Brown Peter: Land Transport Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Brown Peter: Land Transport Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
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PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 Well I think that is the first time for about 8 years that I have listened to Tau Henare and have agreed in part with what he had to say. He has reflected—fair go to the guy—to some degree the public’s concern. But as usual with Tau Henare he has taken it one step too far. We are fixing up this law because— 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Because you didn’t do the job properly in the first place. 
PETER BROWN 
: —we did not do the job properly in the first place. It was not him; I will excuse the honourable member. We did not do the job properly and now we are trying to fix it up. 
It is not because 175 people or however many have missed out. That is the number of people who are affected by our botch-up directly but those people might well have been driving their cabs for years and been perfectly safe and highly regarded by their communities. I have had letters and phone calls from people with regard to the case of at least one person who is a decent law-abiding guy. When he was 17 he had a sexual relationship with a girl who was just under 16 and now we are taking his livelihood away from him. That is why we are fixing up this law and why we have to fix it up. 
New Zealand First will be supporting the Minister’s amendment to clause 4. We will not be supporting the Jim Anderton amendment to clause 3. The simple reason is that we want to accommodate as best we can people who are of no real danger to public safety. They have been caught by this “young love” effect—I will use that term; people can use more basic terms if they like—caught by that sort of administration. Many of them went to borstal or detention centres and one two or half a dozen went to prison. At the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—and I think the National Party members on the committee will recall this—I was opposed to supporting the part of the legislation relating to prison. I drew the line at what we might call youth punishment. But since that time the Minister has clarified exactly who is being affected and we see merit in widening the net. 
This bill is about where we draw the line. That is what we are arguing here. It is not if we will draw the line but where we will draw the line. I notice that Wayne Mapp made reference to a member in his contribution a little while ago. I will own up to being I think that member whom he implied had wanted to support a murderer. That is not true at all. What I pointed out—in a fictitious case I believe—was that a man came home and saw his wife in bed with his best mate. He assaulted his best mate and killed him and was put in prison for murder. I was trying to point out to the honourable member that if he had not killed him—or in modern-day parlance he probably would have been found guilty of manslaughter—it would have made a difference under this bill as manslaughter is not specified. It is not regarded as a serious enough crime. There is no offence of assault in this bill. There is assault to rob but not assault because it is not regarded as a serious crime under the bill. So I am trying to illustrate to the honourable member on the select committee the difference between a murder in those sorts of circumstances and what would have happened if he had not killed the guy. I was trying to illustrate how difficult it is to draw the line. 
The underlying point is that we should draw the line on the court judgment. We are safer there if we draw the line on the court judgment rather than on what we see as the offence. I left the select committee and said that we would draw the line at youth punishment which is covered by a new section 29A(4) to be inserted into the Land Transport Act 1998 by clause 3 of the bill. It states: “imprisonment excludes—(a) corrective training; or (b) borstal training; or (c) detention centre training”. That is where we drew the line. I accept the Hon Harry Duynhoven’s Supplementary Order Paper and I have taken it to my caucus. It said we should move the line that much further for the retrospective guys—the guys who are actually driving now or who have been driving until now—but not for the guys who will be in this position in the future. We keep the line at youth punishment for forward planning for people but for the retrospective guys we would let in those who have been convicted of offences carrying a sentence of short-term imprisonment of under a year. We think that is quite reasonable and quite sensible. It lets through those people whom we in Parliament in haste condemned.