Borrows Chester: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) — First Reading 
Borrows Chester: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) — First Reading 
[Volume:644;Page:13996] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 I rise to take just a short call in respect of the Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No. 3) and to make a number of small points. The first one is of course that what this bill does and the reason the National Party is going to support it is that it clarifies law that at the moment is unclear and it sets about two different courses of action for what is pretty much the same objective. The Law Commission has made a recommendation that the law be clear and concise—and so it should be. People have to live within the law; they need to be able to know where the lines are drawn. This bill aims at simplification in respect of appeal processes for those people who have had items taken from them at the borders and seek to regain control of them. At the moment they head along a track where they need the Minister’s authority to have those released or need to appeal to the Minister.  
This bill seeks to allow an appeal to go through the chief executive officer of the Customs Service and then to the appeal authority. Eventually the second leg of appeal is through the High Court—a court that is used to dealing with those matters and is obviously the final court of appeal for a number of other pieces of legislation that we have to work under.  
The next thing the bill seeks to do is to establish the authority of the chief executive officer to be able to designate on a case by case basis landing places for the entry and exit of people entering and leaving our borders if they are not traditionally supervised by customs and excise staff. Of course we have to remember that in today’s world we are under greater threat from the incursion of criminal products and processes. Also as regards border control there are threats to our biodiversity. So there is a need to guard those very carefully. We have seen incursions from other countries in recent times of pests we do not want to have here—both criminal and “biodiversical” if there is such a word. Authorisation can be made in consultation with the police and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry the Customs Service the Ministry of Transport and the Department of Labour and so it should be. It should be a much simpler and fairer process and it makes good common sense.  
The third point which our friend from the ACT party has recently outlined and debated from a constitutional point of view is the limitations around the growth and manufacture of tobacco products supposedly for personal use. It may be surprising to people to learn that there is a trade in illicitly grown and manufactured tobacco products. People are taking the opportunity to grow tobacco products on a commercial scale. As an ex-smoker I wonder why the hell people would even bother but they do.  
It will be interesting to see just where the various parties line up in respect of this because we do have a bill before the House at the moment for the growth of cannabis for personal use in respect of medicinal cannabis. My view is that it would be incredibly hard to control; it would lead to the commercialisation of that little industry.  
I thought that my friend Mr Hide was going to start making a play about how we can move for the growth for personal use of tobacco and then leave off cannabis but surprisingly he did not head down that track. My response to that is that having worked in some small towns with an absolute plague of cannabis I am sure we do not want to go there. The ramifications of allowing the growing of cannabis for personal use would be much worse than for tobacco. Also trying to restrict tobacco use any further than this legislation does is something for which we could never put the lid back on the bottle.  
National will support this bill because in a timely way it makes three significant amendments towards the simplification and the control of parts of New Zealand ways of life and protection that need to happen.