Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Justice: I move, That the Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill be now read a second time. This bill was introduced in November 2003 to meet two objectives: firstly, the establishment of an active management regime aimed at managing the long-term risks posed by child sex offenders, and, secondly, to make minor amendments to the Sentencing Act and the Parole Act to bring the operation of those aspects of the Acts in line with the policy intentions. The active management regime creates a new legislative regime that will allow extended supervision orders to be imposed on child sex offenders who are assessed as likely to sexually victimise children, once their sentence is finished.

Although the United Kingdom and Canada have regimes that enable child sex offenders to be actively managed, New Zealand authorities do not yet have such a regime. This bill enables offenders to be monitored for up to 10 years. How long the order is granted will be a decision for the court, taking into account the need to protect the community in light of the offender's risk and the likely seriousness and duration of any risk. The Justice and Electoral Committee has recommended that the Department of Corrections may apply for an extension to the duration of the extended supervision in situations where the offender has breached the conditions of the order, within the last 12 months. The maximum period of the order will remain at 10 years. However, officials will continue to monitor international regimes and determine whether, at some future time, there may be a need to consider extending the maximum order permissible under the regime, beyond 10 years.

The select committee has also recommended that an order can be extended, where the offender consents to the Department of Corrections making an application for extension for up to the 10-year maximum, on the offender's behalf. Some offenders may wish to have the ongoing support that an order provides. The extended supervision regime will be limited in its application. It will apply only to eligible offenders, subject to a finite sentence of imprisonment for a relevant offence. The bill, as introduced, was limited to actual sex offending against children, but the select committee has extended it so that those convicted of an imprisonable child pornography offence, under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act, will also be eligible for extended supervision orders. This amendment reiterates the abhorrence with which the Government and society regard the production, distribution, and possession of child pornography. The regime will apply only to eligible offenders who are assessed by the Department of Corrections as posing a high or medium-high risk of offending sexually against children.

Where a court order is sought and made accepting that assessment, the Parole Board will set conditions for supervision and monitoring of the offender. These conditions may include electronic monitoring to deter the offender from breaching any special conditions relating to whereabouts—for example, a condition that a person not approach a school.

The select committee has examined the appropriate safeguards that should govern the use of electronic monitoring and has recommended some amendments. These safeguards include, firstly, providing an explicit statement that the purpose of electronic monitoring is to deter offenders from breaching the conditions relating to their whereabouts, and to monitor compliance; secondly, limiting what information derived from electronic monitoring may be used. The information may be used to verify compliance or to detect non-compliance with conditions, and to provide evidence of non-compliance with conditions, and the commission of offences. The Department of Corrections will be required to include information on the use of electronic monitoring, in its annual report.

I intend to move the adoption of a Supplementary Order Paper in the Committee stage to introduce an amendment to the bill authorising information sharing between specified public sector agencies. This amendment is needed essentially to put beyond doubt that agencies may share information relating to a child sex offender for the purposes of monitoring the offender and reducing the risk of reoffending, and that doing so will not be contrary to the Privacy Act.

Issues related to this amendment were considered by the select committee, and such an amendment was thought desirable. However, the committee could not recommend the amendment, because it was considered to be beyond the scope of the bill. A second Supplementary Order Paper will clarify some of the mechanical procedures around enforcement of orders, and also remove the statutory limitation on the use of electronic monitoring for those on parole. The effect of that limitation, as reported, might be viewed as being more restrictive than had been intended. It is therefore preferable, in the Government's view, to remove it.

Part 2 contains a number of amendments to the Sentencing Act and Parole Act to deal with minor matters. The amendments are either of a technical nature to fix up drafting errors, or to bring the operation of particular provisions of the Act more closely into line with the Government's original policy intent. They include amendments to the provisions relating to home detention, deferral of sentences, and minimum terms of imprisonment. The committee's consideration of Part 2 did not result in many changes to the bill, but the changes that have been recommended have further improved the drafting of some clauses.

The committee has also taken the opportunity to address other minor matters that came to light after the introduction of the bill, and made some necessary consequential amendments to the various prescribed forms. The Government has been concerned that deferred sentence start-dates were being granted too often, in circumstances that did not meet the original policy expectation of being truly “out of the ordinary”. There was also concern that the bail conditions should be imposed where deferral was given, to ensure that some degree of control was retained over the offender between sentencing and the commencement of the sentence. The select committee gave careful consideration to the change of the test for deferring the start-date of prison sentences, from “special reasons” to “exceptional circumstances”. The commentary on the bill sets out examples that illustrate the policy intention underlying the deferral provision in cases where an offender’s employment may be lost.

Changes are also being made to the granting of leave to apply for front-end home detention. The Government has been concerned about the number of cases being granted leave to apply for home detention, and subsequently being declined home detention by the Parole Board because the offender was clearly unsuitable. That raised the question about whether an appropriate degree of discretion was being exercised at that first hurdle. The amendments to which no changes were recommended, clarify and emphasise that the court has the primary role of determining whether wider sentencing considerations make home detention inappropriate.

I thank the members of the Justice and Electoral Committee for their work on this bill. The committee addressed significant issues and had a positive influence on the shape of the bill as reported back. The Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill will provide a means for the supervision of high-risk child sex offenders in the community, beyond the term that is currently possible. Children are amongst the most vulnerable in our society, and the predatory and habitual nature of offending against them justifies the establishment of a special regime to help protect them. I look forward to the passage of this bill.

Would it not be great if we introduced a rule against the reading of speeches. The previous speaker read the speech well, but in the reading of speeches I think we lose so much of what is an essential aspect of this House—that is, unscripted comment on the merits, or otherwise, of particular pieces of legislation.

National supports the Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill, but it is important to say, right from the outset, that there are big differences in the law and order policies of the major parties. That is most vividly demonstrated by the change that Labour has made to the parole legislation. Members of the House will be aware that the position under this Government is that a person who is charged and convicted of rape, and sentenced to a period of 9 years, will be eligible for parole within a period of 3 years. And that surely cannot be right. It is fair to say that National judges Labour to be soft on law and order changes.

The piecemeal law changes of the current Minister of Justice have no strategic context or setting. They are reactive ad hoc measures, and this is one of them. That is not to say that this is a bad measure, but the Government is ignoring significant issues in the parole area and needs to proceed on the basis of a comprehensive and careful look at the laws relating to parole. I do not doubt that other speakers from my side of the House will take this issue further.

National supports the Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill, subject to qualifications that I and those National Party speakers who follow me will identify. What we are talking about here is the introduction of a new extended supervision regime that will actively manage the high-risk child sex offender. The concept behind the bill is that those child sex offenders who come within the bill’s definition of “eligible offender” will be assessed by the Department of Corrections to establish whether they are high-risk individuals and should be subject to an extended supervision order.

What is really proposed is two separate management regimes. The first one is a standard management regime for medium-high and high-risk offenders, similar to that used for offenders on parole, and the second part of it is an intensive management regime for the highest-risk offenders, which may require the use of home detention - like conditions and electronic monitoring.

I am not sure how it is for other members of the House, but I think it is fair to say that many of us were truly shocked by the revelations of Justice Ellis, who holds a senior position on the Parole Board, when he indicated what one would have to say was an abject lack of knowledge of the way the parole system works. I express the hope that those who follow Justice Ellis in this important position, and the other members of the Parole Board, get to grips with what is a significant problem in the oversight and supervision of those people who have the privilege—and it is a privilege in the context of early release—of parole. It seems to be the case that the oversight and supervision given by the probation service is minimal, and it is fair to say in some cases extremely minimal. The consequence of that, of course, is that the chance of reoffending is incredibly high.

The New Zealand Government, in what it has done in connection with this bill, is not really breaking new ground. It is in fact taking an approach that has been followed by overseas jurisdictions in respect of child sex offenders. It is the reality that the prevalence and the nature of the offending and reoffending against a particularly vulnerable group in society—children—has led other jurisdictions to put in place similar measures. To prove that point I really need only instance what has gone on in Canada and the UK, because those countries have created legislation to extend supervision regimes for high-risk offenders, including child sex offenders.

In 1997, for example, the Criminal Code of Canada was amended to allow the court to impose a term of up to 10 years of community supervision following a prison sentence of 2 years or more. In the United Kingdom the relevant statute, which is the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000, allows the court to extend the custodial sentence of eligible offenders by imposing a long-term supervision order of up to 10 years.

So who are these eligible offenders? One only needs to look through the provisions in the Crimes Act to see that we are talking about a group of offenders who in the worst possible way degrade our children. The relevant offences for an extended supervision order include these sorts of things: indecency with a boy or girl under 12, sexual intercourse and attempted sexual intercourse with a girl under 12, sexual intercourse and indecency with a girl aged 12 to 16, organising and promoting child sex tours, and, where the victim is under the age of 16 years at the time of the offence, there is an extended definition to pick up issues like anal intercourse, incest, sexual violation, and attempt to commit sexual violation.

There is a critical gap in the present legislation, which is the reason National supports this bill, in the ability to manage certain child sex offenders in the community. The gap is that there is currently no ability to monitor or supervise in the community those offenders subject to a finite prison term once they are no longer subject to release conditions or eligible for recall from parole. So it was that the Government decided to introduce an extended supervision regime that would enable the management, and also the monitoring, of child sex offenders in the community beyond the end of their current parole or release conditions.

I would like to say something about child sex offenders, in the short time that remains. First of all, child sex offenders are not a homogenous population. There is considerable diversity in this group in socio-economic background, education, age, ethnicity, the psychosocial and psychosexual background, the sexual interest in children, the relationships with victims, and general criminality. One of the issues that the Justice and Electoral Committee determined after hearing evidence is that it was possible to identify the types of factors that increased the risk of reoffending among child sex offenders. It is a statement of the obvious that what we are on about here is the aspect of reoffending, because—and I am sure this may be developed by later speakers, perhaps by myself as well—we are talking about, on one view of it, a significant infringement of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, in this legislation. But I am also saying—and others are also, I am sure—that this is one of those cases where it is justifiable to overlook those provisions of that Act, because of greater societal interests.

I am very pleased to speak briefly in this debate as chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee, which dealt with this bill. The committee—

💬 Darren Hughes: A very fine committee.

I thank the member. The much admired select committee—

💬 Richard Worth: I’d like to endorse the comments of the junior whip from Labour. It’s a very fine committee and he is a very good chairman.

I stand luxuriating in this, but I shall come back to the topic. The committee had the bill for 6 months and in that time I think we did some quite thorough work on it. I wanted to mention five points very quickly. The first is that electronic monitoring is cutting-edge technology. It obviously raises issues about privacy and about the use of information that may be collected in the course of monitoring, and therefore it was important to examine and amend the legislation with that in mind. Secondly, we had lengthy discussions in the committee about whether what would be applied through electronic monitoring was actually punishment. In my view it certainly is a punishment, but I also accept that for some people it is a sentence of liberation if they are high-risk child sex offenders, because they will know that with their electronic monitoring the State is monitoring what they are doing and they have a very clear regime to follow. They know that if they step outside that regime they will be breaking the bounds and may end up back in prison. The retrospectivity issue relates to that in the sense that, again, it is about balancing rights and possibilities in society.

The third issue I want to put on record is that this legislation provides for only a 10-year regime. Certainly, the Justice and Electoral Committee wanted to make it clear that we saw that there would be a need to review its operation after maybe 6 or 7 years, to ensure that if, after 10 years, it was working well, it could be extended beyond that, which would require an amendment to the legislation.

Fourthly, we were particularly keen to ensure that victims’ rights were enhanced through the legislation. Victim participation in a number of aspects of the regime was added in, as detailed in our report on the bill.

Lastly, as the Minister mentioned, there is a very exciting pilot scheme in Dunedin that involves all the key agencies in managing sex offenders in the community. The problem raised by that scheme was outside the boundaries of this bill, but concerned the exchange of information between those agencies as a Privacy Act issue. The Minister has a Supplementary Order Paper that, thanks to the work between the parties and the committee, I understand will be accepted, even though it is outside the bounds of the bill. On that basis, I would like to thank the committee members, the committee staff, and advisers from the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Corrections for their excellent work on the bill.

When the Parole Act and the Sentencing Act were passed by this House in May 2002, New Zealand First voted against them, as shown in the Hansard of 1 May 2002. These bills are amendments to those Acts, which we opposed. The opposition to those Acts was from New Zealand National, ACT New Zealand, New Zealand First, and United New Zealand. We believe that those Acts are bad. They are weak on criminality and do not deal with the fundamental issues with regard to the imprisonment of criminals—namely, punitive justice at the beginning of a sentence, and some rehabilitation at the end. Those were our comments on the sentencing and parole legislation in May 2002. Sections 84(1) and 84(2) of the Parole Act set out a non-parole period that can be one-third of the length of a sentence. That is extraordinarily short, and is much shorter than it ever was before. Both Acts are bad, and in New Zealand First’s view no amendments can make them better.

When we come across a painted apple moth, it is something bad that we cannot make better, so we exterminate it. We get rid of it. On looking at these amendments and at the Acts they relate to, we see New Zealand First cannot support these amendments. We will be voting against both bills.

💬 Hon Rick Barker: Oppose, oppose.

We opposed the legislation in May 2002, and we will oppose it now, because we are not a party that is soft on law and order, unlike the Labour Party, which is trying to make it easier for hardened sex criminals to get out of jail. We do not support that. That is what this legislation is about. In our view, people who have done a horrendous crime should do all the time and not be let out at one-third or two-thirds of the time. Those people should do the time. Towards the end of the time—after getting some punishment, and if there is some evidence of rehabilitation—but only then, should one consider parole.

Although the measures proposed in this legislation are worthwhile, they should be commenced while people are in prison and continued mandatorily once they are out of prison. The current legislation contains a retrospective aspect. There is no reason why there should not be a retrospective aspect in terms of people currently in prison—or, of course, in relation to the prospect of people being in prison in future—and of them having the type of supervision considered in this legislation after they have done their time. It will not be supervision; it will be a degree of control. That is what we want to see. We want to see high-risk sex offenders controlled.

New Zealand First’s policy is clear. It was set out at the last election, and we have not changed from it. At the last election we said that we supported the replacement of the Parole Board by a rehabilitation board with a primary object of minimising recidivism. The board would be required to consider the actual duration of imprisonment, and to ensure that a serious, violent offender had demonstrated remorse and a positive attitude to rehabilitation before considering any parole. There would be none of the idea that at one-third of someone’s time maybe he or she can get out of prison by going in front of a Parole Board of the likes of the one we have today. The Parole Board chairman, Justice Tony Ellis, described the board members as risk takers who “live in hope” that the probation service will properly monitor inmates when it releases them. We cannot have that; it is a disgrace. This Minister should have fired the board. There can hardly be a better indication of the board’s derogation from its duty than that, and if the Minister does not fire the board he ought to resign. I take up Mr Worth’s comments that we should have people on the board who are willing to deal with these people, and who do not take risks. The Parole Act and the Sentencing Act are not there to let people out on parole and to take a risk that the parolees may be all right. That is absolutely ridiculous.

As I said, New Zealand First opposed the two Acts, and we will oppose these amendments. We cannot go against the view of the 92 percent of the public who want tougher sentences than those supported by this Government. High-risk child sex offenders should not be given parole, but should be subject to supervision once their entire sentence is concluded, as this bill to some extent envisages. We do not want a sex offender to be allowed out on supervision undertaken by a probation officer during the term of his or her imprisonment. We know that probation staff do not have the capability to undertake supervision. Supervision should definitely be undertaken only after the term of imprisonment has expired, and by way of retrospective legislation—as contemplated by this legislation—if necessary. These amending bills continue the fundamental flaws of the respective Acts: they were soft on law and order, and the Labour Government failed to take into account the view of the people of New Zealand.

New Zealand First’s message to sex offenders is that punishment is vital. Somehow, the people who abuse young children—boys and girls—have to learn that a punishment factor will flow from the consequences of their actions once they are caught. Those people are essentially cowards. They have to be cowards to do what they do, and the only way to treat a coward is to point out that the penalty will be severe. Some people may want to go much further than that, but I suppose that in a civilised society we draw the line somewhere.

💬 Darren Hughes: The member is a softie, after all.

It is a cutting point, I know, but we will leave it for another day.

There is no doubt about New Zealand First’s hard line when it comes to law and order. We are being consistent with what we said before the election of 2002. I ask the other parties who took the same line before the last election to perhaps reconsider their situations, and to take the same hard line today—if it is a hard line; I think it is the only line one can take. It is not a hard line but it is a common-sense line. If the high-risk sex offenders envisaged by this legislation—and, of course, other offenders as well, but I am limited to speaking about high-risk sex offenders because that is the tenor of this bill—commit sex offences or other serious offences, they have to realise that a New Zealand First Government will be listening to what the Sensible Sentencing Trust has to say, and to what 92 percent of New Zealanders have made very clear.

Home detention is flawed. There has been an example of home detention whereby, while on home detention and with the supervising officer outside the room, a criminal committed another unlawful act inside. What sort of law is it that meant someone could go on supervision in that type of situation and be committing a sex offence inside a room, but the officer would not allow anyone in to stop the person from doing that? It is utterly ridiculous.

We have had a good look at this matter. We believe that our policy is consistent on this issue, and we also opposed the principal Acts in 2002. Although the bill looks quite good on the face of it and is a little tougher than the current legislation, that legislation is inherently soft. We cannot support such soft legislation. We ask other parties to join New Zealand First in rejecting it and going back to the views we had in May 2002, when we rejected the Sentencing Act and the Parole Act. We ask them to join us in coming up with laws that show a real toughness towards all offenders, and in this particular case especially towards high-risk sex offenders, who should be kept in jail right to the end of their time and then have supervision imposed upon them for a long time afterwards.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Before I call the next speaker, I wish to advise honourable members that the Green Party has decided to share its time. Therefore, the member will get a bell at 4 minutes, to signify 1 minute of speaking time remains.

The Green Party will also be seeking leave to split its vote on this bill. That is an indication of how seriously we take the issues raised in it, and how contentious and significant we consider them to be. What we are asked to do here is to balance very carefully the need to protect some important principles of justice with the compelling need to protect children from sexual offenders. That is something we should not take lightly, whatever position we end up taking on the bill. The bill addresses the problem in two ways. First of all, it creates an extended supervision regime for child sex offenders who have reached the end of their finite sentence, and who therefore cannot be subject to any supervision orders or restrictions, but who are assessed as being of high or medium-high risk of reoffending. The other thing the bill does is to put in place a system of electronic monitoring for people released under conditions such as parole or extended supervision. Electronic monitoring is not a new thing in this country. We use it now for home detention, but this bill allows the door to open to an extension of the idea—that is, the use of the Global Positioning System to monitor more closely what people under the regime are doing. The purposes, of course, are to verify compliance with release conditions, detention conditions, or conditions of extended supervision, to detect non-compliance, and to provide evidence of non-compliance so that people can be held to account if they do breach those conditions.

I consider that the use of electronic monitoring has the potential for great benefit, if it is used with some clear restrictions and some clear safeguards. It does allow for the proper monitoring of people, and it therefore opens the door to the use of less restrictive conditions, because those conditions can be more closely monitored in a more sophisticated way. So I consider there is a potential that people could be subject to less restrictive conditions as a result of electronic monitoring. But without restrictions on its use, electronic monitoring could lead to a draconian imposition. It could easily become a gateway for the State to impose more restrictions on people in an unjustified way—for example, by restricting political activity in the way that bail conditions are used right now, today, when arresting people who are engaged in protest, in order to clear them away from areas where the police consider they do not want them to be. My colleague Keith Locke will talk more about that when he speaks on this legislation.

But it is important there are some safeguards concerning electronic monitoring, and that is why the Green Party supported the inclusion, at the Justice and Electoral Committee, of some conditions around the use of it. In particular, new section 15A(1), inserted by clause 6A, states that a condition requiring an offender to submit to electronic monitoring “may be imposed only on an offender who—(a) is subject to a sentence of preventive detention; or (b) is subject to an extended supervision order; or (c) is or will be on parole, and electronic monitoring … is necessary in order to provide the supervision required to ensure that the offender does not pose an undue risk to the community …”. The Justice and Electoral Committee came up with that provision because we felt that there should not be open slather, and that there should be some restrictions on the use of that power. We are concerned to hear that the Government seeks to remove that clause in a Supplementary Order Paper, and we will oppose that.

The other part of the bill deals with extended supervision, which seeks to address a greater problem and a more serious threat to civil liberties—that is, the people released at the end of a finite sentence who are assessed as being of high or medium-high risk. The law allows no restriction on them, yet we know with certainty that almost half the people assessed as high-risk will reoffend. Should we just wait for them to make new victims, or should we act? That is the issue this Parliament has to address. The bill would allow the chief executive of the Department of Corrections to apply to a court for an extended supervision order of up to 10 years, and that would allow conditions to be imposed, whether intensive or standard. But some supervision would be allowed over those people. As Richard Worth said, that is an infringement of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. We had a big discussion about whether that is punishment. Certainly, I think it is punishment, but I believe it is justifiable if we are to protect the young people of New Zealand.

Four of the Green MPs will be voting against the part of the bill that is to become the Parole (Extended Supervision) Amendment Bill. We do that because of its serious civil liberties implications. The bill was heavily criticised by the Attorney-General, the Law Society, several civil liberties groups, and the Howard League for Penal Reform. A major concern is the new provision for the electronic monitoring of offenders and of those under extended supervision, post-release. The Attorney-General said of the latter category that the provision “marks a significant departure from the standards of civil liberties in this country”, and it contravenes the privacy and the search and seizure provisions of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Other submitters argued it was against article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The move to enable the electronic monitoring of some parolees—it could be all parolees if the Minister’s amendment passes—is quite a step towards a surveillance State. It is a big departure from home detention monitoring, which just ensures that a person stays at home. Electronic monitoring will enable the tracking of parolees and of those released under extended supervision everywhere they go, using the Global Positioning System. The monitoring could even be extended later on to more categories of people, including people on bail or people later put on extended supervision for other non-sex crimes. The Auckland Council for Civil Liberties called the bill a Trojan Horse in that respect, pointing out, for example, that the requirement to give blood samples started off as applying to a narrow category but now includes people who are just suspects. It is not dreaming to think that such electronic monitoring, once set in place, could eventually be used against all kinds of offenders, including political protesters, whether they are offenders post-release or on parole, or people on bail, to keep them away from various institutions—be it an institution involved in GE, the American Embassy, a fur shop, etc. Concern about tracking measures is not a new concern for the Green Party and Green MPs. During the debate on the Counter-Terrorism Bill, we warned of the extent of the tracking powers granted to the police.

The other provisions in the current bill that came in for serious criticism from the Attorney-General related to the double jeopardy elements involved in extended supervision, which breach section 26(2) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act—that one cannot be tried or punished again for one offence. That also applies with regard to a similar section, section 14(7), of the international covenant I referred to previously. A second double jeopardy aspect, that the law will retrospectively apply to those currently serving sentences, was also strongly criticised by the Attorney-General, in referring to section 26(2) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. It also contravenes section 15(1) of the international covenant, which forbids the later imposition of a heavier penalty than the one applying when an offence was committed. The New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties objected to another ramification of that particular double jeopardy situation, saying that it was a change from “a system based on conviction for past offences beyond reasonable doubt to one based on a form of effective detention, justified by qualitative estimates of future dangerousness. It erects a shadow criminal law.”

That does not mean to say we are soft on child sex offenders. But there are ways of dealing with those problems—for example, by taking up the submission of the Safe Network organisation that the Government and non-governmental organisations work much closer together to deal with sex offenders post-release. There is also a serious problem of serious child sex offenders serving their full term in jail and getting out without being monitored as they go into the community. So we are supportive of looking into some of the proposals made by the Law Society that there be a limited parole period built in at the time of sentencing, or some provisions for those currently in jail to make sure that they have a parole period, without the problems that this law imposes.

The four of us who will be voting against this legislation have some very serious civil liberty concerns about it.

This bill is the first patch-up of the Parole Act and the Sentencing Act that were passed in 2002, and as a patch-up it is appalling. So many problems have been identified with those Acts, and most of them were identified by ACT, National, New Zealand First, and United Future before they were passed, but this bill addresses only a few of them. A great deal of public attention has been placed on the bits that Mr Goff, in his normal vein-popping fashion, has trumpeted—that is, the new provisions to put child sex offenders under up to 10 years of extended supervision.

But those Acts also deal with other things. First, the Parole Act itself has been examined in the course of this bill, and all the Minister has touched on are a few minor—the traditional word is “tinkering”—matters. For example, Mr Goff has now given himself, his officials, and the Department of Corrections people the power to put ankle bracelets or electronic monitoring on some parole offenders. Why not all? Why not any who deserve it?

ACT, of course, believes that parole is entirely unjustified. There is no evidence that it does anything that a period of extended supervision at the end of a sentence would not do. But even if we accepted for the moment that there is some point in parole other than to empty jails at least cost, we would find the bracelet restriction bizarre. Why should it not be a matter of prison officer discretion or Department of Corrections discretion? The people out on parole are out on a privilege; they should be in prison. If they are on home detention or under some sort of observation, the conditions applying to them should include electronic monitoring without the need for any legislation. They are out on a privilege, and if the cost of that privilege is to be under electronic monitoring, they have a choice: if they do not like it, they should stay inside, so that is fatuous.

I also noticed that this bill touches on cumulative sentencing, but does not, of course, do what New Zealanders want, which is to ensure that there is a price for every crime. Even if it is a small increment, it is at least a price to make sure that crime is not an activity for which one gets a bulk discount, or a write-off above a certain level. No—just to make sure—this bill says that a cumulative sentence cannot be imposed if the person already on sentence has been let out on parole. In other words, that person has been let out on trust and breached the trust, and now this bill takes tender care to say that the court cannot go back and make the sentence cumulative with the earlier one. In other words, it cannot say to the criminal: “You’ve breached the trust. Now you had better serve the rest of your sentence as well as the new one for the new crime you have committed.”

Of course, Mr Goff and his colleagues think that would be unfair. Presumably, they think it might make the criminals feel bad about them. It was not explained to us in the Justice and Electoral Committee what the reason for this provision was, but looking at it, it is plain that cumulative sentencing has been made even harder for a court to order. The Government will not take the risk of leaving it to the judges; it does not trust the judges. The real sentencing is carried out by the Parole Board.

As we have seen this week, the Minister has been sprung. It is very obvious that the Parole Board has been doing what the Parole Act tells it to do—that is, ignore all the purposes of sentencing and simply empty prisons as soon as it can persuade itself, on whatever fatuous evidence it has, that a prisoner might not be a risk to the community. Until this week, I could not have said that in such harsh terms, because we did not have the frank admissions from an honest judge at the head of the Parole Board that what it is doing is taking risks and making guesses. That is an interesting point, and members might not have been aware of it, because the Minister made it look as if he were stunned by those admissions from the Parole Board. He made it appear as if he had no idea that it was not keeping a watch on whether parole conditions were being monitored or enforced, or whether it was capable of doing so.

I just draw to members’ attention that the report back of this bill was on 11 June. It states: “The Parole Board still cannot take account, in ordinary cases, of the reasons for a sentence, it has no duty to consider whether the practical enforcement of conditions is likely, …”. Now, I knew that because I had talked to Parole Board members. I do not think the Minister had bothered. I knew that, because victims had said that the Parole Board was completely uninterested in whether the conditions were capable of being enforced. Let me give an example. Anthony Roma’s conditions of parole were that he abstain from alcohol and drugs and live with his family. Victims told the Parole Board that those conditions were incapable of enforcement, and that he would not do it. The Parole Board, with its Lord Nelson policy of “blind eye to the telescope”, did not want to hear that. It did not pay it any regard and Anthony Roma went out and offended again—as the victims had predicted in writing.

Yet Mr Goff stands in this House and brings forward a bill like this that does nothing to cure those problems. He has brought in other Supplementary Order Papers, but no Supplementary Order Paper to tell the Parole Board it ought to ask the Department of Corrections how its monitoring is going, or whether it has the capacity to enforce conditions. He could just read the newspapers perhaps, and see that the south Auckland probation officers are totally overloaded and utterly without the ability—as they were in relation to William Bell—to ensure that complicated conditions like abstaining from alcohol and drugs are feasible conditions on which the Parole Board can rely.

This bill compounds this Government’s error. In clause 19, the non-parole period the court can set has now made an enormous concession to the judges. The relevant section, section 86 of the Sentencing Act, was wrong when it was passed. In 2002, ACT New Zealand tried to help the Minister out by providing some amendments, and Minister Goff was saved only by Minister Barker at the last minute to even restore any power for the court to set a non-parole period.

Now the public and the media know that the non-parole period is the sentence. The media know it because that is the way they report it. When the media report on a sentencing, they report on the non-parole period. They know the rest is lies. They know that the parole system makes judges lie every time they give a sentence, because the judges know that the sentence they are giving is not the sentence that will be served.

What does the new section 86(2) that the Minister has provided do? It says to the judge that he or she can set a non-parole period to make sure that the purposes of sentencing are performed. That is exactly what ACT New Zealand says the Parole Board should be required to do. Why should it not? That is the thing victims are most interested in. Judges go through the charade of listening to victims’ submissions, and victims are allowed to complain about how frightened they are, but the Parole Board is not permitted to have regard to the most simple victim request of all, which is: “Can I please be confident that after parole justice will still have been done?”.

Justice Ellis was patently clear about that in his interview with Linda Clark on Monday. He said quite bluntly that punishment was not a consideration for the Parole Board, and it gave little if any weight to victims’ views on whether the sentence should be served in its entirety. He said it looked only—as it is directed by statute—at the safety of the community. It does not know what the victim’s rights are, although the Minister tells us it is the right to be heard.

The Minister is more than misleading in that area. He is trumpeting the Act as having been toughened up when, in fact, he has weakened it. This bill even allows child sex offenders to get out earlier. That was admitted during the select committee process. Previously, they had to serve their sentence until the Parole Board was satisfied they were safe to let out. As it could not be satisfied that most of them were safe to let out, they stayed. This bill provides for them to be let out earlier as long as they are wearing a bracelet. Even the trumpeted purpose of this bill—to toughen up the legislation—is not true. The Minister has been misleading the people of this country.

The Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill essentially introduces a new, extended supervision regime to manage so-called high-risk sex offenders. Quite frankly, all sex offenders are high risk. It is often said that sex offenders are lower risk than a lot of other offenders, but a 22-year study showed that after that period of time, the recidivism rate went as high as 70 percent, which gives the lie to the fact that sex offenders are a low-risk category of individual. There is no reason to suspect that 10 years is enough, in terms of an extension of supervision of those individuals. I hope that members will look at my Supplementary Order Paper 226. One of the changes I would like to see take place is the extension of that provision until such time as the Parole Board considers the person to be safe. In my opinion, that would be when the person stops breathing.

Implicit in this is a recognition that sentences were inadequate in the first place. What has been done since? I understand that a lot of individuals will come up for this supervision regime fairly soon, which is one of the reasons why there is urgency in getting this legislation through. In fact, one individual comes up next month. I am loath to name him, though in some ways I would like to, because the problem is—

💬 Richard Worth: You must do so. He should be named.

He should be named. I was advised earlier this evening that if I named him, his counsel might consider that to be prejudicial and force the judge to stop providing the extended supervision that would otherwise ensue because of this legislation. If that is true, the last thing I want is for that to be on my conscience. I will not take the risk. But there are individuals coming up for release very soon, and that is the reason why this bill must be passed, flawed as some of its provisions are.

It has been estimated that around 60 offenders will come under this regime, and there are about 107 to whom it could possibly apply down the track. Sixty offenders may not sound like a lot, but 60 sex offenders—predators—can manage to run up a large count of victims—families that will be broken and hurt by what they do. The simple fact is that those individuals should never be let out of prison in the first place, and if they are mentally deficient, they should be held in a facility appropriate to their condition for the rest of their lives. They should never be let out to hurt any law-abiding citizen again.

I do not see any instinct on the Minister’s behalf to do anything about the Parole Act and the Sentencing Act to remedy that. If anything, those Acts allow people to come up for parole one-third of the way through their sentences—contrary to the instincts of 92 percent of the population who voted in favour of tougher laws. Why has the Government not heard them? Why has the Government not acceded to the democratic wishes of the people of this country? That I do not understand. The Government will pursue other social engineering policies that are not demanded by 92 percent of the population, but by a very small, narrow margin of the population. Yet 92 percent of the population says something, and this Government listens to them with Van Gogh’s ear.

Some groups have asserted that this legislation proposes retrospectivity and punishment over and above sentencing, and on those grounds they complain about it. In fact, the Attorney-General’s report on the compliance of the bill with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act found that its provisions were inconsistent with the rights and freedoms contained in that Act on a number of counts—there is an unreasonable limit on the right not to be subject to double jeopardy, and unreasonable search and seizure.

The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act is actually the problem. It is about time we took that legislation apart and introduced a “Bill of Responsibility”. That Act, along with the Privacy Act, has been responsible for so much stupidity that it is time that they were taken to task and got rid of. The only rights they protect are the rights of offenders. They do not protect the rights of the law-abiding citizens of this country. I do not understand how a Government claiming to have the better interests of the law-abiding citizens of this country in mind can act against their interests by hiding behind the provisions of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and the privacy legislation.

💬 Georgina Beyer: There is some humanity amongst us—that’s why.

There is no humanity amongst sex offenders. Excuse me! They have lost their right to any humanity. They have offended against the rights of the innocent, and they must pay the full and ultimate penalty for what they have done. The rights of the innocent should never be put at risk by these predatory offenders. My Supplementary Order Paper proposes to extend, hopefully with the support of the House, the supervision orders beyond the 10-year period. That is what those predators deserve. Anyone who does not support those amendments and who then finds out that those predators have offended again will have that on his or her conscience.

There are a number of very good things in this bill, particularly with regard to victim participation. There are three things in particular. With the leave of the court, the bill enables victims’ input into hearings about extended supervision orders. It also allows victims to be notified in advance if the Parole Board is considering the imposition of special conditions under Part 1A in clause 10, and permits them to make submissions to the Parole Board about those conditions. I would like to see the victims have the right of appeal if they do not like the provisions set by the Parole Board. It also advises victims of the death of an offender, something I think most victims would be very glad to hear about.

In coming to my conclusion, I have to say that we feel we have to pass the bill, imperfect as it is, because it goes one step beyond what we are otherwise capable of doing with some of those offenders. The problem is we cannot now turn the clock back for the individuals who are coming up for release over the next month or two and give them the longer sentences they deserve. Failing that, the only argument I can see in favour of this bill is that we must offer some sense of comfort to victims and law-abiding citizens that we will supervise these predatory animals. I would not want it on my conscience if there were any future victims as a result of not passing this bill. Given that, United Future will support it.

The National Party has some considerable concerns about this bill, and we simply do not believe that the Government has taken those concerns seriously.

I want to tell the House why this bill has come to Parliament. This bill came to Parliament because Mr Goff, the Minister of Justice, was trying to appear to be doing something about the cases of Barry Allan Ryder and Lloyd Alexander McIntosh, when in fact he had done absolutely nothing. Mr Goff made his reputation on the back of the Barry Allan Ryder case and he said he would never let Barry Allan Ryder be released from jail. He railed against Mrs Shipley, New Zealand’s first woman Prime Minister, and he railed against former Minister of Justice, Douglas Graham. He said that if he were Minister of Justice these people would never be released from prison.

Then we discovered that Barry Allan Ryder, a paedophile who repeatedly sexually abused young children, had been released under Mr Goff’s watch. What did Mr Goff say? He said he did not know about it, yet this is the case that Mr Goff made his reputation on. He said Barry Allan Ryder would never be released. Mr Goff said he would never allow it to happen, but Barry Allan Ryder was released and Mr Goff never ever asked what his parole conditions were. When it was the National Party that revealed the information concerning the release, Mr Goff said he was not going to ask for the parole conditions. He said he could not ask that. It was not until there was pressure from the National Party, New Zealand First, ACT, United Future, and the media that the Parole Board and this Minister of Justice released those parole conditions.

Those conditions showed that this Government could not guarantee the safety of children in Christchurch with Barry Allan Ryder in the community. He abused two young boys in Christchurch, and this Minister said he could do nothing.

Then we discovered the case of Lloyd Alexander McIntosh, another offender whom the Minister expressed considerable concern about when in Opposition. We discovered that Lloyd Alexander McIntosh was being paroled and released into Palmerston North. This Minister and Mr Maharey, only after pressure from the Opposition parties, decided they would say to the people that they would do everything they could to eliminate the risk his behaviour posed to children in Palmerston North. Mr Goff said he would stop the release of this sort of individual, but he did not. Mr Goff looked into the case only when this was raised with him.

So now we have this bill. Mr Goff promised 24-hour, 7-days-a-week supervision for Lloyd Alexander McIntosh. Well, what happened? Lloyd Alexander McIntosh assaulted a young woman in his home while a security guard, employed by this Government, was outside the door.

💬 Stephen Franks: So, they knew where he was?

They knew where he was, and that happened. Lloyd Alexander McIntosh told somebody that he had almost raped the girl while the security guard was outside the door.

So the Government, in its embarrassment, brought forward this bill, saying that paedophiles would be supervised 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 10 years. The National Party was able to reveal to the people of New Zealand that the only supervision that this bill provides for, after 1 year, is the attachment of an electronic bracelet—an attachment of an electronic bracelet after 1 year. For the first year, offenders will be subject to home-detention criteria and supposedly to quite intense 24-hour, 7-days-a-week supervision, but after that it boils down to having a home-detention bracelet, but no home detention. So we said to Mr Goff: “How does a bracelet prevent reoffending?”.

We are concerned about this because what the Government has not told New Zealanders is that last year senior officials of the Community Probation Service appearing before the Law and Order Committee told us that no paedophile would be monitored for 10 years. We were further told that in the first few months extended supervision would include two visits a week with a parole officer and, after 2 years, that it would go down to one visit with a parole officer every 3 months. How will an electronic bracelet and a quarterly visit with a parole officer stop the likes of Barry Allan Ryder from abusing young children?

The proposal in this bill highlights the concern that the Opposition parties have raised time after time in this House, and that is the discredited state of parole in New Zealand. A senior, highly respected judge, respected for his frankness and his directness, Justice Ellis—a fine New Zealander—has commented that he was unaware of how low the level of supervision was of people on parole, and I paraphrase him on that. At the select committee we were told that parole is essentially this: within 3 days of release, inmates must contact their parole officer; there will be contact at least once a week for the first few weeks, then that will very quickly reduce to contact once a month. That is not crime prevention.

The National Party is also concerned about new section 15A(1)(d) in clause 6A. That provision will provide the Parole Board with reason to release these sorts of offenders from jail earlier than would have been the case if the legislation had not been here.

💬 Judith Collins: Shocking.

It is shocking, and we oppose that. We say that the key issue here is the safety of the public, and that keeping people in jail longer is better for keeping people safe than giving offenders a bracelet and quarterly supervision. I tell the House even further that the planning for the supervision of these people is so woolly that the Department of Corrections has not yet finalised its guidelines for the management of paedophiles on extended supervision. This bill, with a majority vote of this House, could become the law of the land within a few days.

Many, many changes would need to be made to this bill for the National Party to want to support it. We look to the Government and other parties to move amendments to fix this bill, because this bill offers no added security or protection to the young people of New Zealand from these vile offenders. A bracelet and quarterly monitoring are no supervision.

I seek leave for the votes cast by the Green Party in party votes on the Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill to include numbers cast for the Ayes and Noes and to record abstentions, notwithstanding Standing Order 144(1)(b).

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Is there any objection to that course of action being taken? There appears to be none.

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I just want to make sure that no one else wants to take a call. I am giving members the chance to go for the call.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): That is not a point of order.

As the Hon Tony Ryall has so eloquently stated, this bill is too little, too late. We have a situation in this country where parole is a joke. People know that after this Government amended the parole laws, a person who had been sentenced to 9 years in jail was likely to get out of jail after serving a mere 3 years. Parole is a joke, and this country needs significantly more than the Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Reform Amendment Bill can ever give it.

The legislation was premised on the basis that it would deal with child sex offenders. I do not think that there would be a member in this House, or in any other term in this Parliament, who would not like to see the whole issue of child sex offending done away with forever and ever, and never come back to haunt this country again. Unfortunately, that will not happen—not in my lifetime, and I suggest not in anyone’s lifetime. The reality is that, unfortunately, some people prey on young children. In any right-thinking person’s mind, those people are absolutely depraved, and no matter what we do with them in prison, or anywhere else, they will always be a danger to society. I am not aware of any studies that show, no matter what we do with child sex offenders, that they can ever be trusted in society. Certainly, some of the efforts that the Department of Corrections has made over the years have shown that there has been some improvement, but never such that any one of us in this House would ever trust them with our children or grandchildren; nor should we. “Once bitten, twice shy”, society should say of those people.

Some parts of this bill are an improvement on the current system, but that is not saying much. The current system is so poor and so devoid of any concept of punishment, because punishment in this country seems to be a bad thing when it comes to offenders. Punishment is something reserved for the victims of crime. Unfortunately, this Government is soft on crime. Despite all the Government’s rhetoric when it was in Opposition, despite all the rhetoric from Mr Goff when he was the Opposition spokesperson on justice, this Government has proven itself to be remarkably soft on crime.

One thing it has to deal with is the recidivist culture in the criminal element in New Zealand. Recidivism occurs because we have no concept of deterrents or punishment. We consistently hear comments from the Department of Corrections and its very, very culturally sensitive staff that losing one’s liberty is, itself, the punishment. Some of us on this side of the House do not believe that that is punishment enough. We do believe that deterrents work. We do believe that punishment actually works, too. It is about time that we did.

Mr Tanczos, who is making comments, obviously feeling that I do not understand concepts of law and order and crime and punishment, should consider that as a parent we are told that when our child is naughty we should explain what has happened, and then have time out as a punishment. We do not have time out as something else; we have it as a punishment. That is because children do not like to be kept away from others. They do not like to be deprived of their toys, or be kept away from something they want, like the television, or friends. In fact, in our prison system, criminals do not have to be kept away from their friends, their toys, or their televisions, because they are all provided.

What is not being provided is a system that educates people who need to be educated. The system does not provide any sort of deterrents. When sex offenders are jailed with other sex offenders they will be with a group of people who consistently reinforce their own behaviour. We then let them out on society and into our communities.

In my particular electorate of Clevedon one such sex offender was released into the community on bail recently. Before that he was released into the community after having finished his sentence. People in the community were extremely concerned that that man was there. They feared that he was living very close to a school. The next thing that happened was that he was accused of a particular sex offence, yet again, with a boy. He has admitted it and consequently we have yet another victim, and it is only the victim, in that case, who has come forward. How many other victims do not come forward, because somewhere in their minds they have convinced themselves that they are at fault in some way; that they have done something wrong, when that is just the very sick and perverse attitude that those manipulators of children have placed in their minds? Those children, who in many cases have very loving and caring parents, are manipulated by the arch manipulators of the criminal world. That is what we are dealing with, with child sex offenders.

I am supportive of the fact that this legislation is at least an attempt by the Government to improve the situation. What I am not supportive of is that it does not go far enough. As decent-minded people with our own political views—and I do not think that Mr Tanczos and I will ever agree on very much, but at least I do acknowledge that he is a decent person with his own views—I do not think that we will ever understand the perverse nature of people who are utterly perverse and evil in their manipulations and what they do. Worse is the fact that so often they place themselves in positions where they have access to children.

It is worse that they put themselves in positions where they have access to mothers of young children, and they target those mothers who often are in positions where they have very little self-esteem. Sex offenders use that position to get access to little children. There is nothing in this bill that will necessarily stop that. As Mr Ryall said: “What’s the bracelet going to do?”. Some of us who come, as I do, originally from a farming background, would say that there are places where that bracelet could go, which might do some good, but unfortunately I have been reminded by Mr Jones that we are supposed to live in a civilised society, and I should not be thinking thoughts like that.

I can imagine that many New Zealanders would think exactly the same as I do, that prison is far too good for those people, and it is about time we faced those facts. Occasionally, I think that there might be some merit in some of the sharia law that some of the Muslim countries use in those issues. I never thought I would say it, but perhaps we could look at that in this particular instance. As Mr Jones said, it would be the unkindest cut of all. I am consistently told that chemical castration will not help those perverts. I notice that every man in the House is suddenly looking a bit worried. However, I do not understand why castration would not help those people, because as far as I am concerned it would certainly help some of the victims of their demented and revolting crimes.

Mr Ryall has put our position on this very succinctly and very well. We believe that this amendment is simply not good enough. As I said, some parts of the legislation are at least an improvement, but that is all it is. Next year when we are in Government we will have to change this legislation and make it significantly tougher. I am extremely pleased that we will not have to wait very long.