that as an issue. But we were assured by advisers that in fact those people would be entitled to legal aid so a defence would be able to be provided. 
This legislation expands the ability of the authorities to confiscate property of gangs gang members associates and other criminals and places an onus of proof onto the defendants to prove the legitimacy of the ownership and their holding of that property. In shifting that onus of proof—it is a fairly rare situation where that onus is laid upon the respondent and does not rest on the prosecutor—the offenders may be liable to a cause of action under both the criminal law and the civil law as the criminal and civil liability legs stand independently. There has been argument from some quarters that it is a sort of double jeopardy situation but it is not. One is dealing with charges that are brought against the person; the other is dealing with an action that is attacking the property. Those who want to get involved in a criminal lifestyle and who want to reap the profits—for instance in drug dealing to deal and gain money from the curse that is put on other people the recipients of their drug dealing—should be ready to do the time if they have been found to have done the crime. 
The objects of the bill are fourfold. The first is to confiscate property from persons who have engaged in or profited from significant criminal activity. The second is to reduce the rewards of crime for the individual. The third is to reduce the attraction of crime for potential offenders. The deterrents contained within this bill are many and they will certainly spread further than just to those caught for the immediate crime of committing criminal offending because we all know that within gang situations it is those more vulnerable associates of gangs—prospects or junior members of gangs—who are forced to commit crime in order to be promoted up the ladder. The fourth benefit is that the policy objectives of this bill are to reduce the resources that could potentially be used for criminal activity. We know that once the snowball of criminal activity gets rolling it generates wealth for those who are the taggers-on and those who are at the hub of the planning and execution of crime are then further and further away from those committing it and those who find themselves before the court on criminal charges.