Estimates Debate — Vote Pacific Island Affairs

The next set of votes is in the name of the Hon Phil Goff. They are the Foreign Affairs and Trade, Justice, and Pacific Island Affairs votes. I intend to take those as one debate, as has been the practice throughout this debate. However, there will be three separate votes at the end, unless there is any objection to that course of action being taken.

I rise in support of the votes before the Committee, particularly Vote Justice, as a member of the Justice and Electoral Committee that considered that vote. The committee reported back to the House in favour of the estimates that were presented as part of the Budget. The vote contains spending to the tune of $171.43 million. Before going on to talk about some details of the vote, and how it will be appropriated this coming financial year, I want to record on behalf of Labour members of the Justice and Electoral Committee our gratitude and appreciation for the justice portfolio leadership team of Phil Goff, the Hon Lianne Dalziel, Taito Phillip Field, Rick Barker, and Margaret Wilson. Those Ministers work across quite a diverse range of interests in pursuing Government policy, and I believe they are making very good progress on these goals.

💬 Stephen Franks: Is the member blushing? It’s only in question time that he has to do that.

Mr Franks has never been part of any Budget process where ideas are turned into policies that are implemented across the country; if he had been, he would know the great feeling of joy and pride that members of Parliament can have in seeing things actually happen, rather than just carping on the cross-benches in perpetual irrelevancy. I express my sympathy for him at the same time that I congratulate New Zealanders who are making a difference.

The select committee has a number of pieces of work in front of it at the moment that refer to Vote Justice, and I want to talk on particular areas where that vote is impacting on young New Zealanders. I will start by talking about Project Early, which is a project that was piloted in the city of Christchurch over a period of time, which has now been funded through this vote into the city of Auckland. I believe that it is a very good example of using the justice portfolio as a lead agency in coordinating with other Government agencies to work with young people, and to ensure that we try to turn round any signs of criminal offending. Project Early does help young children, targeting children between the ages of 4 and 8. We know that it is possible to identify people who may go on to offend, through some of their behaviours at an early age, and if we can intervene early, spending money and putting support in place for them early, we have a chance of changing their lives and making a real difference, rather than ignoring that, and then spending the money after they have committed criminal activity.

That is something that Parliament and Government agencies have been very good at doing. We have been very good at paying for things at the wrong end when it is expensive, and when we can look tough about it, but what we are doing here is spending a smaller amount of money early. We do not know whether those 4 to 8-year-olds will go on to a life of criminal offending, but we do know that if we do not try to help them, we will not be able to make a difference for them.

We also know that the formal evaluation of this project—and I will be interested to hear whether Opposition members support Project Early—has found that it has been very, very successful in dealing with behavioural problems, through intervening, and being able to resolve some of the issues that those young children face. Eighty percent of the interventions that Project Early has made have been successful. I am sure we are going to hear from the ACT party and from other Opposition parties that this is a waste of time, and another example of big Government spending on programmes that do not actually make a difference. Of course, that flies in the face of the evaluation that has been done, and it flies in the face of the young children whom we are helping through programmes like Project Early, but I am sure that will not stop Opposition members from being negative about the kinds of things we are trying to do in the area of early intervention. The project will be going into Auckland, and it will continue to have funding in Christchurch through this estimate. The committee very strongly supports that approach.

Money from this Budget’s Vote Justice is also going to fund the victims’ rights legislation. I acknowledge the United Future party, which made the Victims’ Rights Act a part of the confidence and supply agreement with the Government and has put a big emphasis on making sure that victims’ rights legislation was passed before Christmas last year. In this set of estimates the money goes in to make sure that we can make a difference in victims’ rights. For example, in the 14 areas that Victim Support deals with through the country, there will be $2 million to hire district managers who will be able to support the work of Victim Support. What is the work of Victim Support? Over 100,000 crimes have had intervention by Victim Support, and that has led to support for 135,000 victims across communities in New Zealand. So not only do we have legislation where Parliament says that victims’ rights are important, but through Vote Justice we have a recognition in a financial sense by the Crown that these things need to be funded and properly appropriated for.

In my own area in both Horowhenua and Kapiti we have two very strong Victim Support organisations run by volunteers. Volunteers have always run them. In the 1980s it was set up under the previous Labour Government. Our Labour-Progressive Government with the support of United Future has been able to make sure that we then make sure that the Government is a partner with Victim Support in terms of making money available.

I come to the family group conference part of Vote Justice where there is some money available. We see that the Government is making a very strong commitment to ensure that family group conferences are well resourced. The group conferences were an innovative part of the 1989 legislation, but there has been a need to make sure that it is a vehicle that is actually useful. There are two ways of doing that. One, of course, is in follow-up once the family, the police, and the victims have come together for a conference, making sure the decisions of those conferences are followed through. It is very important in terms of the legitimacy of the family group conference process, but also being able to identify some of the wider issues that affect the people coming before the group conference is important. That is why in Vote Justice, funding is available to have a regionally based professional management structure, but, more than that, also to be able to work with young people to do health and education assessments for the high-risk young people who are offending.

This reinforces the theme I spoke of earlier, which was early intervention with young people and making sure that these needs are taken care of when people appear at family group conferences. If we intervene early in that way we can put in place support networks to ensure that the offending does not go on. Being proactive when we deal with criminal offending is very important. It is so easy in this House—and I have heard it so often in the one year that I have been a member here—to be very reactive in the criminal justice debate. Members of Parliament try to be the toughest and angriest about crime, and very little goes into dealing with how we can prevent crime in the first place. There are some tangible examples in Vote Justice in that regard.

Some of the other structural things that are happening will be the money and the vote for the merger of the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Courts on 1 October. That is part of the Review of the Centre that the Minister of State Services has been leading, but the funding is in there to bring those two departments back together again. I am very pleased that restorative justice is continuing to be taken seriously within Vote Justice. There will be 16 programmes funded within the coming financial year. This is a very effective way of dealing with crime where we can try to change criminal offending. In my area in Levin and Foxton there are two very successful restorative justice programmes that have an extremely low level of reoffending. That is because families, friends, and victims are involved, and because key agencies are involved. They are all focused on stopping reoffending rather than simply meting out punishment to look tough.

The fact that there is low reoffending is reinforced by the fact that the restorative justice programmes are running effectively. It is very easy in political debate to make them look like soft options, but when one talks to people who have been through a restorative justice programme, and talks to some of the judges involved, they often say that the punishment—

💬 Stephen Franks: Try the victims!

The victims are involved in the process and have to agree for restorative justice to be an option. The ACT party spokesperson on justice does not even know what the trigger is for restorative justice. We spend time in this House talking about how we try to raise the level of debate about criminal offending, and we have a member of Parliament in his second term who is meant to be responsible for this portfolio area who tries to say that he does not know what the trigger is for restorative justice. How on earth are we to try to raise the tone in this Parliament to make sure there are fewer victims, when there are contributions like that by way of interjection? It is an absolute disgrace that the member would do that.

The other area that is in the vote refers to the clean slate legislation currently before the Justice and Electoral Committee. If that is passed by this Parliament, there will be funding within the vote to ensure that can happen. That will be a good move, as well. In respect of burglary, the ongoing commitment of this Government is to make sure that we target crime early, because burglary is a stepping stone to further crime. We have seen those rates come right down through the intervention of the Government and through funding that at the front end.

With regard to the youth offending teams that are running around the country, there is no actual new funding, but existing funding from within the vote is used to support them, bringing together four agencies—health, education, the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Service, and the police. They are working very successfully in the community. Labour members visited the Nelson youth offending team. It is a very good vote. I support it.

That was an interesting contribution from a member on the Government side, particularly given that he was on the Justice and Electoral Committee that went through Vote Justice and presumably knew that the committee had a number of reasons for saying that it could not tell just what was happening in this vote—what the intended effect was, what some of the targets were, and what outcomes were planned—because the reporting was so poor.

Let me run very quickly through the select committee report. I remind the member that we said, for a start, that the merger of the Ministry of Justice with the Department for Courts made it hard indeed to understand the estimates in this area. We had the evidence that Treasury believed that the proposed merger would be more likely to worsen performance, given that there would be a loss of focus on matters of strategic importance in both public law and the criminal justice system, and, in the rather oblique language and jargon we get from bureaucracies that are anxious not to offend their political masters, “the proposal may constrain the ability of an incoming chief executive to address capability and cultural issues that seem to be affecting performance in both organisations”. One really does wonder what is meant by “capability and cultural issues”. The New Zealanders who pay the many, many millions of dollars that go into this department would probably ask, in respect of a department of State, whether capability and cultural issues might be more simply expressed as “work ethic”, or is it trying to say that they are lazy, stupid, poorly qualified, or have loopy theories that cannot be knocked out of them? Just exactly what was it that Treasury was trying to say? We can only glean what is meant from what the Minister has done and approved.

The Secretary for Justice told us that the main cultural difference between the two organisations is that the ministry is more policy focused, and that “the biggest driver behind the merger was to bring the courts closer to policy development, as the division of the old department has reduced the connection between policy and operations”. I really would appreciate the Minister setting aside the time this evening to reassure us that this is not a set of code words for subordinating the courts to the executive.

I see that one of the stated objectives of the merger is to “enable better coordination of the relationship between the Executive and Judiciary in respect of both policy and administration”. Just what exactly is it that the judiciary is to have its arm stuck up behind its back to do? Why would a merger of departments, with supposedly independent politically neutral judges, give us “better coordination of the relationship between the Executive and the judiciary in respect of policy and administration”? Is this a signal that we are quite right to expect Margaret Wilson’s new Court of Appeal to have a preset agenda? Is this telling us that by sticking the judges under the Ministry of Justice they will have to do what they are told? Or is this something just as sinister but more simple, like bringing an indigenous law into the heart of our legal system? This may be just that the Minister expects that he will be able to get the judges to read what is in his mind when they look at something like section 86 of the Sentencing Act. That provision was stuck in at the last minute to reverse the Minister’s previous decision that there would not be a power for judges to set non-parole periods.

Section 86 has been repeatedly criticised by the judges. They have to find that a crime is extraordinary before they can set any sort of non-parole period. Perhaps what the Minister means here, and what the select committee could not get to the bottom of, is that there is an intention to put the judges more under the thumb of the politician and the executive. Certainly, nothing of what we have seen in performance in the justice portfolio reassures us that that is not the intention. We have a Minister who was determined to get rid of suspended sentences, despite the expressed opposition of both the judiciary and the profession, and who turns to berating the judges when they implement his own law in the way that the Opposition in this Parliament told him it would be implemented. And what do we get? We seem to get a response that says: “Bring the Department for Courts under the thumb of the Secretary for Justice and the Ministry of Justice and we will get better coordination of the relationship.”, whatever that may mean.

We see in this vote that there is $1.25 million more in funding for policy advice. The policy advice might be needed to work out exactly what the Ministry of Justice is trying to do. We could not understand the statement of intent. We strongly urged—as Mr Darren Hughes ought to have known—the previous recommendations of the select committee to include quantifiable data on family group conferences that would allow national comparisons to be made. That was the recommendation not just of the Opposition but of the entire select committee. We unanimously recommended that we get something that would tell us whether family group conferences were working. Yet Mr Darren Hughes was able to stand here in this Chamber as a young Labour member, get 10 minutes of the Committee’s time, and tell me as an Opposition member that expressing a little bit of justified cynicism about family group conferencing was in some way a reprehensible use of the debate in this Chamber.

Let me draw to Mr Hughes’ attention what the victims think of family group conferencing and some of the justice processes that the ministry has implemented and is supposed to supervise. What the victims think about family group conferencing was very clear in the message given by the Sensible Sentencing Trust to Parliament today. It reads: “The existing law means young offenders are not being held accountable. The politically correct family group conference is totally ineffective as a deterrent. This is confirmed by our youth reoffending rates. Youth offenders should be processed through the normal court system, but with the judges having the power to hold parents and guardians jointly accountable. The courts must be able to order parents and guardians to undertake parenting courses, and continued offending could see parents and guardians prosecuted.” It goes on to say that parents would need restored power to control or discipline those for whom they are responsible and that there is a need to end the living-alone benefit, which allows kids to give the fingers to their parents.

Representatives of the Sensible Sentencing Trust gave us three examples of the junior crime waves that have so upset the judges. The page they gave us at 2 o’clock today reads: “Youth laughs at frustrated judge.”; “Boy, 14, charged with rape.”; “O’Brien to appeal”; “Fifteen-year-old schoolgirl found guilty of murdering Waitara truck driver, Kenneth Pigott, will appeal both her conviction and mandatory life sentence next Monday”. That is what the victims think of the vaunted family group conference system that the Labour member Darren Hughes took such pains to praise just now. The select committee could not form a view because it found that not enough quantifiable data was available to know whether the thing works, and the system has been in effect since 1991.

We also looked at possible future developments. National, ACT, and United Future—and I will be interested to see whether United Future can find it in itself to vote against this appropriation, given the clear agreement it had with the Opposition—listed the matters that need addressing in relation to the Sentencing Act. Can the Minister assure us that some of that extra $1.25 million he is giving to the policy section of his ministry will go into addressing the perception that people can pay reparation to significantly reduce their sentence? That is a polite way of saying that the reparation and amends provisions have become a means for buying justice. Another matter that needs addressing is the loophole for serial non-fine payers that sees the court powerless to impose further punishment once an offender has completed a maximum of 400 hours of community work.

I ask Mr Goff whether he has looked at the headline in today’s Dominion Post, which states: “Get out of bed and pay fines, says father.” The article goes on: “An Upper Hutt man who owes $91,000 in fines could have full-time work to pay back the money if he got out of bed, his father says.” He owes $91,000 in fines, and what did he get for that? He got 400 hours community work and an order to pay back $30 a week.

Vote Foreign Affairs and Trade agreed to.

I just remind members that under Speaker’s ruling 56/4 and Speaker’s ruling 8/2 (Supplement), it is highly disorderly to interject when votes are being cast. In fact, it can be seen as intimidation and could lead, ultimately, to a breach of privilege. I just caution members about that.

Vote Pacific Island Affairs agreed to.

Vote Food Safety

Vote Health