O'Connor GregGREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): Thank you Madam Chair. I would just like to start by congratulating the member in the chair Simeon Brown for attempting to do something about this. We are all as electorate MPs faced every day with people who come into our office and we want to do something about it. Now we like to send them away with a solution but solutions as we learn—a quick fix; just add water and stir" - type solutions—are not generally those that are available to us because if they were that easy then they wouldn't have ended up in our office so often.Coming to clause 4 of this bill the sentencing option so often in the history of law enforcement and particularly those who make the laws we look for that easy fix—something that is going to look good something we're going to feel good about and something that we can probably reassure those who come to us with problems with. However one advantage of standing here with a little grey hair having seen a little bit in my 40 years in the police—I was a police officer in the 1970s when we had a major heroin problem in this country. We had heroin deaths. The signs or the symptoms of a heroin problem are generally overdose deaths—that's how you really know you've got a problem. There will be crime there'll be others associated but really ultimately it's those who die because of overdose.In the 1970s when I was a young police officer in this very town we had major problems with heroin overdoses and that was happening around the country. I wasn't really aware of the political environment at that time but the debate was something of the same outcry and the sentence for heroin dealing went to life imprisonment. It still is on the books now as life imprisonment and it made no difference at all. As a result of that the deaths continued. In fact in Wellington we had a bigger problem because in Auckland there was a homicide that resulted in a lot of pressure going on heroin dealers not around the sentencing but around trying to solve the homicide. So Wellington became full of heroin addicts and of course dealers and we ended up with a raft of deaths similar to where we are today. That life sentence made no difference whatsoever.What actually did make a difference was when the Mr Asia syndicate collapsed because they had become so effective at bringing heroin into New Zealand—so good at what they did—that they'd squeezed out all the opposition. So when they fell apart in the late 1970s and early 1980s all of a sudden there was no heroin in New Zealand. New Zealand heroin addicts jumped on a plane and went to Australia. That is when we got a really bad name over there. So while I may sound like I'm drifting a little from clause 4 this is all about the sentencing and the ineffectiveness of the sentencing. I was anticipating a rebuke Madam Chair but I'm pleased to see that that's not coming my way—but back to the subject.In that case—and I was probably it's fair to say a much younger man in those days and didn't quite have the broad outline—it's when you get to the stage when you sit and reflect on those things you've learnt that I know that again going back to this bill and what it is attempting to fix it won't actually fix anything. I've sat on the select committee and we're well aware of the terrible stories out there. I've had family members who have been involved in this. Interestingly in the history of the sentencing when the problem was at its worst in about 2011-12 that first piece of legislation went through. It did actually fix the problem in the short term because the suppliers of course were legitimate suppliers and when they were taken out of the market there was actually no one who filled the gap at that time. There's a history of how we got to where we are that's for another time perhaps. It does not really come within clause 4 of this bill.Can I just encourage the member that while he will be doing this for the right reason and certainly he will have had people come into his office this won't fix anything and the worst thing about it is that we will end up thinking "Well we've done that fixed that let's go on to the next problem." Unfortunately it will not solve anything. It will stop us from really addressing the issue—those issues that my colleagues have talked about and the fact of why people end up using these substances in the first place. It is something that really generally affects the lower socioeconomic part of New Zealand—those who probably for the rest of their lives will not be in great shape. So using these substances is just another part of that. Thank you Madam Chair."