Fenton Darien: Sentencing (Vehicle Confiscation) Amendment Bill Summary Proceedings (Vehicle Seizure) Amendment Bill Privacy Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Fenton Darien: Sentencing (Vehicle Confiscation) Amendment Bill Summary Proceedings (Vehicle Seizure) Amendment Bill Privacy Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
[Sitting date: 20 October 2009. Volume:658;Page:7282. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call in the third readings of the vehicle confiscation and seizure legislation. As Labour has repeatedly said we are supporting this bill. We have reservations about it that I will go into a little bit more shortly but I want to reflect on some of the considerations of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. Before I do that I acknowledge the work of the select committee and particularly the officials. Whether or not we like it the decision-making process on the select committee was not perfect. In fact it was far from perfect. The Vehicle Confiscation and Seizure Bill was rushed through and there was a change of report-back date at the last minute. I think that made it very difficult for the officials who were required to come back with their report far earlier than they should have been made to. It also made it difficult for the Labour members with regard to taking the issues to our caucus and considering them properly. It was not a great process. However we have put that behind us and here we are. 
I observe that this legislation was supposed to be the king hit on boy racers but I fear that the public have been fed a whole lot of big talk and bragging by this Government. The reality is that this legislation will not make a huge difference to the problem of illegal street racing. I am really sorry about that. I am sorry for the 58 people who made submissions to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. I am sorry for the 30 submitters who made the effort to come along to the select committee to be heard. I am sorry for the residents in the communities who came to the select committee and talked about the way that this problem is affecting them and said that it is having a real impact on their well-being. I am especially sorry for those communities that are expecting a miracle to occur when this legislation is passed because they have been led to believe that this legislation will mean that peace will reign once more in their neighbourhoods. Well it will not. 
I am also very disappointed that Minister Judith Collins failed to accept the Labour Party’s offer of assistance through Clayton Cosgrove’s Supplementary Order Paper 73. We were trying to be helpful to the Government to toughen up the legislation so that it would work and would make a difference. It is very interesting that the Police Association for example said that this legislation was a sideshow a waste of time and it ignored the real issues. 
Hon Annette King 
: Did they really? 
DARIEN FENTON 
: The Police Association said that. It had some other suggestions that were very good and I will talk about that a little more. Minister Judith Collins has talked tough. It was interesting that in the Committee stage this morning she started to say that the legislation is not really about being tough and crushing vehicles but about changing behaviour. It is not a silver bullet. It will not fix the problem 
Hon Annette King 
: It was few months ago. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: It was a few months ago when we heard her in the media and when she got her nickname. It is not what the Government has been saying up and down the country. It is not what it has been saying over many years. 
In fact I think this has been a hard lesson not only for Minister Judith Collins but also for some other members; for example Nicky Wagner— 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: “Warg-ner”. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: —Nicky “Warg-ner”—with her petition and the National members who campaigned in Christchurch in the 2005 and 2008 election campaigns on this issue. Those members got people to believe that there was a simple solution to this problem. They had people believe that not enough had been done and that they would fix it. It is very disappointing as my colleague Brendon Burns observed this morning that we have had no National MP from Christchurch participating in either the Committee stage or the third reading of this legislation. 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: We’ve had Simon Bridges from Auckland. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: Yes that is right. I want to know where those members’ contributions have been in the final stages of this debate. I ask what Nicky Wagner has to say about this. I ask what she has to say about the noise which was the real issue that she campaigned on. We have heard about that issue from many of our colleagues from our side of the Chamber. That seemed to be the No. 1 issue affecting the submitters who came along to the select committee. It has been left to Labour to run the arguments to ask the questions and to try to make this legislation work. As I said it is very disappointing that our offer has not been taken up. 
One of the things that is worth recording is that of the 17 submitters who commented on vehicle confiscation and destruction seven were opposed to that aspect of the legislation. Two of those submitters are big organisations. One was the Police Association as I have mentioned and the other one was the New Zealand Automobile Association. It said that it did not favour crushing vehicles. It said that it was a Draconian measure motivated by revenge although it acknowledged that the number of vehicles likely to be crushed under the legislation will be low. The Minister owned up to that this morning too and said that that would be the case. The Automobile Association did a survey of its members in March 2009 in which 65 percent of its members supported permanent vehicle confiscation for repeat offenders but only 11 percent supported the crushing of cars. It is quite interesting to hear that. Despite all the hoopla made by this Government about crushing cars and all the rest of it the public have shown that they have quite a lot of common sense when it comes to this issue. They want the cars off the road. They think that permanent confiscation is enough. They think that car destruction is a waste of taxpayers’ money and that it has been talked up by a Minister who wants to look tough. 
One of the other interesting things that was discussed in the select committee was the role of the police. I completely support my colleagues who said that it is the Government’s job to ensure that with regard to this legislation and its companion bill that we passed yesterday the Land Transport (Enforcement Powers) Amendment Bill the police must have enough resources to implement the changes. In the Committee stage I asked for some reassurance from the Minister that that would be the case and I got no reply. The police told us that they have recently undertaken measures led by the assistant commissioner of operations to ensure that the operational response to illegal street racing is nationwide and consistent that the police are fully utilising existing legislation and that a clear measurement of illegal street racing activity is made in each district. That demonstrated to me that the police considered that the powers they already have are sufficient and that it was more of an issue of resources as they said in their submission to us. 
Some people in this debate and in the debate on the previous bill mentioned the success in Manukau of Operation Sniper as a mechanism for prosecuting boy racers and working within existing laws. Just to outline that a little judges in Manukau are working within the provisions already available to them prior to this legislation becoming law and are handing out much harsher penalties for illegal street racing than courts elsewhere. Two 17-year-olds were recently disqualified from driving for a year and fined $1000 as well as being ordered to pay $130 in court costs for racing their cars in Papatoetoe. Their cars were registered to their fathers for insurance purposes and they were impounded for 28 days and it cost each youth $400 to recover them. This came about because the case was reported by a concerned motorist and the police are encouraging other motorists to report similar behaviour. The police say that about a third of the 60 complaints made each month to Operation Sniper provide enough identification such as car registration for the police to follow up and prosecute. Most cases have resulted in convictions with the driver being disqualified for at least 6 months fined up to $4500 and the car being impounded. The police also reported that illegal street racing has been scaled back considerably since Operation Sniper started. 
That report and what the police told us demonstrate that the laws we already have in place can work with the will of the Government and with sufficient resources for the police and without the grandstanding that we have seen around this legislation. We admit that there are a couple of loopholes. That is why we are supporting the legislation and will not stand in its way. But having said that I repeat that we regret the fact that the Government did not accept Labour’s offer of assistance to make this legislation work as it was intended to do. What we had in place around confiscation was perfectly adequate as is demonstrated by Operation Sniper in Manukau. A couple of loopholes just needed to be closed and there needed to be some investigation into why the courts were not confiscating vehicles permanently in the way that they are able to do under the existing legislation.