Hague Kevin: Crimes (Match-fixing) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Crimes (Match-fixing) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 30 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19766. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green):It is rare that the sport and recreation spokespeople of parties get to speak on a bill. We are usually congratulating some sports team or other on fantastic efforts overseas. So I am very pleased to take a call on this bill the Crimes (Match-fixing) Amendment Bill. I personally am an obsessive follower of particularly cricket cycling and rugby. Some say that we are in fact a sports-obsessed nation. I guess there is some evidence for that. If I think back to 1981 there were plenty of people who were saying that sport in fact with the opportunity for the rugby tour from the Springboks should take precedence over fundamental human rights breaches. The sense of priority evident in that line of thinking suggests that there is something deeply askew in the minds of many. We still see that kind of thinking today. My personal favourite example of that askew thinking came in the 1980s when a magistrate was found dead in the Huka Falls after being murdered when a bondage session went wrong. The comment from Auckland Cricket because this magistrate was also an umpire for Auckland Cricket was “We can’t afford to keep losing umpires like this.”Hon Members: Ha ha!KEVIN HAGUE: Although I am a cricket tragic—not to that extent!Why is sport so important to us? Partly it is that as human beings there is something great about seeing human beings test the limits of what is possible in terms of their ability and skill and so seeing any great sportsperson performing is fantastic. There is also something inspiring about the effort. One of my earliest memories of sport was from the 1968 Olympics. It was right at the very end of the marathon when a guy called John Akhwari representing Tanzania limped into the Olympic stadium. People had gone home the lights were off and the TV cameras followed him through the streets of Mexico City when all of the other competitors had gone. His spirit his endurance and his commitment to finishing were deeply inspiring.Perhaps even more important is the sense of representation. At the weekend I had very considerable interest in the Crusaders game. I was interested in the rugby regardless of whether it was a good game or not between the Warratahs and Brumbies—as it turned out it was a pretty rubbish game. But actually my sense of stake in the game and my sense of stake in the outcome were not nearly as great as for the Crusaders’ games. Why is that important? It is because of that sense of representation that we have when we feel a sense of connection to the person or team that is competing. That sense of representation is important because we feel a sense of ownership of the success or otherwise of that person or team. When they succeed it feels like we ourselves have succeeded a bit.I join with others in congratulating the success of our Commonwealth Games team. I am very pleased that Mark Mitchell mentioned the achievements of Anton Cooper and Sam Gaze. Anton Cooper is a great young guy whom I met through the Tour of New Zealand a few years ago. I know that right now kids are competing against each other on their way to school on their bikes—you know who is going to be Anton and who is going to be Sam. That is fantastic because that inspiration that they are providing will lead to that next level not only of competition at that elite level but also of increased physical activity which goodness only knows this nation certainly needs.But what about the other side? At one point in my life I worked in the evenings for a cleaning company. The cleaning company was owned by a guy who trained racehorses in the Waikato and the other cleaners were jockeys and people who worked in the stables—people who worked in the industry. After listening to their conversations during our breaks about what was coming up in the weekend’s races there is no way in the world that I would ever bet on horse races unless I had inside information about who was actually trying to win a race and who was deliberately just stacking the odds for their next race. The industry is rigged.As people know I am a cycling obsessive as well and I am one of those people who believed against all the evidence in Lance Armstrong. I followed his career and I wanted to believe that he had transcended that terrible illness that he had and through his own efforts achieved that amazing success. It came as a body blow to me—and I know to others who perhaps had suspended their disbelief—when the evidence finally became irrefutable. Cheating in sport is like a cancer to sport and to those benefits that we get from it.I well remember a fantastic whirlwind century that Chris Cairns scored in a 1-day international against England. It stayed in my memory for a long time. What should I make of that now? I am not sure. I am a person who loathes sports betting. I wish it had never been introduced and that it was not a part of the sporting scene now. For me match fixing is another form of cheating and cheating undermines all of that nobleness of spirit that we encounter in sport that we derive from sport and that we celebrate in sport. Match fixing has absolutely no place in sport and the Green Party fully supports this bill.