O'Connor GregGREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): I commend the previous speaker Nicole McKee for taking time to go through what was quite a litany of serious offences and evokes nothing but sympathy from everyone in this House for those circumstances. And oh that it would be so easy that we could stand in this House and pass a piece of legislation that would change any of that. The reality of it is it won't. That offender has been caught he will spend considerable time in prison—as he should do—for the protection of New Zealand society. I used to train detectives at the Police College for some years. Quite a difficult part of training detectives was that the law was actually so complicated. If we wanted to trip them up as instructors we'd just give them a scenario and ask them to go through and do what we called a criminal liability" where they had to go through and try and select what the offence was and what the adequate charge would be. And boy it wasn't easy because when you went through the Crimes Act most of the Crimes Act was full of add-ons. Generally the Arms Act was actually worse where every time there was an outrageous offence someone would bring in—and I'm now learning that it would be in this House—an amendment like this which would be very like another amendment but you would end up with two offences and it would just present nothing but confusion for these poor budding young detectives.So when I came to this House I was determined—and I know the author of this bill Matt King; he and I had very similar careers and we got on well and we discussed this. There was an element of a solution looking for a problem. I did challenge him to say "Do you know of anyone that avoided one minute of jail time? Do you know of one minute of avoiding of community service or whatever as a result of this law?" And I know the member is not here to defend himself but he couldn't—but he might do; it might do.So what I will say is that there is something of an understanding needs to be required about how we arrive at this situation. Now unlawful taking was actually something that was introduced; it was a lesser offence. It was actually really designed to deal with larrikin youths who did go out on a Saturday or Friday night—I know that when I was a young police officer up in Newlands Johnsonville my current electorate it was nothing to see 20-odd cars taken up there in a night joy riders—it was nothing like as bad as it is now; cars are just a little bit harder to steal than they were then. So it was really designed to be a lesser offence than theft. So it is quite interesting that we are trying to redefine an offence now that was actually meant to be a lesser offence.Also for some members it would be very good to understand what "conversion" means too. I see several speakers tonight have mentioned the word "conversion". Conversion was always meant to apply to a situation where someone perhaps took a car for a test drive. It was given to them when they got in the car. There was no offence committed when they got into it and at some stage when they intended to keep that car that was when they converted the car to their own use. And that was a rental car—again if you'd rented a car for a week decided to keep it for two weeks decided not to give it back the time that you decided you weren't giving it back that was where you committed the offence of conversion. So this is an area as I say whenever I used to try to make it difficult for the detectives then you would throw a question in around these circumstances.So going back to my original provision and my discussion with the original author of this bill—and well done Ms Stanford for taking this up on behalf of your ex-colleague—I go back to the previous speaker Nicole McKee. It was a well-researched speech but there will not be one minute of jail time that anyone will avoid from this bill not having been in place and that is the test we really should apply.I'm a great believer in the less definition around crimes the better. In fact something that my ACT colleagues have often spoken about is "do no harm". And the more broad a defence is and a well-trained well-directed judiciary who can actually take the facts of the case and it not to be quite so important around the definitions and those who are going to be deciding on the charge—or certainly those who are deciding on the penalty—look at the facts of the case as outlined by our colleague Nicole McKee and look at those circumstances and apply the sentence based on the circumstances before them and not allow definitions. So I will not be supporting this bill to the House."