Cosgrove Clayton: Gangs and Organised Crime Bill — In Committee 
Cosgrove Clayton: Gangs and Organised Crime Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:658;Page:7514] 
Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour—Waimakariri) 
: 
 I have to say that the exchange between my colleague Moana Mackey and Sandra Goudie was interesting. For those who do not know Sandra Goudie is actually the chairperson of the Law and Order Committee and was charged with shepherding the Gangs and Organised Crime Bill through the process of reporting back to this House. I say to Ms Goudie that this is actually very serious legislation. That is the last time I will bother addressing that member in a speech because it is a waste of time. 
I want to raise a very serious issue. In terms of the resourcing issues that other colleagues have talked about an issue that I think is of great concern certainly to the Police Association and that will go to the heart of how this bill is implemented is how the police protect themselves in respect of dealing with gang members and organised crime. The evidence that Ms Mackey and others speak of and that some on the other side of the Chamber might want to look at is very very clear in terms of the violence that is put upon our communities family members and others especially by gangs and organised crime. Yet for the first time in history to my knowledge firearms training for the police force is being rationed. An allegation was put up by the Minister of Police that the police have always reviewed firearms training and that reviews occurred under our Government or whatever. That is true because the police are independent and they are charged with reviewing their own operational requirements. But in 9 years of a Labour Government no requirement was put on the police to ration firearms training. 
We are not talking about some sort of gung-ho attitude here; we are talking about incidents such as the tragedy in Napier when Senior Constable Len Snee was killed and two other officers were critically wounded. The first responder was not the armed offenders squad; it was a Youth Aid officer. In that case—and it is very germane to this bill—it was not organised crime although there were organised crime connections. We now know a lot of drug cultivation and drug selling was going on but there was no intelligence that that day would be a problem for the police. There was no intelligence inside the police. That is not a comment on them; it simply was not anticipated. No one knew. There was no evidence. There was no one from the public to say that something strange was going on at this person’s residence. There was no evidence in respect of firearms use. It was a routine drug warrant. The first responder was a Youth Aid officer and then we had a tragedy. So when it comes to resourcing if the Minister of Police Judith Collins wanted to she could communicate very very clearly to the Commissioner of Police that the pressure is off in terms of resources. She could communicate that he is not required to cut cars to ration firearms training or to find $21 million in the Police vote because this Government says it is committed to implementing this and other law enforcement legislation. The Minister of Police and the Minister of Justice could pick up the phone and say to Commissioner Broad that it is OK and that he is exempt from the razor gang requirements that are going through Government agencies because they believe that if they require him to protect our community there is a requirement on them to allow police officers to have the tools to protect themselves. 
There is a lot of hot air about this bill. We support the bill but I am concerned about the man or woman in the blue uniform. We know from our communities that there is an expectation from people wearing the blue uniform. It does not matter if that person is a police educator driving a desk a front-line police officer a Youth Aid officer or whatever. When it hits the fan our communities assume that if a police officer is wearing the blue uniform he or she will have the skills to intervene at any time and at any level at least as first responders until specialists like the armed offenders squad and others can come to finish the job as it were. The problem we will have implementing this legislation is that there will be police officers—people in the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB) and all sorts of folk—who will have their firearms training rationed or who will not get firearms training at all and will not renew their skills every year or every second year as they are required to. My challenge to the Minister of Justice is to guarantee that when a man or a woman in a police uniform is going around dealing with people who are involved in organised crime and gang violence they will not be required to use firearms because they will not have the training to execute that job.