Coddington Deborah: Courts and Criminal Matters Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Coddington Deborah: Courts and Criminal Matters Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:626;Page:21698] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 ACT does not have anyone on the Law and Order Committee so I have been sitting here listening to the debate and before I came down to the House I listened to it from my office. I think this is a good piece of legislation. I think it is needed. Like a number of the other speakers I do not think it is tough enough or goes far enough. I think Parliament could consider extending this sort of legislation into other situations where New Zealanders go overseas and default on money they owe. For instance student loans are treated as a tax which means that they cannot be recovered from people who move overseas. We should treat them as a debt and when people move overseas and default on their student loans there is no reason why we should not sell those debts to a private collection agency and have them collected. That would be a deterrent to students who think they can rack up loans here and then go away and welsh on them. 
I am horrified by the amount of money that is owed in fines by defaulters how difficult it is to recover those fines and how hamstrung the agencies are by having to rely on just a simple address when they try to recover those fines. Even when defaulters remain in New Zealand it must still be a nightmare for those agencies. But a couple of things concern me. One is that when we have legislation that allows the sharing of information we have to be very careful that that information is not abused or misused. I have had experience of this in drafting the Sex Offenders Registry Bill which causes obviously a much more emotive reaction than this sort of legislation does although one could argue that the harm done by those people is worse than the harm done by these people. However we have been very careful when copying legislation from Canada and the UK—where information is shared between agencies and passed on between people—that the information is correct and is correctly used. Everybody knows that there are times when fines—especially fines for less serious things—are disputed. If people do not have a system in place for paying them off they are liable for arrest. 
The New Zealand Customs Service has enormous powers. I remember writing a story about information being passed to it in a malicious way. This information accused two individuals of importing class A drugs and selling them in Parnell nightclubs. One of the people who came back into the country was detained by customs for 6 hours and searched and suffered enormous humiliation and distress because that person was innocent of all of those things. It was very difficult for that information to be removed from the records of the Customs Service. The service finally conceded that the information had been passed to it maliciously and it said it had to act on any information it was given But for the innocent parties it took a long time—over a year—for that information to be corrected on their records and for them to be able to travel between countries and to and from New Zealand able to breathe easy in the knowledge that they were not likely to be pulled aside questioned and have all their stuff searched. 
It concerns me that section 280E which is inserted by clause 7 states that there is no Crown liability for third parties unless it has not acted in good faith or has been grossly negligent. It seems to me that that would not include the fact that information had been passed to the Crown maliciously that the information had been used in good faith and that the Crown had not been grossly negligent. That does not offer any protection to someone who has none the less taken months to clear his or her name and get the issue cleared up. There is no liability on the Crown to address that.