Hayes John: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hayes John: Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 02 September 2008. Volume:649;Page:18508. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JOHN HAYES (National—Wairarapa) 
: 
 I rise in support of the Customs and Excise Amendment Bill (No 3) and I invite members of the House to have a good look at it. This bill is a good bill. It is good well-written legislation in contrast to the emissions trading scheme legislation and the affordable homes legislation. If anybody in the House looks at the documents on the Table he or she will see that a huge number of changes and additions have been made to those bills. This legislation is substantial common-sense legislation. It is not theatre without substance which the affordable homes legislation we have just passed is and which the emissions trading legislation is. This bill reflects the substantive work of this House and I am in absolute support of it. 
The legislation comes from a department that is very well run. One of the pieces of education for me over my 3 years in this Parliament has been to see chief executives and their teams come to select committees to contribute to and interact with them. Martyn Dunne the Chief Executive of the Customs Service and the Comptroller of Customs stands out head and shoulders. He has a good team and the department is very well led to the point where during this Parliament our committee has not gone through a questions and answers process with the Customs Service because we have such confidence in the administration of that department. 
This legislation makes effectively three changes to our existing law. The first is to adopt a more pragmatic regime in respect of the forfeiture and seizure regime contained in the Act. This has application in my electorate. For example a woman recently moved from Switzerland to New Zealand there was a mix-up in the rules and she ended up with all her household effects being seized. It was a nightmare to unlock the arrangements because of the complications of the law that she had to operate under at that time. I got involved and we managed to get a good common-sense solution. Those sorts of bureaucratic inanities are removed by this legislation and I support totally that element of it. 
The second part of the bill gives the management of the Customs Service more flexibility to deal with ad hoc arrivals in and departures from New Zealand. The bill talks about “craft”. “Craft” could be aircraft or yachts or small boats. It makes eminent sense for example to allow the Comptroller of Customs to decide whether to send someone to Milford Sound so that a man rowing here from Australia can clear customs there rather than being required to paddle up to Picton or to Westport—if they are authorised Customs Service ports. The provision would work in the same way for yachties up in Northland. Let us say a yachtie wants to head out to Tonga from Houhora; Customs Service officials could be sent up there to clear a yacht or a cruise ship if that would make sense. What we are doing here is putting common sense into the hands of the Comptroller of Customs and that is an extremely good thing to do. 
The third element of this legislation is that—as my colleagues have said—it regulates the amount of tobacco or “chop chop” that can be grown for personal consumption. There is an issue that has not been discussed in the House this morning and that is that the Customs Service collects excise tax from tobacco. Because the rules have been a bit loose some people operating in the top of the South Island—not in my electorate—said that they could grow tobacco for personal consumption and they were growing tobacco in quite significant volumes. The Customs Service took a case against some growers and it lost because of the inadequacy of the law. So I think our select committee has been perfectly sensible in deciding what quantity of tobacco meets the needs of personal consumption. 
The first two changes as I have said are rooted in absolute common sense and pragmatism and I think they represent good simplified law that is not in the nanny-State mould of the Real Estate Agents Bill which we were debating yesterday afternoon or the emissions trading scheme bill or as I have already said the bill we were just dealing with— 
Chris Tremain 
: The appalling affordable housing bill. 
JOHN HAYES 
: —the appalling affordable housing bill as my colleague Chris Tremain reports and I totally agree with him. An issue that caused some concern amongst members of the committee was the personal exemption for production and manufacture of tobacco leaf beyond an area controlled by the Customs Service. As my colleague Tim Groser has pointed out we did a great deal of research on it and looked at what other countries did. There was an element—and I will be more straightforward than Tim was—of self-interest on the part of the people who came here to back the bill. That is because all cigarettes available in New Zealand are actually manufactured in Australia and the manufacturers of those cigarettes were quite keen to shut down competing supplies from locally grown tobacco. 
I go back to the legislation. It seems to me that the issue fell into two parts. The first was in the context of an argument with the Crown Law Office over whether the committee should put penalties within the legislation or whether we should leave them to be determined by Order in Council—essentially by officials. On the question of whether punishment for offences under the legislation should be contained in the primary legislation or whether it should be put into delegated legislation a majority of us strongly supported the principle that individuals who face a possible jail sentence should have the certainty of having the penalties spelt out in the primary legislation—in other words in this bill. The flexibility and the speed with which delegated legislation could be amended could create uncertainty in people’s minds and as a committee we felt that that was undesirable. 
We recognise that in bringing the exemption for tobacco into primary legislation we have left an anomaly in the law in that there is an exemption in the context of producing alcohol. I hope the next Parliament will consider correcting that anomaly by bringing all exemptions relating to offences punishable by imprisonment into our primary legislation. The next Parliament ought to look at the offence of illegal alcohol production and bring the penalties for it into the primary legislation. 
The other part that concerned the committee was the amount of tobacco that could be grown for private consumption. The committee eventually agreed that 15 kilograms was a realistic amount. We did not want to have an amount that was so low that the Customs Service was engaged in trivial pursuit of people growing tiny amounts of tobacco in their garden or backyard for their own use. Although there are some health issues around the volume the majority of the select committee came to a consensus that 15 kilograms was a good figure. I would note that the Government members on our committee did not agree with that figure but common sense prevailed. I personally would have preferred a rather greater exemption but that is the value of democracy—that we reach a common-sense generally agreed perspective. 
With those words I offer the National Party’s full support to this legislation and I particularly commend the officials for the excellent job they did in advising the select committee. Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker.