Mark Ron: Financial Review Debate — Procedure In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Mark Ron: Financial Review Debate — Procedure In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:616;Page:11891] 
RON MARK (NZ First) 
: 
 Sometimes it is very pleasing to work on the Law and Order Committee and sometimes it is jolly frustrating. The reason I find so much of it to be frustrating is that we seem to be very long in the talk about what this Government is going to do about crime and about what Labour was going to do about crime when it was in Opposition. I have a wad of press releases about 4 inches thick stating what Mr Hawkins Mr Goff and Mr Mike Moore would do when they finally got to the Government benches. Well 5 years down the line we are still dealing with the problems they promised they would resolve. No amount of shilly-shallying and wishy-washy arguments from the police will convince me that in some areas the police are simply not achieving the results we want them to achieve. 
For example in our review we discussed the improving trend in respect of burglary but the bottom line is that over the last 12 months the burglary of dwellings was up by 4 percent. That is the bottom line. The bottom line is that whilst we sit and crow that another $6.8 million is being pumped into dealing with methamphetamine the police asked for the establishment of four teams to deal with home laboratories and this Government gave them only three. Worse than that the South Island has to share the same facility that Wellington and the lower North Island use—this on the back of the fact that with those scarce resources the police have cracked more methamphetamine laboratories than we would ever in our worst nightmares have feared possible. What does that say? It says that the police predictions were exactly correct. 
The methamphetamine threat was portrayed well by the Police Association. The Government was told about it. The Commissioner of Police went to the Government and asked for the funding. The Government short-changed him and then had the nerve to boast that it had increased the funding by $6.8 million. That sum was identified as not being enough to deal with methamphetamine and on the back of the results we are seeing we now know it is not enough. No amount of crowing will disguise the facts that the police did not get the resources they need that methamphetamine is a growing problem that organised crime is behind it and that the problem is threatening the very well-being of our youth and the safety of our communities. 
Let us look at the interventions. There was a lot of talk from the Government about what it was going to do to intervene. Yes some good things have been done. There are regulations going through to restrict the sales of pseudoephedrine. But New Zealand First warned this Government about immigrant crime. It warned that with regard to certain people of certain ethnicities one could see a propensity of certain crimes being carried out by them. What have we seen? Well hello now surprise surprise the Customs Service people doing a good job at the border have seized hundreds of thousands of pills and drugs that form the base product for methamphetamine production. Again there was a failure to heed the warnings and I have to say to this Government that no amount of political correctness will avoid the fact that certain ethnicities need to be monitored for particular types of crime. 
I have a simple question to ask all the Maori MPs in Labour: why do they sit there and allow Maori crime to be analysed debated and recorded in the most minute detail whilst they let the Minister of Police and the Minister of Justice turn a blind eye to Asian crime to Somali crime and to the crimes committed by all the other ethnic groups that we now have coming to this country who have their own propensity to a particular crime fetish? Ignoring that will not make it go away—it is there. The discussions I have had on private trips to New South Wales confirm that there is a Lebanese crime problem. It does not go away because someone says that it is racist to talk about it. The police need to be steered into recording the details of what those people are doing. If Government members do not accept what I am saying they should look at the figure for kidnappings coercion and extortion—a 600 percent increase in that one crime alone. 
Dail Jones 
: How much? 
RON MARK 
: A 600 percent increase and the vast majority of that crime is committed by Chinese students or immigrants. Members should look at the gambling dens. There is a whole backlog of issues there that if we do not get to grips with the downstream effects of the huge gambling debts being incurred by Asian New Zealanders will come back to bite us when we see them recoup those losses or pay their loan sharks the massive interest they owe them by illicit means. How will that happen? By extortion bribery kidnapping and that sort of thing. That is where we have to improve our interventions with regard to crime. 
Report noted.