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They are going to be cracking down on illegal drugs entering the country. Well, I mean they're always cracking down on it, but anyway, starting with customs. So Customs will get an additional thirty five million to help combat the rising rate of organized crime groups who are bringing illicit drugs into the country, and it'll provide Customs with the funding that needs from sixty more roles. Anyway. To discuss that, former Customs Minister Morris Williamson is joining us. Good afternoon,
Good afternoon, Thank you. Thank you for being available a little earlier for us. Now you've been in this role before. Thirty five million and new funding for Customs. What's your reaction. Is it enough?
It's a good start. It's never enough, because I can tell you back during my time as minister, and I started in two thousand and eight, so that's what about fifteen years ago or so or more, the biggest thing across the border then was effordream and pseudo ef adrine, So they were the precursors and all of the PA was actually being cooked here. And I remember talking to my Aussie counterpart minister, And I said, you know, I've got this big flood of efadrine and pseudo efadrine pouring
in from China. And he said what And I said efadren and he said, I don't even what you're talking about. And I said, it's used to make methan Phedomi said, I said, you don't have it. He said no, no, no, no, He said, you know, cocaine, heroine and all sorts of that huge here at the border. But I don't even think we rank it. But it certainly changed over the few years. And now what you can't really compare is
the statistics. I've seen a whole lot of statistics that say a huge amount more methan fhetamine is getting over the border than it used to. But now I don't believe there's any effidrine or pseudo EFFI dreams coming over the border. So it's all coming in final product. So it's not to say that there's more actually in the marketplace, although there clearly is. It's to say that it's now all coming as a fire product rather than just the pseudoverdreen coming in and then being made into p.
Yeah, I mean, because I mean it still amazes me that we can test the water and find out how much the consumption's gone up, which is through the roof.
Isn't it that the laugh I had from one of the officials the other day He said to me that we've even been able to detect some urine in the water in Queenstown.
I guess how much of a difference do you think this will make this extra money? Because it's one thing to spend the money, it's another thing to see the difference.
Yeah, well, I think it will make a difference because you get a real multiplying factor for every additional piece of intelligence that you have in the network. You see, you don't really make the busts by finding the stuff by opening up a box, rummaging through and AlOH wats this? You make most of the busts through intelligence. You know, stuff about where was the origin of the product that it come in a container? Are they? Are they a
reputable supplier company that's checked everything? And I can tell you the vast bulk of what customs are decepted during my time as minister, and as minister for about eight years, I can tell you the vast bulk of it is they had pretty much clues and eyes on the system before the stuff even arrived.
Is the fact that we are so we have custom says it's now stopping nearly ninety kilos of meth per week. Oh my godness, it's said so much, isn't it anyway? Compared for fifty five kilos about ten years ago?
Yeah?
Does this suggest that the problem is a lot bigger? Or are we just getting better at detecting it all?
We just correct? Let me just correct your figure because I'll show you how much bigger it is. You said ninety kilos a week, correct, But what you didn't say was for the fifty five in twenty fourteen, was for the entire year?
Oh my goodness. And so oh yes, sorry, sorry I missed that word. It's actually in front of me and I just misread my notes.
Yeah, eighty five, So the moltiplying factor is eighty five times the level, not not just on double.
Yeah, thank you for picking me up on that. Well, that's obviously a massive, much bigger problem.
It can't mean's huge, it's massively huge. And the damage it's doing, I mean it's breaking families. Some of the family violent stats that have gone through the roof you know. It's people always used to get stuck into me. Some of the more lefty liberals used to say, oh, you know, why are you making such a fuss about this stuff. You know, it's a it's a victimless crime. It is
not the damage that it does to our society. When this gets in, it wrecks families, It absolutely creates just dreadful consequences for our society, and I would love to find a way of getting on top of it. When I went to the States once, it is another little funny story. I sat with their secretary of border security and I said to her, where's your biggest inflow of drugs? I said, is it by air or by sea? And
she said, I said it, She said neither. I said what she said, it's all ours comes in via land, And I went, good God, I hadn't thought of that, because we don't have land, so only ours come in via the port. The poets of the seaports. But in America that what's flying over the border and drones and catapult They were even firing catapults, big big catapults with bags of drugs, firing them at the border, and there were people on the other side waiting for them to
come flying over stick them in e vents. So this is a serious problem, massive amount of money involved. What I thought was interesting is how the average prices have dropped. It was, in my time, a good sign. That meant, you know, that it was we were sorry. It was the way round of prices were going up. It meant we were getting on top of it. If prices are dropping like they are, that suggests there's a real flood coming across the border.
Well that's the thing. Do you think we're just chasing our tails? That simply we're having to spend this money just to try and make a small densinet. Really you actually think this is going to make a real difference.
I think it'll make a difference. I'd be very reluctant to say it'll make a real difference because we're dealing with really big organized crime here. We're talking with organizations who have funds sometimes bigger than a small country's GDP, and they have abilities to do things in the transport
and other networks where it is really hard. You know, there have been things where children's clothing has come through all looking absolutely pristine, and then they've suddenly found that the clothing was sort of drenched in meth, then waited to dry put into the packs. And if you then unmelted all after you've put it into a cooker, all the meth comes back and you've got a big supply. So how do you detect that? You know, sometimes even the dogs can't pick it. So it's one of these journeys,
not a destination. And I'm pleased to congratulate Casey Costello for having got some money when times are so tight. I mean I used to go to the Minister of Finance every now and then for more money for this and normally I would always get it because as our economy was in a reasonably good shape and positive sort
of out. So she's got a really difficult balance because every minister going, you know, from the Minister of Health on down and desperate to get more funding into their balance, into their balances.
I don't know what would you ever have in your job formerly as the Minister of Customs, know what the cost to the country is of this meth epidemic.
We used to get what was called the harm Index, which basically tried to quantify what it was doing in terms of, you know, the serious health consequences, but serious dislocations of families and beatings and and shocking, you know, breakdown of family units and children not you know, having parents live that were in a sort of a mood that could even know how to make a sandwich for their lunch. Actually now getting into school lunches.
But we'll be getting we'll be getting if Mark Mitchell doesn't front up, we'll be getting into that next time.
So look, it's one of these things you have got no option. You've got no option but to try to do it. And the more that you can do with intelligence, and I think AI is now starting to faster. Its little head has been really useful for if you've given fifty thousand million data points, you just look at it.
So I can't even tell that if AI can do a sweepover at several several times, it can have you thought about this that coming from there, that container's picked up there, there's a common sort of thread here, and your intelligence people within customs can say, right, we need to have a look at that. And I think that will help. But I don't want to be a sort of a Johnny Kill the Party sort of guy. But I think this stuff is always going to be present
in it. Well, it's because you make such a profit out of it, You make such phenomenal sums of money.
Well here's the thing. Where else do we need to move legislatively too? Because are we a soft touch New Zealand? Do we need to have some more stringent sort of measures and punishments for people dealing on this stuff?
Well, we do need to look at that. Always. There are multitude multi factors that you're going to look at. One of the things that I always thought was a bit sort of blood curdling was we were catching mules coming in from China, very young, sometimes even university students who were told you can pay for your entire university education five thousand times over if you have a pack of this in your luggage. And those who got through could never believe how much money they had for the
rest of their life. But the ones that didn't get through, we put in jail for a reasonably short period of time. They lived in better quality digs than they lived in back home in the slums, and they got better food than they had, and then finally we put them on an aeroplane at our expense to take them home. So if you think about the consequences they are not that.
I don't know how much that's changed. But I always used to say, in fact, if I was a young kid from the slums and had no future whatsoever, this would look terribly attractive. So there has to be some legislative change. The penalties do have to be realistic so that they try to deter people from doing it. But we had stuff magnetically stuck to the hull of ships. We had to die. I went down with the divers one night and they were diving on the base of a ship and they found some big sort of like
limpid mind stuck against it. When they pulled them off, the pea was all stuck in them. It's just the reason, it's all it's going to be there is. It's just you don't make thousands of dollars, you don't make millions. You make tens of millions by being in this trade. And I just hope that we just keep on keeping on and good on to Casey Costello, and hopefully the Ministry of Finance will always keep giving of the funding that's necessary.
Excellent, Hey, Maris, I really appreciate your time this afternoon into the rest of the day.
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