Mark Ron: Courts and Criminal Matters Bill — In Committee 
Mark Ron: Courts and Criminal Matters Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:630;Page:2238] 
RON MARK (NZ First) 
: 
 This bill as the honourable Chris Finlayson pointed out has been long in the coming and long in the delivery. We have to admit that while it has floundered around in the processes hundreds—no thousands—of young offenders have been able to thumb their noses at the law and walk away clear in their minds that the law is ineffective. 
One would not believe this given the amount of publicity certain National Party spokesmen are getting of late on law and order but it was actually New Zealand First that brought the issue of the level of outstanding fines and reparation payments to the attention of the House. In about 2001-02 New Zealand First started to ask written questions and oral questions in the House and we had front-page headlines in the  
Dominion Post 
 pointing out that $550 million was owed in outstanding fines and had not been collected. From there the snowball started to move and gather momentum. Unfortunately the snowball was the fines-gathering machine as more and more young boy racers in particular thumbed their noses at traffic officers who were filling their ticketing quotas. They continued to rack up tens hundreds thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in fines knowing full well that the likelihood of their ever being required to pay them off was virtually nil. 
I sat on the Law and Order Committee and listened to the information and advice from the officials. I must put it on the record here and now that I still consider this bill—although New Zealand First will support it because let us face it we have to get something through; we have to get the law changed and make some improvements—is only a start. We believe that many inconsistencies will still remain in the legislation and that many things that could have been included in this bill were not specifically because the Labour Government—propped up in those days by the Greens and United Future—saw no need to go down the path New Zealand First advocated. I will highlight a couple of areas in which we believe this legislation is still deficient. 
It absolutely boggles my mind to hear officials tell me that the reason the courts cannot collect fines is that they do not have the address of the offender. Excuse me? Firstly one asks what the heck the traffic officer wrote on the infringement notice. As it turns out sometimes he or she wrote the vehicle registration number and the name of the driver only to find that the person did not live at the address he or she had given. But here is the real rub: two organisations both State departments know where each and every New Zealander lives. Day in and day out one cannot avoid the prying eyes of the Inland Revenue Department. If one gets two jobs and claims a benefit Work and Income will be on one’s back. If one is a pensioner who flies out of New Zealand for a holiday in the Pacific and stays longer than one should stay one is immediately greeted on returning by a letter advising that the holiday was too long and the payments made will be recovered. 
How is it that some Government departments can find anybody at any time but the courts—arguably the second-highest office in the land—cannot? The answer is simple. The legislation lacks in one basic area: it does not allow the courts to access Inland Revenue Department or Work and Income information. That as I contended in the select committee hearings and in the report back and as New Zealand First still contends today is absolutely patently absurd. Why is it that the courts which should not be considered inferior to Work and Income with all the disasters it has or to the Inland Revenue Department which has a history of harassing people to the point of committing suicide as it hunts them down in order to collect outstanding revenue cannot have the same information as those agencies? 
New Zealand First says that this legislation should give the courts the power to access any information they need in order to find some little dirt bag of a boy racer who has racked up $100000 worth of fines. Is that unreasonable? No it is not. It is not unreasonable when one considers the damage done to the justice system when its integrity is undermined by catching people charging them prosecuting them through the courts having them convicted and sentenced and then not enforcing the penalty. What is worse is that when the same little rabbit is back before the courts on another raft of charges the courts simply add those charges to the list. And when the fines defaulter comes back again the courts remit the lot in exchange for community service which the offender does not do. 
Who is made to look a fool? Who becomes a monkey? It is the courts. Who can we least afford to make a mockery of? It is the men and women of the State institution that is our judiciary system. By allowing legislation as inadequate as this to operate and rule we undermine the efforts of the men and women in blue who are out there in our communities trying to protect us. We may as well tell them all to go home and forget about it because even if they do catch the hoods the bad guys the thugs and the thieves and get them sentenced and fined nobody will bother to collect the money. That is the truth. 
Even worse than that this legislation does not give us the power to bring fines defaulters back when they flee to Australia. It does not give us the power to share information with the Australian authorities in order to catch a toe-rag like the gentleman owing $1 million worth of fines who is living in Australia right now extradite him bring him back sell off his assets and recover them for the State. I ask anyone who says that is over the top and we should not go as far as that to consider this. Hospitals around the country have trouble in meeting the demand for cataract operations for elderly people whose quality of life has gone because they can no longer read a newspaper. Hospitals around the country struggle to find the money to carry out elective surgery on knees hips and other joints. Parents still—and New Zealand First will fix this—have to pay in order to have children under 6 years seen by a doctor. Whether it is $5 $10 or $15 it is still money that comes from their pockets. We are still struggling to get cardiothoracic services provided in some parts of the country. Yet we sit here and pander to the privacy issues for a bunch of ratbags who will not pay their fines while $500 million to $600 million sits unclaimed. 
This legislation is not good enough and it will be readdressed. It must be readdressed. We will pass this bill in order to get some improvements made but it is as I have told the Minister inadequate. As I have told the Minister this bill is a slap in the face for the good men and women in blue who enforce our laws and catch the bad people for us. It is a slap in the face for the judiciary—the men and women on the benches who find people guilty sentence them and issue fines. And it is a slap in the face for every law-abiding tax-paying New Zealander who has to watch nanna struggle to get around the house because she still has cataracts. We have some work to do and New Zealand First means to make sure that it is done by crikey before 2008.