Politicians do like being tough on crime. Flexing law and order muscle is a feature of the patriarchal Daddy State, and is beloved by the very same conservatives who deplore the workings of the Nanny State. But tough on which crimes – and even more to the point – tough on which criminals? White collar criminals? No, not so much.

As extensive research by Victoria University academic Lisa Marriott has pointed out:

If you’re a tax evader you’ve got about an 18 per cent chance of going to prison. Whereas if you’ve committed welfare fraud there’s a 70 per cent chance you’ll end up behind bars – that’s in spite of tax evasion being at least 30 times more damaging than welfare fraud to the economy.”

This week, that double standard was evident once more in the coalition government’s crackdown on shoplifters. Under changes announced by Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith, the shoplifting of goods worth up to $500 would result in “instant” fines of $500, while stealing items worth more could trigger instant $1,000 fines. Moreover, maximum prison sentences for shoplifting would increase to one year for thefts of items valued at less than $2000 and up to a seven year prison term if the stolen goods exceeded $2000 in value.

No doubt, retail crime is a problem. But these penalties are grossly disproportionate.( See below.) If only we had a centre-left party in this country to make that point. But Labour’s main concern is that the changes are “confused” and that we won’t have enough police officers to enforce the penalties! Incredible.

Look at the figures. Retail crime has been estimated by Retail NZ to cost the country $2.6 billion annually. How much does fraud against tax revenue/government spending cost us each year ? We don’t know for sure, partly because we don’t look for it. As the Serious Fraud Office frankly pointed out in a December 2021 report: “In a public sector context, detection is not driven by the victim in the same way it is in fraud against individuals. As such, detected fraud levels are usually well below the level of actual fraud loss.” However:

Based on the international comparators, the range that we have reached indicates that the total cost of fraud against the New Zealand public sector spending for 2020 is estimated to be between $601m (0.45%) and $7.48bn (5.6%) per annum . If tax revenues were to be included in this estimation, the total cost of fraud and associated error loss could be as high as $12.97bn per year.

For a second opinion: the cost of tax evasion alone was estimated by the NZ Herald last year at around $7-8 billion a year. Clearly, these are guesstimates. Yet on the available evidence, we’re talking about sums for tax evasion/government spending fraud that are running at around three to five times the amounts lost in retail crime.

Yet is this ‘tough on crime’ government being tough on this sector of criminal activity? Sure, it did throw a bit more money at IRD in the last two Budgets to beef up tax compliance and tax debt recovery. Yet what about allocating some serious funding for the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) so that it can go after white collar corporate crime more thoroughly? Nope. Sample headline, from last August: “Govt. Cuts Front Line White Collar Crime Fighters at Serious Fraud Office.”

The Goose and the Commons

These inconsistencies are not surprising. The rich and powerful have been using the justice system selectively for centuries. On that point, the Hunger Games books have resurrected an anonymous poem published in the early 1800s, another era when being “tough on crime” was all the rage. The first two verses of the poem seem as relevant now as when they were written, over 200 years ago :

They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But let the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine

The double standard in the shoplifting crackdown is reflected in the penalty regime. Leave aside for the moment how those “instant” fines of either $500 or $1,000 will be levied on people who have little or no disposable income. (If they are welfare recipients, will their benefits be docked, and with what effects on their ability to feed and house their children?) Talk about reverting to the early 1800s. Are we proposing to risk making families homeless for stealing goods worth less than $500?

Contrast the punitive regime being contemplated for shoplifters, with what faces tax evaders. Here’s a key part of the legal situation faced by tax cheats:

To ensure the penalty is proportionate to the seriousness of the non-compliance, there are circumstances where a shortfall penalty may be reduced or eliminated, including:

• 100% reduction (in cases of not taking reasonable care or unacceptable tax position) when a full voluntary disclosure is made prior to notification of an audit
• 75% reduction (in the case of other penalties) when a full voluntary disclosure is made prior to notification of an audit
• 75% reduction if there is a “temporary shortfall” when a taxpayer has reversed or corrected a shortfall permanently (or will do so within a prescribed timeframe)
• 40% reduction when a voluntary disclosure is made post notification of an audit, but before the audit commences
• 50% reduction for taxpayers with “prior good behaviour”

Right. Nothing like this same care, leniency and concern about being “ proportionate” is being proposed for the treatment of shoplifters. IMO, there is no good reason why shoplifting couldn’t be punished with similar deductions for prior good behaviour, and with similarly graduated penalties? Why not set the penalties for shoplifting at a percentage of the value of the goods stolen?

On goods worth $500 where there is full recovery of the goods, a 40% fine would be $200. That’s less than half of what Paul Goldsmith is proposing. Yet it would still be a deterrent penalty for many on low incomes. Plus, it would have the virtue of being more consistent with the treatment of tax offenders. Conceivably, the fine might even be within the capacity of the offender to pay it, without causing a raft of unintended consequences for their families.

Finally ...

The IRD shortfall penalties for tax evasion are meant to sustain a tax regime based on voluntary compliance. They involve a slap on the wrist and a warning not to do it again, even if the offence has been caused by a wilful “lack of care” all the way up the chain to ‘gross negligence” or worse.

In the name of sentencing consistency....what has been the outcome when (a) shoplifting offences and (b) white collar crimes have both included extensive planning, multiple offences, and large amounts of money?

Shock. Shoplifters seem to come off worse, even when (a) the amounts involved are far smaller, and when (b) the social damage caused is demonstrably less. Circumstances vary, I know. But here's such a shoplifting case. Some 37 offences were committed in Tauranga by a female offender on a shoplifting spree carried out on an almost daily basis between September 2024, and her arrest in February 25. In total, the goods involved were estimated to be worth about $10,000. In early June, she received a two year jail sentence.

Circumstances vary, as mentioned. But compare that outcome with a recent case of white collar criminality. In late June, two men working in IT were sentenced for offering and receiving 32 bribe payments worth $4.1 million in total, in return for the recipient of the bribes funnelling $20.7 million worth of contracts from Spark to a particular company associated with the briber. 

SFO director Karen Chang said it was New Zealand's largest ever private sector corruption case involving a publicly listed company.

"It sends a clear warning about the real risks corruption poses. These risks include, harming the integrity of our business environment, reducing competition and lowering investor confidence.”

Right. That sounds really bad. To repeat: 32 bribes worth $4.1 million in all, and tainted contracts worth over $20 million in the country’s biggest corporate corruption case, one that possibly caused lasting harm to our competitive tendering processes and to investor confidence. The sentence? Three years.

Three years is considerably less than half of what Paul Goldsmith is proposing as the maximum sentence for shoplifting items worth $2000, or more. The sentence handed down in this multi-million dollar IT case was also only 12 months more than what the Tauranga shoplifter got for stealing about $10,000 in all – and she caused no ripple effects across the entire NZ business sector.

But hey, this latest crackdown is mainly about winning votes by looking tough. The crackdown on shoplifting has already earned the coalition government a lot of brownie points with retailers. (The rollback of the anti-smoking legislation also earned them brownie points with dairy owners). All of this comes on top of the deeply problematic expansion of the legal powers granted to shop-keepers to make citizens arrests of shoplifters. Can we make citizens arrests of CEOs whose corporate fiefdoms pay less than their fair share of tax? Not likely.

In the end...populist politicians using the justice system to scavenge for votes bring the law into disrepute. That anonymous poet in the early 1800s had that outcome in mind, too.

In the final verse, he/she predicted that people treated with disproportionate harshness by the justice system will feel that their only recourse is to take the law further into their own hands:

They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a commons lack
Till they go and steal it back...

The Children of Skrillex

Noise can be therapeutic, and Jane Remover’s third album Revengeseekerz is a good antidote on those days when you feel you’ve had enough Trump, or enough Seymour, to last a lifetime.

Here’s the first single from that album. Once again the 22 year old music veteran punctuates their glitchy, unstable hyperpop melodies with bursts of noise delivered with Skrillex-levels of speed and confidence. BTW, this video contains a lot of flashes and flicker, so be warned:

From much the same neck of the woods, here’s April Harper Grey aka underscores, with the lead single released last week off their new album:

In 2023, undercsores’ breakthrough track was this single, in which a stalkery obsession also served as a partial analogue for the experience of gender dysphoria:

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