Hodgson Pete: Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Hodgson Pete: Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
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Hon PETE HODGSON (Labour—Dunedin North) 
: 
 I was impressed by the elegance of the argument put forward by Lianne Dalziel. She said more or less that tonight we are looking at legislation that will increase our ability to offer assistance to victims of crime only because the Minister for ACC cannot get the numbers in the House to put in legislation that will reduce the assistance given to victims of accidents. I think that is a really nice little conundrum. The Government has found itself at war again for the second time this week but this time it is over accident compensation legislation. The climate change legislation is unravelling in a room in this building as we speak. 
In respect of the Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill we are looking to improve the lot of victims of crime. I am interested in the money. I did not hear Chester Borrows when he spoke and I wonder whether he would be kind enough to indicate whether the expected 4-year revenue stream would be $13 million or $30 million. 
Chester Borrows 
: $13 million. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: So it is $13 million and presumably the amount will increase each year because there will be an implementation period and then there will be a backlog and the backlog will slowly clear—well it will never clear but the payments will increase. 
I think if I heard Chester Borrows correctly the costs of the collection were thought to be something like $1.1 million or $1.2 million. I have a few things to say about that. Earlier today we passed money-laundering legislation and when that bill was put into the House the Ministry of Justice attempted to put some figures in the regulatory impact statement but failed. So we had legislation that had no dollar figure in it. We came to the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee and found that the dollar figure was first of all large and secondly highly contested by the banking industry and the finance sector—highly contested because the regulatory impact statement had been put together around an earlier draft of the legislation. By the time the officials had decided to become prescriptive the regulatory impact statement was out of date and the regulatory impact was going to be large. So two things happened. There was no regulatory impact statement at the time of introduction and secondly when the select committee got it it was wrong. 
In this case the regulatory impact statement signed off by the Ministry of Justice as being a complete total accurate and full impact statement does not have a dollar figure anywhere near it. But if we take Chester Borrows as being the man who has the correct figures—let us pretend for the moment that his figures are accurate and I am sure he has given them accurately but they will have been derived from the Ministry of Justice in whom I have little faith in these matters—then we will see that the cost of collection appears to be somewhere in the order of a quarter of the revenue. No inland revenue system in the world would operate with that level of inefficiency. The question is given that this Government wants to improve productivity wants to improve efficiency and wants to reduce back-office bureaucracy how could one possibly deal with it? Clayton Cosgrove had a pretty interesting argument which he put forward which was that the much more efficient way to do it would be to take money from private schools and give it to victims. 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: Only need half of it. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: We would need only half of it. I think the Minister of Justice would agree that even if we receive up to $4 million a year for Victim Support that amount does not meet the needs of the Victim Support service. I think people would agree with that. I do not think anyone thinks that we can provide decent victim support for four million bucks. If we have too little money being collected too inefficiently and the Government does not want to take money from private schools then maybe 50 bucks is too low. That is a possibility. Maybe 50 bucks is too low. 
Then we come to the argument of whether it will be paid. A colleague of mine who spoke earlier and I think it was Clayton Cosgrove said that he thought the fact that something would not be struck because it might not be paid went to the heart of decent justice. We would fine someone according to what the fine should be not according to whether we think it would be paid.