Williamson Maurice: Border (Customs Excise and Tariff) Processing Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Williamson Maurice: Border (Customs Excise and Tariff) Processing Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8230. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister of Customs) 
: 
 I will take a brief call to answer a couple of things that Su’a William Sio raised and also to try to head off a little of what Chris Carter may raise because he raised it in his second reading speech. First of all with regard to the 7-day arrest period the reason that customs officers have the 7-day period of arrest from an offence having been committed is that simply in a number of cases now we actually track offenders into the networks rather than arresting them at the border. We may catch a very low-level functionary—for example somebody who is a mule—who has been paid $1000 but who does not even know he or she is doing anything wrong. We really want to try to work back through the networks to catch the Mr Bigs at the top. We want customs officers to have the ability to put a track and trace procedure in place in order to follow the person. It may be that after the fourth or fifth day of watching motels and hotels we want to make an arrest. The 7-day limit is just for practical purposes. If we want to go beyond that customs officers can get a warrant if they wish or by that stage we could have the police actively involved and it may be that the police would make the arrest. I think the 7-day limit is set at a practical level. It gives customs officers the chance to track and trace people into hotels and motels and then to make a decision about whether to arrest them. 
With regard to the other one I do not think there is anything sinister about empowering the chief executive to use some electronic systems. I tell members that one of the biggest problems we have in this portfolio is that crooks can nearly always get better equipment than we can. For example a number of people who have been arrested recently for the customs offences of bringing in P and precursor substances to pseudoephedrine have been found to have a funny little scanner sitting on the seat which they had bought at Dick Smith Electronics for $200 and with which they could scan the entire analogue bands of all of the customs officers hear them talking and know what they were doing. So we need to be able to move to some new digital equipment—some stuff that cannot be interfered with; all of those things—along with new computer systems and GPS tracking devices in packages as well. Technology will become our biggest friend in the fight to try to deal with some of the real nasties. I think that answers the two questions raised by the member for Mangere. 
In the case of Chris Carter I want to make matters really clear so he gets them sorted out. He was quite firm in his second reading speech about some of the biosecurity issues. He talked about the painted apple moth and the varroa bee mite and about his concern about the impact of biosecurity breaches on the conservation estate. But I tell the member that the Customs Service does not do that work. The service did not have a budget cut in Vote Customs. The cut was done to Vote Biosecurity. It was done in Mr Carter’s portfolios as Minister of Agriculture and Minister of Forestry and the biosecurity people the ones in green whom we see when we come through the airport. I know everyone will know—those who travel a lot like Mr Carter—that the customs guys are in dark navy blue and the Biosecurity New Zealand guys are in the green shorts and socks. We do both the customs and the immigration roles at the border. We check people to make sure that they are the right people and so on but once they have come through picked up their baggage and headed on down the Biosecurity New Zealand people do the checking of them as they go through the border to make sure that their bags do not contain fruit or any of the other pests and bugs. That is not a Customs Service role so this bill has no impact on that role. 
I want to confirm—well not confirm; members know this as was announced in the Budget and they saw the figures from a press release. I tell members—and I really want to get this very clear as well—that the error rate with SmartGate is actually lower than the rate of human error. If someone dresses up with a bit of hair colouring and different glasses and puts a beard on a human being who is working busy shifts and processing a lot of people could look at that person think he looks all right—that his photo is from 5 years ago or so—and through he goes. But with SmartGate the machines measure the distance between the eyeballs from the tip of the nose to the eyeballs from the tip of the nose to the chin between the ears from the top of the forehead down to the chin and so on and one cannot actually forge that. One cannot change that no matter what one does. That is why SmartGate does not work for people under the age of 18: their faces are changing in shape and size as they grow but from 18 years on they do not change. These machines will fast process the very low-risk mainly good-quality New Zealand and Australian citizens and get them out of the place. That will free up the front-line customs officers to do the role that they are best trained for which is to identify the bad people to deal to them to move them off into secondary-line processing and to make sure that we keep our nation safe.