Hipkins ChrisCHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): The protection of the public is the core business of the police and it seems staggering in this day and age that members have to rise in the House to state that very obvious fact. Let us look at the purpose of this bill that we are debating the Policing (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill and in the Law and Order Committee's commentary it says that this bill will allow the police to charge people effectively for services that are of direct private benefit to that individual or organisation".Let us look at the first one that has been identified as a service that the police might be charging for and that is police vetting. Let us consider the example of an early childhood centre using police vetting and being charged under this bill for the police vetting that they are using. Under this bill that would be deemed to be a private benefit to that individual or organisation but I would put it to the members opposite: who actually really benefits from the police vetting of people working in early childhood education centres? It is not actually the centres that are the primary beneficiary of that; it is the children who are attending those services who are the primary beneficiaries of police vetting. That is why we have a regulation that requires centres to do that. So yes it helps centres to meet their regulatory responsibilities but actually we do that because it keeps the children safe which is the core job of the police—keeping people safe. That is why we have police vetting.So the members opposite mentioned that all the police districts in Australia do that. Interestingly enough the cost of doing so for the organisations that pay for police vetting is over $50 per police vet. The Government is talking about a cost in New Zealand of around $7 per vet when it introduces this so how long will it be before we catch up with Australia—which seems to be the goal of the members opposite if you listen to what they are saying—and people are having to pay $50 per police vet?Take an early childhood education centre that might have half a dozen staff or maybe more actually—let us say a dozen people are working in an early childhood education service. That is a significant cost and ultimately where does its funding come from? A community-based early childhood education service—most of their funding comes from the Government. So this is the Government kind of robbing from one recipient of Government funding in order to give to another and all of the transaction costs that go with that. Of course we have got a Government here that does not like transfer payments; it is actually just creating a whole new regime of them. But the fundamental issue which is missing here is that the job of the police is to keep children safe and keep people safe so why would they be charging and making it difficult for organisations to vet the people they are working with?Consider a voluntary organisation—a club or a society that uses police vetting in order to keep children safe. We are told by the Government to simply rely on the Minister exempting those organisations and yet there is no guarantee in this legislation that the Minister will do so. And what is even more concerning is that if you look at the second part of this bill which creates the regulation-making power it basically allows the Minister of Police without reference to the House to impose a new form of tax. So the Minister of Police can decide which police services will be charged for. It basically gives the Minister of Police the absolute power to determine which police services are charged for and aside from the ability of the Regulations Review Committee to review that this House has no say in that. That is not right.That is why we are elected. If the Government want to come to the House and say "We think these police services should be charged for." as it does with tax—it has got to come to the House and say "These are the taxes and levies that we think New Zealanders should be charged." and Parliament then debates them and votes on them—this does not create the environment where that would happen. This just says that it is completely up to the Minister and they can do that without reference back to the House and they can change that at will simply by Order in Council. That is not good enough. If the Government is going to start charging for police services it should at least have public scrutiny around that. It should at least bring those proposals to the House and have them debated in the form of a bill but it is not willing to do that. I think that that is wrong and I am sure that we will get into the debate on that when this bill comes up for its Committee stage.Ultimately this is the first step in user-pays policing. The Government has given the example of police vetting as a service that may be charged for but there could be others. There could be plenty of others that fall within that definition and the question becomes—go right back to that comment I made at the beginning: determining what is a private benefit to the individual or organisation is very difficult because actually most police services even if they are provided directly to an organisation are for the purpose of keeping the public safe which is the core business of the police."