May 11, 2025 • 10 mins
The Government is cracking down on illegal drugs entering the country, starting with Customs.
Customs will get an additional $35 million to help combat the rising rate of organised crime groups bringing illicit drugs into the country.
It will provide Customs with the funding needed for 60 more roles.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
You're listening to the Weekend Collective podcast from News Talks 'DB.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
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,
(00:31):
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?
Speaker 3 (00:49):
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
(01:13):
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
(01:33):
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
(01:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
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
(03:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
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?
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Does this suggest that the problem is a lot bigger?
Or are we just getting better at detecting it all?
Speaker 3 (03:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (03:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Yeah, eighty five, So the moltiplying factor is eighty five
times the level, not not just on double.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Yeah, thank you for picking me up on that. Well,
that's obviously a massive, much bigger problem.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
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
(04:41):
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?
(05:02):
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
(05:25):
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
(05:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
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,
(06:26):
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
(06:46):
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
(07:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
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
(07:47):
that could even know how to make a sandwich for
their lunch. Actually now getting into school lunches.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
But we'll be getting we'll be getting if Mark Mitchell
doesn't front up, we'll be getting into that next time.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
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
(08:21):
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
(08:42):
out of it, You make such phenomenal sums of money.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
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?
Speaker 3 (09:00):
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
(09:23):
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
(09:43):
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.
(10:07):
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.
(10:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Excellent, Hey, Maris, I really appreciate your time this afternoon
into the rest of the day.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
For more from the Weekend Collective, listen live to News
Talk ZB weekends from three pm, or follow the podcast
on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Weekend Collective podcast from News Talks 'DB.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
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,
(00:31):
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?
Speaker 3 (00:49):
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
(01:13):
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
(01:33):
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
(01:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
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
(03:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
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?
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Does this suggest that the problem is a lot bigger?
Or are we just getting better at detecting it all?
Speaker 3 (03:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (03:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Yeah, eighty five, So the moltiplying factor is eighty five
times the level, not not just on double.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Yeah, thank you for picking me up on that. Well,
that's obviously a massive, much bigger problem.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
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
(04:41):
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?
(05:02):
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
(05:25):
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
(05:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
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,
(06:26):
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
(06:46):
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
(07:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
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
(07:47):
that could even know how to make a sandwich for
their lunch. Actually now getting into school lunches.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
But we'll be getting we'll be getting if Mark Mitchell
doesn't front up, we'll be getting into that next time.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
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
(08:21):
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
(08:42):
out of it, You make such phenomenal sums of money.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
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?
Speaker 3 (09:00):
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
(09:23):
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
(09:43):
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.
(10:07):
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.
(10:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Excellent, Hey, Maris, I really appreciate your time this afternoon
into the rest of the day.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
For more from the Weekend Collective, listen live to News
Talk ZB weekends from three pm, or follow the podcast
on iHeartRadio.
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