White Helen; Dean JacquiHELEN WHITE (Labour): I rise unable to support this bill and I did look at the bill with an open mind. As a lawyer I work in employment law and I don't work in criminal law but I did what I would consider due diligence. I thought about the purpose of Matt King's bill and again I congratulate Erica Stanford on winning the ballot. It's a pity it was for this bill because I'm pretty sure that she has things that are important to her that would have been good things to come out of this ballot. Unfortunately when I looked at the bill and I looked at its intent its intent is to deal it looks like with carjacking. Its grievance its mischief is that a person who converts a car aggressively—violently—is not actually treated the same as a person who steals a car with an intent to deprive the owner of it permanently and does so violently. That does seem to be the common-sense thrust of what Matt King was trying to achieve. The reality is when you read the statute the definition of theft" is one which by its very purpose is to encapsulate the intent to deprive permanently. Conversion is something that has been actually defined so that it doesn't require that and they both hold exactly the same penalty. So I ask people at home when they look at this to actually just look it up. Basically the amount is a maximum penalty of seven years. That as my colleagues have said does change depending on what other offences have happened at the same time. So if there is the taking of something as is proposed by this bill—by the way absolutely no connection with cars in this bill so it could be the taking of anything—and it's taken in a non-intentional way but violently the actual violence is what we're really most worried about. So if it's something trivial that is taken but it's taken in a violent way then the police are very likely going to focus on the violence as they should. If a car is taken in a carjacking the police are likely to recognise the significance of that—and I certainly do—and they will be adding the conversion charge to other charges including violence. So these things all add up and that's a really sensible approach to the law. The Crimes Act was actually created in 1961 and I take the point that my friend Greg O'Connor made that actually we have had a lot of little changes in law and they often happen through members' bills and agitation and people using dog-whistling kinds of tactics like talking about "soft on crime". That's how they happen—they're appealing to people. But actually what they do is they undermine the structure of an Act and while there will be issues in something like the Crimes Act as things change what we really need is a thoughtful and structural approach to such things so that when we review the Crimes Act we catch everything. When I went through I could see other sections in the Crimes Act which refer to and depend upon the idea of theft. So for example there's a whole connection there to burglary. You go down to burglary and it's a 10-year offence because that's actually going into a premises deciding that you're going to do something that would be an imprisonable offence. That could be conversion it could be theft but those things are all defined and they're actually created in the statute with a lot of thought. So what you don't want to do is meddle with that and undermine it because there could well be unintended consequences. What you want is a sensible look at the entire law and a structural thoughtful change if necessary. What you don't want is little changes that might make you feel good and my friend Emily Henderson talked about a sugar hit. You don't want those things because they won't achieve your purpose. What they will do is undermine certainty and they will stop the police doing their job which is to focus on the actual mischief in the particular situation and that will vary. That is why I cannot support this bill going further. Thank you. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): I call Erica Stanford—five minutes in reply."