Ardern Shane: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Ardern Shane: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 02 September 2008. Volume:649;Page:18518. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
SHANE ARDERN (National—Taranaki-King Country) 
: 
 Like the Minister I on behalf of National also support the Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) in the third reading. As the Minister has just said the bill basically tidies up three areas of the Customs and Excise Act: forfeiture and seizure provision of greater flexibility for customs with ad hoc arrivals and a remedy to legislate for inconsistencies relating to illegal manufacture of tobacco. 
I will touch on the forfeiture and seizure part of the legislation for a start because I have a real and practical example of how the legislation as it was before the amendments could get the Customs Service bound up in something it did not really want to be involved with and there were some innocent victims in that.  
In Taranaki the Taranaki Rescue Helicopter Trust which of course is publicly funded and privately funded from fund-raising activity for health services in that region bought some night-vision goggles about 6 or 8 months ago—in fact it is longer ago than that; it is more like 12 months ago. The goggles were about to be delivered to the rescue helicopter service when they were found to have been stolen in the US by a US military person. Of course the Customs Service did what it must do and seized those goods with the intention of holding them until the legal position was established or tidied up and that went on for a long time. The Taranaki Rescue Helicopter Trust had bought the goggles in good faith off a New Zealand person who traded in this stuff and who had no idea they were stolen in the US. Finally through negotiation and after some time the trader of this equipment as I understand it was able to resolve the legal status in the United States. That status was that the military was paid for the goods or they came to some arrangement—I am not sure of the detail—but because of the legislation in New Zealand the Customs Service was still unable as I understand it to make a speedy or timely decision to have these goggles released to the rescue helicopter. Of course the helicopter trust had spent something like $40000 or better on purchasing this equipment and it was out of pocket and did not have the equipment.  
If the Chief Executive of the Customs Service had the powers that he or she will have then a common-sense decision or intervention at that level potentially would have overcome this problem. That is a practical example of one case where there were no guilty parties except for obviously the person who stole the equipment from the US military in the United States in the first instance and who was subsequently proven to have stolen it. 
Ad hoc arrivals have been of concern for a while. I think someone in the Committee stage of the bill touched on the fact that people arrive here by all sorts of craft—by pleasure craft by aircraft in big numbers and suchlike. The discretion to say that the beach at Opunake—or it might be Raglan or Kawhia or somewhere else in the great Taranaki-King Country electorate—can be a customs place for the purpose of the arrival of a pleasure craft is at times a useful and necessary requirement. As I said in the second reading the only concern I have is whether we will be able to meet the stringent requirements that we must meet regarding biosecurity otherwise we are liable to open our borders to further risk. I am confident that concern will be able to be met but we will have to watch and see. I suspect that at some stage in the future there will be further debate in this regard in this Parliament. Maybe some amendments or some further resourcing will be required to meet that concern. 
The final point covered in the bill is the control for the exemption of personal tobacco. I now know as a result of the good work done in the select committee that it is known as “chop chop”. Plenty of people have suggested that I should chop-chop and get moving a bit and sometimes when we listen to debates in the House we could certainly come to the conclusion that members should chop-chop and move on. But tobacco is referred to colloquially as “chop chop” and the reality is that the select committee has done a good job no doubt ably assisted by the officials who clearly have done a good job in helping the Minister draft this legislation to submit to the House and the select committee in the first instance. They have done a good job a practical job and a pragmatic job in coming up with a solution. 
I note that the original proposal was for 8 kilograms of tobacco to be exempt. The select committee has extended that to 15 kilograms. The Labour Party put in a minority report and one can only conclude that it was clearly not happy with 8 kilograms. Ministers obviously wanted a higher volume than that but I know my colleagues on the select committee—the anti-smokers that they are—probably would not have been supporters of that. But in any event the end result is that the figure is now 15 kilograms and that seems like a pretty practical solution. It is one that will not tie up the customs staff and officials in needless trivial pursuit—as someone described it and I thought it was a very good description—out there trying to find out if someone has grown a kilogram or two or four or half a kilogram more than he or she was legally allowed to. Fifteen kilograms should cover the domestic needs of even the heaviest smoker in society. Potentially if a person smokes 15 kilograms of tobacco annually that person will not be around for that long to breach customs laws in the future according to medical science. I think it was probably the right figure to arrive at and it is a pragmatic decision. Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker.