Border (Customs, Excise, and Tariff) Processing Bill

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister of Customs) Link to this

I seek leave for the Committee on the Border (Customs, Excise, and Tariff) Processing Bill to take the bill as one question.

SU’A WILLIAM SIO (Labour—Māngere) Link to this

Labour supports the Border (Customs, Excise, and Tariff) Processing Bill for many reasons. One of the key reasons, of course, is that our people Rick Barker and the Hon Nanaia Mahuta have worked on this issue for some years. This bill clarifies and enhances the Customs and Excise Act in terms of law enforcement capability. Its provisions include enabling customs officers to stop and search a vehicle, to use reasonable force to gain entry, and to search a vehicle that is unattended or abandoned. The use of reasonable force is needed in order to open a vehicle if it is locked or unattended. Otherwise, customs officers cannot search the vehicle without a court order, and in the time it takes to obtain a court order the prohibited goods could have been disposed of and the people responsible for the vehicle could be gone.

This bill is important particularly for communities that have a serious concern about illegal drugs and P coming through our borders. The bill also allows customs officers to arrest any person committing an offence under the Customs and Excise Act, whether or not that person is on a craft. These provisions simply streamline enforcement processes by the Customs Service and aid efficient law-enforcement procedures.

The bill also creates a new offence of making a false allegation or a false report to the Customs Service. If anyone does so, he or she commits an offence and can be prosecuted. The bill allows customs officers to use future technologies to detect tampering with containers or interference with goods and packages. Using future technologies is seen as being more effective than the currently utilised customs seal. That is especially pertinent now, as I have been made aware that the United States is making rapid advances in the use of technology for its trade security.

There are, however, a couple of things that I seek clarity on from the Minister of Customs. The first is that the bill gives customs officers the power to arrest not only when reasonable cause to suspect has arisen but for a period of 7 days after the offence. That raises the question of why the period is limited to 7 days. What happens if the offender immediately goes to ground and is not located for another 3 months? Do police and customs officers stop searching for the offender after the 1-week period has expired? We want some clarity on that.

The other point I want to make concerns new section 274A, inserted by clause 22. It allows the chief executive to arrange for the use of automated electronic systems for any purposes that he or she sees fit in exercising a power. Labour asks where the checks and balances in this process are. Although Labour members have the deepest respect for our customs and border control officials, we do not believe that it is a good thing to have a chief executive with unfettered power. We would expect checks and balances in that regard.

As I said before, Labour members support the bill. We will be supporting the amendments. In the third reading debate we will emphasise our concerns about the issues around P and other drugs. My colleague the Hon Chris Carter has also highlighted our concerns about ensuring that our borders are well-resourced. Despite having SmartGate—a tool that customs officials need—the job of the Customs Service is still labour-intensive. That is what I understand from what I have learnt about the service at the border.

Cutting the budget of the Customs Service may send to criminals some signals that we do not want to be sending. The signals could say to them that we are putting our customs officials and border agencies under strain. It could mean that we are sending them the signal that they can compromise our borders. That is not what we want. I will leave it at that, and give my colleagues the opportunity to speak.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister of Customs) Link to this

I will take a brief call to answer a couple of things that Su’a William Sio raised, and also to try to head off a little of what Chris Carter may raise, because he raised it in his second reading speech. First of all, with regard to the 7-day arrest period, the reason that customs officers have the 7-day period of arrest from an offence having been committed is that, simply, in a number of cases now, we actually track offenders into the networks rather than arresting them at the border. We may catch a very low-level functionary—for example, somebody who is a mule—who has been paid $1,000, but who does not even know he or she is doing anything wrong. We really want to try to work back through the networks to catch the Mr Bigs at the top. We want customs officers to have the ability to put a track and trace procedure in place, in order to follow the person. It may be that after the fourth or fifth day of watching motels and hotels, we want to make an arrest. The 7-day limit is just for practical purposes. If we want to go beyond that, customs officers can get a warrant if they wish, or by that stage we could have the police actively involved and it may be that the police would make the arrest. I think the 7-day limit is set at a practical level. It gives customs officers the chance to track and trace people into hotels and motels, and then to make a decision about whether to arrest them.

With regard to the other one, I do not think there is anything sinister about empowering the chief executive to use some electronic systems. I tell members that one of the biggest problems we have in this portfolio is that crooks can nearly always get better equipment than we can. For example, a number of people who have been arrested recently for the customs offences of bringing in P and precursor substances to pseudoephedrine have been found to have a funny little scanner sitting on the seat, which they had bought at Dick Smith Electronics for $200, and with which they could scan the entire analogue bands of all of the customs officers, hear them talking, and know what they were doing. So we need to be able to move to some new digital equipment—some stuff that cannot be interfered with; all of those things—along with new computer systems and GPS tracking devices in packages, as well. Technology will become our biggest friend in the fight to try to deal with some of the real nasties. I think that answers the two questions raised by the member for Māngere.

In the case of Chris Carter, I want to make matters really clear, so he gets them sorted out. He was quite firm in his second reading speech about some of the biosecurity issues. He talked about the painted apple moth and the varroa bee mite, and about his concern about the impact of biosecurity breaches on the conservation estate. But I tell the member that the Customs Service does not do that work. The service did not have a budget cut in Vote Customs. The cut was done to Vote Biosecurity. It was done in Mr Carter’s portfolios as Minister of Agriculture and Minister of Forestry, and the biosecurity people, the ones in green whom we see when we come through the airport. I know everyone will know—those who travel a lot, like Mr Carter—that the customs guys are in dark navy blue, and the Biosecurity New Zealand guys are in the green shorts and socks. We do both the customs and the immigration roles at the border. We check people to make sure that they are the right people, and so on, but once they have come through, picked up their baggage, and headed on down, the Biosecurity New Zealand people do the checking of them as they go through the border, to make sure that their bags do not contain fruit or any of the other pests and bugs. That is not a Customs Service role, so this bill has no impact on that role.

I want to confirm—well, not confirm; members know this, as was announced in the Budget, and they saw the figures from a press release. I tell members—and I really want to get this very clear, as well—that the error rate with SmartGate is actually lower than the rate of human error. If someone dresses up with a bit of hair colouring and different glasses and puts a beard on, a human being who is working busy shifts and processing a lot of people could look at that person, think he looks all right—that his photo is from 5 years ago or so—and through he goes. But with SmartGate the machines measure the distance between the eyeballs, from the tip of the nose to the eyeballs, from the tip of the nose to the chin, between the ears, from the top of the forehead down to the chin, and so on, and one cannot actually forge that. One cannot change that, no matter what one does. That is why SmartGate does not work for people under the age of 18: their faces are changing in shape and size as they grow, but from 18 years on they do not change. These machines will fast process the very low-risk, mainly good-quality New Zealand and Australian citizens and get them out of the place. That will free up the front-line customs officers to do the role that they are best trained for, which is to identify the bad people, to deal to them, to move them off into secondary-line processing, and to make sure that we keep our nation safe.

Hon CHRIS CARTER (Labour—Te Atatū) Link to this

I appreciate the Minister in the chair, the Hon Maurice Williamson, making some points on the Border (Customs, Excise, and Tariff) Processing Bill and reminding us again that biosecurity staff have been cut. I hope that he, as a person who is partly responsible for the security of our borders with immigration and customs, was a strong lobbyist to see that biosecurity did not lose 50 workers and over $4 million, because I am sure Mr Williamson, like all New Zealanders, wants to see our borders safe and secure, especially as he has partial responsibility for them. He made some good points about SmartGate, and about the work that customs and immigration are doing.

I seek an assurance from the Minister that some of the practices that have not been very fair—in fact, that have been quite discriminatory by, particularly, immigration—will be dealt with. For 6 years I was the Minister for Ethnic Affairs, and on a number of occasions during that time I and my colleague Nanaia Mahuta—and, prior to that, Rick Barker—met with different migrant communities to reassure them that racial profiling was not taking place via customs and immigration officers, because a large number of cases were brought to us. To be absolutely fair to the chief executives of the Immigration Service and the Customs Service, I tell members that they engaged with these communities.

However, only a month or so ago I received a delegation of Pakistani New Zealanders, who raised the case of a young Pakistani man in Auckland who had been through New Zealand immigration several times in the last year. He has just graduated as a nurse and got permanent residency as a result, making a contribution to our country as a firm and committed New Zealander—or a person seeking to become a New Zealander. He was plucked out of a queue just a month ago, taken in for 3½ hours, and subjected to a lot of questioning and a lot of rude and abusive behaviour while his partner was waiting for him on the other side, unable to access any information about this young man. Sadly, I have to say to the Minister that in the 6 years I served as ethnic affairs Minister, this was not a unique case. I thought we had dealt with these cases, but this case was just a month ago.

Hopefully this technology will make sure that there is no more of that racial profiling. Sure, we have to keep our borders safe, but at the same time people who are New Zealand residents should not be subject to 3½ hours of intensive, rude, and aggressive questioning while their families are waiting to see them.

CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) Link to this

I want to take only a very brief call on this bill, which is relatively non-controversial, and is supported on all sides of the House. I had the opportunity to sit on the Government Administration Committee that considered this bill and made a few amendments. I had some concerns as we began the select committee hearings on this bill, and I will talk about a couple of those briefly.

The Labour Party agrees, obviously, with the need to stay up to date with the latest technology to keep our borders safe. We need to protect against things such as the menace of P. Often smuggling is undertaken by organised gangs with very sophisticated techniques, and the Customs Service needs to have the tools to keep on top of that threat. One of the things that we talked about for a reasonable amount of time at the select committee was the powers of arrest that this bill deals with. I guess I just wanted to receive a reassurance in the committee that we were not, in fact, extending the powers of arrest or giving new powers of arrest. Having looked at all of the evidence on that, the committee was satisfied that the bill does not extend those powers, and it clarifies what can be done under the existing legislation. We spent quite a lot of time probing that in the committee, to make sure that that was, indeed, the case. We were relatively comfortable that it was perfectly all right, although other members have raised issues around the 7 days, which I think the Minister in the chair, the Hon Maurice Williamson, has subsequently addressed.

We also questioned some of the technology—I can see Jacqui Dean over there; she was also interested in this particular area—just to make sure that the technology was at least as effective and at least as reliable as human checking. I think we found, as the Minister has just pointed out, that in some cases the technology is actually more reliable than human judgment as to whether the person who is presenting himself or herself is actually the person on the passport. We spent a considerable amount of time considering the issue and we are relatively comfortable about that, as well.

The final things that we spent a reasonable amount of time talking about, that I can recall, were issues around search and surveillance, and making sure that this bill did not give a whole range of new search and surveillance powers that were not there previously, particularly with regard to containers and the fitting of electronic devices on containers. Having gone into that issue in some detail, although we had some questions around it still, I think we were comfortable enough that this bill did not confer huge additional search and surveillance powers, which, of course, is a debate that is being held in another part of the parliamentary process at the moment.

So overall I think the committee was pretty comfortable with this bill. We had some questions and issues along the way, but I think the Committee can be reassured that the select committee interrogated the officials on this bill quite thoroughly. I think as a result this is a good bill, and I commend it to the Committee.