King Annette: Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Bill — Second Reading 
King Annette: Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:652;Page:1573] 
Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour) 
: 
 Labour supports the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Bill in the second reading and right through to its completion. This was a Labour bill introduced in my name; it was picked up by the current Government which is carrying it on. I congratulate the Government on that. I say to Mr Young that I am big enough to thank National for the work it did on this legislation when in Opposition alongside the Government of the day. In fact a joint approach on the issue of the proceeds of crime has led to this bill being supported by most members in this House. Would it not be nice if just now and then instead of the grandstanding and the written-out speeches there could be some acknowledgment that Labour in Government did a number of very important things in terms of law and order? Unfortunately the total political approach that we often hear from National speakers does not allow that to happen. 
I thank members of the Law and Order Committee who took part in the deliberations on this bill for the work they did and for bringing back to this House a bill that is in better shape than it was when it went to the select committee. That is why we have select committees; that is why they are important and that is why we send legislation to them. We know that in our democracy which is without another House or Upper Chamber to scrutinise legislation the importance of select committees is huge. That is why we send bills to them. This bill was sent to a select committee; it was not introduced and passed under urgency. It went to a select committee the public of New Zealand had a say on it and helped with the changes in it and we now have a bill I believe that will pass by the overwhelming majority vote of this House. 
The truth is that New Zealand like many countries has an organised criminal gang problem. The problem is not unique to New Zealand although sometimes when we hear people speaking about it we would think that New Zealand had invented it and that we are the only country with the problem. Those who have studied this problem and who have taken the time to travel to other countries to talk to people in other jurisdictions tell us that New Zealand like many countries has an organised criminal gang problem. It is a problem that cannot be addressed by quick-fix one-off bills or some sort of smart approach where we take one particular resource and say that it is going to be the panacea. In fact this is a very complex problem indeed and one that will take all our collective wisdom and resources to resolve. 
Let us look back at the history. Perhaps the person who started trying to address this issue was Sir Robert Muldoon. He thought the way to get alongside the gang issue in New Zealand was to get alongside the gangs—to actually work with the gangs to see if their behaviour could be changed. There are those who believe there is some merit in that. But we know that since those days of the 1970s and 1980s gangs in New Zealand today—organised criminal gangs—are highly sophisticated organisations. They are not there for the good of New Zealand; they are there to make money from the misery of other New Zealanders and I deplore the fact that they make their money from the misery of our young people. They make their money out of peddling drugs to young people. They are organised criminals. 
Our approach to this issue has to be one that has many facets to it. In Government Labour looked at what we could do. It was not just to have one piece of legislation— 
Hon Phil Heatley 
: You did nothing! 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: —it was quite a number of things I say to Mr Heatley. In fact National has picked up by reinstating this bill one of those pieces of legislation. The issue needed to have legislation it needed to have an overall strategy to approach organised criminal gangs and it also needed the police to have the powers to carry out their surveillance and their work. Those three legs of the stool were what Labour put in place to address this problem. As I said it was not a new problem; the previous National Government had had the problem the Labour Government before that had had the problem and we can go back through the decades. So the previous Labour Government put in place an overarching approach to organised criminal gangs in New Zealand—a strategic approach that had with it partners working with us from local government to our police our corrections system our non-governmental organisations and our communities because gangs live within communities and they are intergenerational. We can go into parts of New Zealand today where the third and fourth generations of young people are now in criminal gangs so we needed to have an overall strategic approach to our gang problem. 
We also needed to ensure that the police had the powers they required. That is why we established the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand to attack the issues of organised criminal gangs and financial crime in New Zealand; they overlap in fact. The old idea that only white-collar criminals ripped off people is not the case today; in fact many of our organised criminal gangs wear white collars and they have their money laundered through the fronts of businesses and so on. So an agency was put in place that had powers that rested with the police—additional powers—for them to be able to undertake the work they needed to do from surveillance to the tracking of these people and the getting of overseas intelligence so that we could see what they were doing we could see where the precursors to the drug P were coming from and we would be able to follow up in an international sense. That is why the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand was put into place. 
The third leg of this approach was legislation—legislation that we believed could be effective not legislation that looks good on the books but is not going to do anything. I believe that a law that just makes patches illegal is not going to do that but this bill will add to the arsenal of legislation to help in that approach with gangs. 
Let us look at what the problem is. Currently the Proceeds of Crime Act 1991 allows the Crown to confiscate the profit made from crimes after someone is convicted of that crime. But the profits of crime can be spread amongst many people not all of whom are able to be convicted of the crime. So they get the proceeds from that crime and they spread it amongst other people but they are not able to be convicted of the crime. Organised gangs are an example of outfits that do just that. That is why this bill will add to the arsenal of legislative approaches that we need to tackle gang problems. 
I also think we need to look at other jurisdictions to see how they have handled this problem. In January this year Phil Goff and I went to South Australia to look at its legislation. That state has put a lot of effort into tackling organised criminal gangs to reduce the harm they are doing in its communities. I believe that we ought to look closely at South Australia’s overarching legislation and the approach that it is taking. There are many lessons for us to learn from that. There are many examples that we can pick up and put in place here in New Zealand to tackle a problem that we all should be concerned about. 
We support this bill firstly because it was our bill and it was part as I said of the arsenal of legislation that we were putting in place and part of an overall approach. We support it because we believe that it will work. It has worked in other places where this sort of legislation exists. In fact it exists in places like Australia Ireland and the United Kingdom. Those countries have passed similar laws to this one. The legislation has already been tried so we believe that it will work. We believe that it will help in the fight against organised criminal gangs. Therefore we will be supporting this bill to its conclusion.