Hipkins Chris: Customs and Excise (Joint Border Management Information Sharing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Hipkins Chris: Customs and Excise (Joint Border Management Information Sharing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 I move that all of the words after “Committee” be deleted. 
The House has recently seen something from the Government on a regular basis: when it refers a very non-controversial very non-urgent bill to a select committee it gives the select committee the power to meet at any hour of the day or night whenever Parliament is sitting and thereby actually short-circuits the democratic process and prevents all members of this House from fully participating in it. That is absolutely outrageous and it has to stop. Where there is a legitimate reason for a bill to be considered in a hurry it is absolutely legitimate to say that yes a select committee should have the power to meet during a time when the House is sitting. When a bill is not urgent—and there is nothing at all urgent about the Customs and Excise (Joint Border Management Information Sharing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill—there is no justification for moving such a referral motion. That is the reason why Labour will be putting forward amendments to remove the additional parts of such referral motions—because they are an outrageous abuse of the democratic process. 
I turn to the bill. First of all I think the New Zealand Customs Service does an absolutely fantastic front-line job. We can be very proud of our Customs Service. It does great work. As my colleague Damien O’Connor has just pointed out Biosecurity New Zealand lost 54 front-line staff in the first year of this National Government despite Mr Ryall and his colleagues promising to focus resources on the front line. We do not actually get much more front line than the people at our borders working for the Customs Service. New Zealand has 15000 kilometres of coastline. The Customs Service does a big job for us. It is vital work and it is incredibly important work. New Zealand relies on its clean green image and the work that the Customs Service and Biosecurity New Zealand do to keep that clean green image and to stop things getting into the country that we do not want here is vital—it is very important. It is something we should fully support. 
This bill makes a number of amendments that are relatively non-controversial and some on which there will be substantial debate. I want to talk about a few of them. The first one that I want to pick up is the exemption from duty for those who produce biofuels domestically—householders who produce their own biofuels. I think there is a wider issue around the production of small-scale biofuels in New Zealand and that is that it might not be just at the household level; it might be at the small-business level as well. Small businesses potentially are going to be converting waste products into biofuels. It is possible to turn used cooking oil for example into biofuels. There is potential for some of the by-products from the forestry industry to be turned into biofuels. So we need to rethink quite carefully how we handle duties on biofuels. I hope the Justice and Electoral Committee will take some wider consideration of that issue and highlight and flag issues that are not covered in this bill but may well need to be covered. 
About 2 weeks ago I visited a biofuels producer in Pukekohe which I think is in the Minister of Custom’s own electorate. This small biofuels company is producing about 5000 litres of bio-diesel every day from used cooking oil. It is a fantastic enterprise. The company will encounter issues around paying duty. So it is something we need to look at much more carefully. 
Overall as I said it is important that we have a lot of confidence in our Customs Service staff and other people who work at the borders. 
I pick up the comments made by Paul Quinn and also Damien O’Connor about the duty that should be payable on goods coming into the country. About 2 weeks ago I canvassed businesses in the main street of Upper Hutt and several retailers raised with me the issue of people importing their own stuff over the Internet and the impact that was having on their retail businesses. One shop in particular deals in model crafts which can be reasonably high-end high-value stuff. We are talking about model helicopters for example that people put together. People import bit by bit the relevant parts they need in a series of small packages thereby getting round paying the tax that a retailer importing those products for sale would have to pay. People can get them from overseas via the Internet for a significantly cheaper price but a lot of the reason why they are significantly cheaper is the fact that they bypass all of the taxes duties and so on. I think that is quite an important issue to consider if we want to have a good vibrant small-business retail community in New Zealand. It is particularly important in niche areas like model crafts and hobbies. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: Damien doesn’t think we should charge it and you think we should. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: I know that we may not necessarily agree on this. To some that is very novel but Labour is a party of robust debate. The Labour Party is a very broad church. Maurice Williamson does not need to be reminded of what a broad-church political party looks like. He is still in the National Party I think. He is even a Minister in the National Government. Maurice Williamson gave me a very very good piece of advice when I first arrived in Parliament. He said: “If you wish to advance in this place never ever say what you actually think.” Apparently that does not get National members very far. Those members end up being Ministers outside Cabinet. 
I think our small-business community deserves the protection of a good rigorous duty enforcement regime so that people cannot import a whole lot of products over the Internet sell them to their friends and not be caught by the relevant duties and taxes that they would otherwise have to pay. The bill potentially strengthens the hand of those retailers and that is a very good thing. 
One of the other things the Customs Service does of course—the elephant in the room that nobody has wanted to mention—is check passports at the border. [ 
Interruption 
] Yes it does do. So if some crazy sicko has stolen a dead child’s identity and applied for a passport the Customs Service is the type of agency that would pick that up. It would pick it up I hope. That type of behaviour is absolutely despicable. There is no excuse for it and I think it is good that we have a Customs Service that would pick up that kind of behaviour by anybody at any time. 
I will run through some of the other amending provisions of the bill. It is by and large a good bill and Labour will support it. The bill amends the two principal Acts the Customs and Excise Act and the Biosecurity Act. It has quite wide-ranging provisions in three main areas of reform and there are some other rather non-controversial minor amendments. So wide-ranging yet non-controversial seems to be the order of the day. The bill facilitates enhanced information-sharing between border agencies and that is clearly something we support. We look forward to the select committee having an opportunity to examine the relevant provisions and hear from submitters about the privacy and information-management issues that will inevitably flow from multi-agency cooperation. Just as an observation I point out that in the short period of time I have been in this House we have seen privacy considerations concerning the sharing of information between agencies come up more and more. As the Government collects more information and as technology allows for the easier transmission and storage of information the issue of the sharing of information between agencies is something the House will end up debating a lot more often. The bill addresses that. 
Other issues are addressed. The bill will allow customs officers to use reasonable force to remove an unauthorised person from customs areas. I cannot see how anybody could have any concern about that. Obviously one hopes the officers will be appropriately trained. Immediately before this debate we were talking about private security personnel and were saying that they need to be appropriately trained to deal with potentially violent situations. I hope that customs people who potentially might remove people from customs areas would receive appropriate training. 
Under the bill the Customs Service will have direct access to a customs agent’s records. Goods designed to facilitate a crime of dishonesty such as card skimmers will be banned from entering New Zealand and that is a good thing. It will be an offence to harm a Customs Service dog and I do not think anybody could possibly disagree with that provision. Everybody has seen those lovely little dogs wandering around the airport and I think it would be absolutely tragic if people were allowed to harm them. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: Trained by the Labour Party. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: Goods in multiple shipments can be classified as if they are a single shipment and that provision is relatively non-controversial and simple. What was that? 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: No it’s all right. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: Oh it is all right—OK. 
Regulation-making powers to determine when an export entry has been made are contained in the bill. They will define when an item of post has been delivered to a customs officer and so on. The bill makes changes to a range of fines that on the surface look fairly sensible to me. The department will no longer allow an infringer to say why he or she should be exempt from paying any penalty and that too seems a relatively non-controversial provision. 
Overall there is much in this bill we look forward to hearing more about.