Cullen Michael: Wanganui District Council (Prohibition of Gang Insignia) Bill — Second Reading 
Cullen Michael: Wanganui District Council (Prohibition of Gang Insignia) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:652;Page:1656] 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Labour) 
: 
 I strongly support the underlying intention of this bill—what it is trying to do—but I strongly oppose it because it simply will not achieve its basic purposes and cannot achieve those basic purposes with the mechanisms that are suggested. I think it was Rodney Hide who said in the first reading on this bill that he was opposed to the legislation because what was objectionable about gangs was what they did not what they wore. Now for some strange reason the ACT Party which more and more is simply the political arm of the Sensible Sentencing Trust has decided to do a complete U-turn and support the legislation for reasons that are beyond me given the coherence of the arguments put up by Mr Hide on the first reading of the bill. 
Gangs are not acceptable organisations—a means for younger middle-aged and increasingly elderly people to organise themselves. They are a threat to ordinary citizens going about their lawful business. Gangs engage in criminal activity they are heavily involved in the drug trade they create disturbances in public places and they are a blight upon our society. All of that is true but what has this bill to do with solving those problems? 
The first problem with this bill is a simple one and it is directly contrary to what Mr Bridges argued. This is not a good bill precisely because it is a local bill. If the issue of gangs is an issue for New Zealand it needs to be resolved by a much broader range of policies across the entire country. We need to monitor what South Australia is doing in this regard and see whether that works and if it works it should be done across the country. All this bill will do at the very very best—and not that—is shift the gangs in Wanganui to somewhere next door. They will become next door’s problem. 
This measure is a kind of “nimby-ism” in criminal policy which is completely counter-productive and still able to come back inside. We therefore need a much more coherent suite of policies that look at the underlying causes of the existence of gangs. We need to look at how we can transform people so that instead of being drawn into gangs at increasingly young ages they are making a positive contribution to society. If the Government really wants to lift productivity then it should note that transforming one person from a gang member to an active involved person working in society is an enormous addition to our national productivity. 
What does this bill do intrinsically? It gives the power to the Wanganui District Council to make certain judgments. Those judgments will be a lawyer’s delight. The poor district council will take upon itself at its own request the power to determine whether people or groups of people are known to be engaged in criminal activity. Who are they to make that kind of decision and then issue prescriptions? Indeed if that power were given to central government we would start using terminology like “police State” about those kinds of powers—prescribing to people on the basis of one’s belief rather than on the proven facts taken before a court of law. 
There used to be a notion in New Zealand that our legal system rests upon the right to a fair trial and upon some demonstration of proof not upon some local councillors’ suspicions. The very people the Government totally distrusts to engage in resource management planning exercises and come up with the right solutions are those whom the Government trusts to make decisions about criminality and responsibility for criminal behaviour. It is a total contradiction and it will lead to legal activity occurring because the gangs are often quite wealthy organisations now. And with an oversupply of lawyers in this country there are no doubt plenty available to act on behalf of gangs should they choose to do so. Many of Mr Bridges’ colleagues did not work for the Crown but indeed worked for the other side of the forces at work in this society in that particular respect. 
We are going to have a law that says we cannot ban the whole of Wanganui from having gangs; only bits of it. Which bits will be banned? Well the central business district will be and that is fine but I wonder which suburbs are most likely to have gang bans put upon them. Already gangs are affecting people at the lower end of society—poor and working-class people—much more than others. We do not see many gangs wandering round Remuera or the Napier Hill suburbs. We see them in Maraenui and Marewa in Napier. This bill will simply end up with the ghettoisation of gangs. It will constrain gangs within those very areas where they do the most damage already and to the very people they do the most damage to already. No doubt many National Party supporters will say the bill has worked because the one gang member they saw the previous year they have not seen again as a consequence of this bill. 
What is even sillier in this bill is that the district council will have to put up signs saying: “Dear gang member please don’t display your insignia.” Of course some gang members will wonder what an insignia is for a start. They may think it is their genitals; I have no idea—and they probably think that is illegal anyway. Is it just possible given our knowledge of gang behaviour that those signs will not last very long when they are put up and that the poor old ratepayers of Wanganui will find themselves paying over and over again for replacement of those signs? I am sure gang members will find those signs terribly frightening given the history of gang behaviour and gang attitudes on these sorts of matters! 
This bill is silly stuff. It is silly stuff that this House should not be supporting and shame on those who continue to support these kinds of cosmetic measures that do nothing about the underlying issues. It is not a matter of wearing insignia; it is a matter only of displaying it. So what gang members have to do—to borrow an analogy from another aspect of peculiar behaviour in society—is put a plastic mack over the top of their insignia when within a forbidden area wait until they get to the edge of it and whip off the plastic mack. Then lo and behold there they are proudly displaying their Mongrel Mob Black Power or Mothers Motor-cycle Club signs—and I hope they know which mothers they are talking about in Wanganui—and they are all hunky-dory and can carry on their behaviour. 
Are we really passing legislation of this sort—and why? This is a classic example of the need to be seen to do something as opposed to actually doing something that will actually address the issue. This measure is purely cosmetic. This is bravely running up to gang members putting some lipstick on them and saying they will look a lot nicer from now on and that because they look a lot nicer they will now behave a lot more nicely. 
The reality is that in the suburbs of my city where there are large numbers of gang members most of them do not need to be wearing their insignia for everybody to know they are Mongrel Bob and Black Power members. Most of those people are actually well known within the community already. Mr Borrows knows that that is true. He did not need to see insignia on various people to know who they were when he was a senior police officer within the area. He knew who they were. Even in very dim light at 100 paces he had a pretty good idea who he was talking about. 
At the end of the day Wanganui will end up being an experiment that will prove to be a failure. This bill will not solve Wanganui’s problems. We all want to solve the problems with gangs in Wanganui and in every one of our cities up and down this country. There is not a member in this House who does not want to resolve these problems but some of us want to have a serious discussion about the broad range of policies that might actually do something. 
I fully endorse what Tariana Turia said about the importance of restorative justice and alternative approaches in some of these areas. We are launched down the path of ever more punitive measures—some of them silly; some of them serious—yet we are not drawing the lesson that none of them is actually working at the end of the day.