Heather Roy's Diary
Friday, September 10 2010

Good Intentions Does Not Good Law Make

Good intentions frequently come with unintended consequences, not just in life but also in Parliament. I was reminded of this fact this week when Parliament debated Private Members Bills.

Every second sitting Wednesday is ‘Members Day’. It gives back bench and opposition MPs the chance to have their issues raised in the form of a Bill if it is pulled from the ballot. It is ‘legislation by lotto’ but Parliament hasn’t found any better way to fairly allocate the order paper slots for Members Day.

The issues raised are sometimes dull, but are often the right thing to do. For example, National MP Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi’s ‘Military Manoeuvres Act Repeal Bill’- heard on Wednesday night - won't change the world but will have the original Bill removed from the law books because it hasn’t been used in the past 30 years.

Some of the issues are quirky, while others cover the very narrow area of interest of an individual MP. Often the Members bills are drafted the best of intentions, but can end up doing more harm than good. It is not enough for MPs merely to be seen taking a societal problem seriously - laws should be passed to solve a problem that exists.

Former Green MP Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking Bill - which was passed into law in 2007 by the previous Labour Government - is a case in point. The good intention was to reduce the terrible rates of child abuse in New Zealand. But, as the law did not address the real causes of child abuse, the abuse continued. More than 20 children have been murdered since the law was passed.

To make matters worse, the law also had unintended consequences. It criminalised good parents who disciplined their child with a light smack. ACT lodged a Private Members Bill to amend this legislation and it had its first reading on Wednesday night. Despite 87 percent of the population deciding it was an intrusion of parents’ rights, only ACT’s five MPs supported it.

The other well intentioned Bill heard this week was Maori Party MP Rahui Katene’s Bill to remove GST from healthy food. The good intention here: to encourage healthy eating.

The problem is this Bill raises more questions than it answers. The bill included a list of healthy foods - fresh and canned fruit and vegetables, milk and milk products, cereals, lean meats…the list went on. But, do scotch eggs count as healthy because they have an egg in the middle? And what about Fish and chips – the ingredients are healthy until they are cooked in fat!

Many healthy foods are already amongst our cheapest grocery items, and are certainly cheaper than takeaway meals. So why are people increasingly consuming takeaways? The answer, of course, is convenience.

Unfortunately trying to encourage the right eating behaviour using price as the mechanism is fraught with unintended consequences.

ACT and National opposed Mrs Katene’s Bill, but had it been sent to select committee, there would have been endless debates as to what constitutes “healthy food”, not to mention the fact that different conditions require different nutritional treatment. For example, what would you do with the chronically underweight (yes they do exist) – give them an exemption on high fat foods?

We only have to look at Australia’s example to see the unintended consequences of removing GST on food. Australia introduced GST on July 1 2000. It was so unpopular that to soften the blow groceries were to be exempted and this is where it raised some ridiculous anomalies. Takeaway meals were considered a luxury and attracted GST. An uncooked chicken was considered a staple food but a cooked chicken was a take-away and the debate became at what temperature did a chicken attract tax? The opposition had a field-day citing anomalies in the exemption proposals.

Mrs Katene's Bill had Labour’s support for fresh fruit and vegetables but Labour failed to say why it had not changed the tax system when it was in power from 1999 to 2008. Phil Goff appears to have forgotten that he was a proponent of a broadly based GST when he was part of the Lange government that introduced New Zealand's Goods and Services tax in 1985.

Part of the success of New Zealand’s GST is its universality. Its introduction was relatively smooth and uncomplicated because GST applied to all goods and services. New Zealand has one of the world’s most efficient tax systems and to compromise this for little, if any, gain makes no sense at all.

Changing people’s behaviours is never easy or clear cut and politicians should be wary about legislating to do so. While it is always done with the best intentions, it can very quickly go wrong.

Lest We Forget: Canterbury Earthquake
4 September, 2010

Last Saturday's earthquake with a magnitude of 7.1 and the subsequent aftershocks has dominated our thinking this week. I was in Christchurch on Monday night and the two after shocks of 5.4 were enough to give me a taste of what it must have been like for Canterbury residents on Saturday. The community and the rest of the country have certainly rallied around those badly affected, in the knowledge that this could have happened just about anywhere in New Zealand.

Those who have lost their homes and livelihoods are in all our thoughts and I've heard of a large number of organisations planning events to offer assistance and financial support.

Looking back in New Zealand’s history, there have only been 11 earthquakes of greater magnitude recorded since records began. But due to the population density of the Christchurch area, the scale of devastation in this recent event has been huge. Fortunately no-one was killed, which is something of a miracle.

The last time North Canterbury experienced an earthquake of similar magnitude was September 1 1988, measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale. New Zealand's strongest earthquake was in the Wairarapa on January 23 1855, measuring 8.2 and killing an estimated nine people.

Earthquakes are a regular occurrence in New Zealand with an average of 14,000, mostly minor, recorded each year. About 200 are strong enough to be felt, usually along the fault line present where the Indo-Australian and Pacific plates meet.

ENDS

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