Customs and Excise Amendment Bill, Tariff Amendment Bill

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister of Customs) Link to this

I move, That the Customs and Excise Amendment Bill and the Tariff Amendment Bill be now read a third time. Given that it is only a few minutes since I gave my second reading speech on this legislation, I have decided to bail out of my prepared third reading speech, save the House a lot of pain and misery, and just cover again what I think are two or three key points.

The biggest part of this legislation is the implementation of the SmartGate technology, which I am proud to announce. I have seen the kiosks at Auckland Airport. They are in, we have been testing them, and they are done in lovely black and grey with the silver fern on them. New Zealand and Australian e-passport holders will be able to come through the gates from 3 December when we launch this stuff at Auckland Airport, and early in the new year we will be implementing them at the airports in Christchurch and Wellington. It means that ordinary citizens—good-quality people; New Zealanders and Australians with nothing to worry about—who are travelling across the Tasman Sea with their families and so on will be able to walk up to these machines, bang their passport on, and get their facial recognitions confirmed. The gates will open, through they will go, and they are down straight to the customs hall that much quicker. The reason for that is these machines can work quicker than humans. As I said in the Committee of the whole House, they have a lesser error rate. But, more important, we want to free up the very, very good customs officers, who I am terribly proud to be the Minister of, to go about and do their job that they do so well; that is, to find where the really serious offenders are, where stuff is being hidden, and go after it.

I never cease to be amazed at just how under attack we are at our border. I was at the mail centre the other day with customs and I saw something that literally took my breath away. It was a beautiful little pack for a baby. It had beautiful baby toys, some baby oil, some baby powder bottles, and it was all decked out beautifully. It was sealed and had a lovely card from a grandmother to her loving granddaughter, wishing her well. I looked at it and said: “So what?”. The customs officer said that one bottle was talcum powder and the one beside it, which was absolutely exactly the same, was pseudoephedrine. Somebody had completely replaced the entire contents and resealed it. If one looked at it, one just could not tell. But we had a particularly vigilant customs officer who, after having looked at scans and X-rays and so on, thought the powder densities were slightly different. After some checking was done, he or she got it. That war goes on every day. We just finished a big operation that they were dealing with. That is what I want customs officers to be freed up to do, and that is what this legislation will do by allowing electronic machinery to process people.

There are quite a lot of minor amendments to provisions that were really quite silly. One example is that a person could not be arrested if he or she were not still on the aircraft or the ship. It is quite silly; if a person makes a jump, customs officers have to get the police to do the arresting. The amendments tidy up some quite silly stuff, such as giving customs a 7-day period to track and trace somebody. It is a good bill. I again thank all members of the Government Administration Committee for being as cooperative as they were and for doing a very good job of tidying it up. I think we clarified earlier on the reason for one of my Supplementary Order Papers. It was to make sure that some technology did not have to have a human equivalent, for example, back-office processing, but a passenger coming through will always have that alternative if he or she chooses. I commend the bill to the House.

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

As I did not spend very much time in my second reading speech on the Border (Customs, Excise, and Tariff) Processing Bill, I will spend a bit of time highlighting the importance of our border. I will illuminate the community concerns around drugs that have gone through our borders, share some concerns with the Minister of Customs, and issue some challenges to him.

It is no secret that over the past several decades our borders have changed significantly, with increasing demands on border control agencies due to a number of factors. Travel passenger numbers have increased significantly. In 1993-94 there were, I think, 2 million passengers, and now we are looking at 9 million people coming in and out during the past year. Our trade volumes all continue to rise as, with each free-trade agreement New Zealand signs up to, there are increases in the volume of imports and exports and increases in the number of transactions required to meet our international obligations.

Another factor that threatens our borders arose from the disaster of 9/11 in New York. This and the subsequent Bush war on the Arabian region has meant that every country has been forced to stand in a heightened sense of alertness as the world comes to grips with the recognition that our borders are vulnerable to the rising tide of international terrorism, which has become both frequent and more intense. Then in May of this year every New Zealander was shocked to hear that one of our own senior police constables had been shot dead in Napier, and several other police officers and members of the public had been fired upon. I think that tragedy highlighted that illegal firearms are crossing our borders and are sold and exchanged here in Aotearoa. Most of us thought that that kind of stuff belongs in the movies, out there in the USA or in Africa. Sadly, that experience and other similar tragedies involving firearms show that our borders are not immune to illegal weapons passing through undetected. Our borders are also not immune to the ongoing criminal activities of counterfeit goods and products being smuggled through. We are also vulnerable to breaches in our biosecurity and to human trafficking.

Perhaps the most significant factor for me is the very real threat that organised crime groups pose to our families and our communities from the illegal drug trade involving P or its precursor. These crime syndicates are becoming increasingly diverse and sophisticated in their methods of smuggling. In recent months the Customs Service, working with the other border agency, succeeded at intercepting significant drug hauls at our border. Earlier this month the Customs Service intercepted a drug haul with an estimated street value of up to $6 million, and six people were arrested. In September the Customs Service seized 80 kilos of a precursor that would produce 24 kilos of P with a street value of around $20 million. I understand that this was the third-largest haul of its kind seen in New Zealand. An Auckland man was charged with this offence. In March a drug haul of about $4.8 million was intercepted and three people were arrested.

I use these examples to illuminate the reality of the drug problem that is moving through our borders. It involves millions of dollars, and people will kill to protect their money. For whatever reasons, people in our community buy the drug. It is being sold all over New Zealand. It is a huge challenge to our law enforcement agencies and they face real dangers when dealing with this illegal trade. However, it may be more alarming to many New Zealanders that, despite the best efforts of the Customs Service and our border control agencies, we are able to intercept only some illegal drugs crossing our borders. There is a strong indication that a significant volume passes through our borders undetected. The MP for Hunua raised the point in the post-Budget select committee meeting that he had a seen report that stated that only 20 percent of illegal drugs coming over our borders are intercepted. At that same meeting the Minister of Customs himself said he did not know how many drugs go through our borders unnoticed. He said further that he was resigned to the Customs Service not being able to inspect every package, container, boat, or person that enters New Zealand’s borders.

Communities throughout New Zealand that are aware of the misery that P and other related drugs cause on our streets and in our homes want to know that this Government will do all it can to make sure our borders are safe and secure from illegal drug-trafficking. We want to know that organised crime syndicates will be caught, and that those responsible for this scourge on our society will be prosecuted. The public wants to know that the Minister of Customs is on the job doing something about protecting our borders. We want to know that the Minister is supporting our border control officials and that he himself has committed to stopping drug trafficking across our borders, because when the drugs cross our borders, they reach our communities.

Labour is concerned that $2 million was cut from the Customs Service in a line-by-line review. We were concerned also when it was highlighted by Paul Holmes in his Q+A interview of the Prime Minister on 11 October that the Government cut some $3.57 million from the border control budget. The New Zealand public wants to be assured that our borders are not under strain from lack of resourcing from this Government. That is the challenge that we are issuing to the Minister of Customs.

JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki) Link to this

I rise to speak in the third reading debate on the Border (Customs, Excise and Tariff) Processing Bill, which has been divided. In his speech in the second reading, Green member Keith Locke raised his concern with regard to free-trade agreements and the amendments contained in this bill. The Government Administration Committee looked very carefully at those issues, and clause 23 of the original bill inserts a couple of new sections into the Customs and Excise Act to allow provisions contained in, or prepared under, international trade agreements to be incorporated by reference into regulations under the Act. This means that instead of repeating the provisions in the Act the regulations can simply refer to them. The provisions would be given legal force by the regulation but would not be set out in the regulations themselves.

The objectives of the legislation are: to ensure the orderly administration of the law, to modernise legislation, to meet new technologies such as SmartGate, to rectify legislative gaps and inconsistencies identified within border legislation, and to fully meet our international obligations including, very importantly, those relating to cross-border crime. This legislation achieves those objectives.

I thank the members who sat on the select committee for their good work. I also thank the officials who assisted the committee. I commend this legislation to the House.

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

I am pleased to rise on the third reading of this legislation to assure the Minister that the Labour Opposition will support it, for many of the reasons outlined by my esteemed and honourable colleague Su’a William Sio, who is the Labour member for the seat of Māngere.

We have touched on the importance of keeping our borders secure. The Minister who is responsible for the Customs Service works in close dialogue, we hope, with the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, which is responsible for biosecurity issues, and the Immigration Service, which, of course, is responsible for the flow and regulation of visitors as well as returning New Zealand citizens and residents. Working together in that partnership is critical, not just for the security of our border but also for the economic growth of our country and the sense that everybody passing through the airport is a respected and valued member of our community. During the second reading I spoke about my experiences as Minister of Conservation and the importance of keeping our unique and natural environment, as well as our agricultural industry, safe from pests, which is the responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.

I wanted to talk to the Minister a little bit today and to say that customs officials have a great responsibility put on them. They have to deal with a huge range of issues, from drugs and other illegally imported substances, to check that illegal goods are not being brought into the country, to ensure that New Zealanders are obeying the law around those issues, to keep our border safe, and to make sure that commerce flows freely, as well.

I mentioned briefly in the Committee stage that I was privileged to be the Minister for Ethnic Affairs for 6 years, and during that time concerns were raised with us not just about immigration but also about customs and the profiling of different groups of New Zealanders who were deemed to be more of a security risk, whether that be through terrorism, which is the issue that Mr Su’a William Sio touched upon, or whether they were more likely to be at risk of being importers of drugs, illegal firearms, or other illegal substances.

For an efficient use of any service there has to be profiling: who would be most at risk. In respect of drugs, for example, it may be young people who may have a very limited income and who may be coming from at-risk places—places where illegal substances are produced—and we would expect there to be greater scrutiny. Who could challenge that? But the issue I had to deal with as Minister for Ethnic Affairs was members of the Muslim community—some 50,000 New Zealanders—