Henderson EmilyDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei): I rise to take a brief call on this matter. I believe I am one of the lawyers for whom the member Nicole McKee spoke earlier as being able to fix up this bill were it to go before the Justice Committee. So I actually want to go lawyer and take this through. Because I take the points of the previous speaker: the problem with this bill is it's in search of a problem that doesn't exist. Now we all accept that carjacking is a pretty revolting crime. It is scary. It is often accompanied by violence. It often does lead to the damage to property. It is absolutely something on which we should be having a very hard line. But there's hard lines already. If there's one thing that I don't think this country needs it's this House spending its time repeating the wheel having a knee-jerk little bit of legislation that perhaps makes us feel good. It's a sugar hit and sugar hits are not good for any of us.So what I want to look at quickly is just to recap on the definition here. We have a problem. We have a definition of a thing called robbery which has 10 years; that's theft with violence or threats of violence. Then we have this other thing called vehicle conversion section 226 in the Crimes Act which has the same penalty as theft which is seven years. So how are we going to make up those three years is I think the thought here. Because I think conversion in section 226 is primarily considered to be joyriding a crime that involves taking a parked car on the street and being an idiot. Now that's a very different thing from a carjacking. It does not obviously involve the same degree of harm.But when one is looking as a prosecutor as I used to be at someone who has suffered a carjacking and one is looking at the defendant and wondering what to charge there are a plethora of options within the Crimes Act already. There is absolutely no need for us to do anything else. So let me take you through it if you don't mind. The first point is that we have the option of co-charging other offences. So you can charge for the conversion which is the taking without intent to permanently deprive—because this is for example someone who is going to junk the car at the end of the ride and run—we can then charge for any violence. So violence charges start with a penalty of one year for common assault and it rises upward from there. So we've now got a crime that's worth seven years and we've got a crime that's worth one year.Then on top of that if you have only threats of violence for example under the Crimes Act actually a threat of violence is also an assault. So you can still charge an assault even if there is only a threat of violence. Then if you've got a worse assault you can have for example the charge of injuring with intent. So when Ms McKee was talking about the poor woman who was hauled from her car and damaged by the seatbelt it seems to me that is an obvious case of injuring with intent which carries a sentence of I think it's around five years from memory. If then there has been an occasion when during that carjacking the driver or the baby in the example that we were given is confined in that car deliberately however brief that might be that is the offence of kidnapping. Even a brief deprivation of liberty is kidnapping. Police are adept at charging it. Kidnapping carries the penalty of 14 years.So in conclusion when you are then in a situation where you have looked at your charges if our police officer our prosecutor has forgotten the possibility of co-charging for violence or kidnapping or threats of violence that police officer can still at the sentencing stage look to the Sentencing Act in section 9 and they can look at the aggravating factors. If an offence involves actual or threatened violence or the actual or threatened use of a weapon that is an aggravating feature. We can look at the extent of the harm the loss or the damage and we can also look at any known vulnerability of the victim.In conclusion this is a sugar hit. This is a short-term unnecessary piece of legislation and I do not commend it to this House.