Estimates Debate — Vote Justice

My co-leader and I will be doing the good cop, bad cop routine with Mr Goff.

💬 Hon Phil Goff: I am likely to agree with you, Nandor.

I quite agree with my co-leader in terms of trade issues. The Minister has to walk a tightrope when it comes to matters of justice, because there is always the need to head off the more extreme policies and promises of parties that are desperate to get into Government, and the need to do what the Minister knows the evidence shows actually works to reduce crime and lower the crime rate.

That tightrope just became looser because we are coming up to an election year, and the “rash Brash” promises of abolishing parole for most offenders, lowering the age of criminal culpability, and ignoring a number of other international conventions about protecting the rights of prisoners will all go out the window. There is an agenda around the world right now among right-wing Governments to do away with international conventions to protect the rights of prisoners, so it is no surprise that Mr Brash is following his American idol in that regard. But the reality is that there are no simple solutions to reducing crime, and politicians who offer silver bullets are simply misleading the public. That is not to say there is nothing we can do about crime, but the answers are much more complex.

There is a desire for tougher sentences—that is understandable—but it leads us down a dead-end road of building more and more prisons to lock up more and more people for inevitably increasing amounts of crime. The fact is that prisons do not reduce the rate of reoffending to any significant degree, and longer sentences are no better than shorter sentences at reducing reoffending. The real danger is that that focus diverts resources into building prisons, and away from more effective initiatives. It is sad that the Minister constantly boasts that we have a rising prison population. That fact is an indictment on our country, whereas we should be looking at how we keep people out of prisons.

Let us look at the things that are being promised at the moment, such as truth in sentencing and no parole. There are problems with parole, there is no doubt about that—we see that in the newspapers—but the problems are particularly around monitoring. The answer is not to abolish parole; the answer is to make sure that parole is properly resourced so that there is proper monitoring and so that we know what is going on. Resourcing is a significant part of that. This is not an argument to end parole, because the reality is that parole does work. We have just to look at the recidivism index, which shows that in the 24 months after release by the Parole Board, 15.6 percent of those released on discretionary parole were reconvicted of an offence, compared with 28.7 percent of those released on automatic release. We can assume that the same would go for people who are kept to the end of their sentence and then released without parole. There is ample evidence from overseas, as well, that shows that parole and reintegrative programmes result in greatly decreased recidivism rates.

That is really where we have to start looking. We have to start looking at a real package of what we are going to do to reduce crime. Everyone in this Chamber knows that the real answer is around crime prevention and early intervention, and, to Mr Goff’s credit, he has put resources into those issues. He has come before the Justice and Electoral Committee numerous times and laid out some of the different pilot schemes that have been put into place around early intervention and crime prevention.

I visited a scheme in the Hawke’s Bay where there were incredible successes in working with young people who were serious offenders at a young age—people who have been convicted of 16 to 20 offences of burglary, and the like. They have very close monitoring and hands-on mentoring by extremely dedicated staff, with amazing results. I visited a young man who had never been employed in his life, and now he is attending school and doing well in his exams. He has been doing part-time work at a local business and is turning his life around. This also indicates that it is not just about Government intervention, but that the community has to get on board. The community has to support rehabilitation. The community has to be prepared to give people a chance and give them another go to turn their lives around. If people come out of prison, or wherever, and have no chance of work or of getting any kind of decent income, it is inevitable that many of them will go back to crime. So I acknowledge the work that Mr Goff has done on that.

It needs to go further. We have pilot schemes, but we need to expand them out. We need to look at a whole range of strategies aimed at the community and the family, not just at individuals. We need to look at how we can strengthen families, parenting skills, and the like.

Having disagreed somewhat strongly in the last debate with Nandor Tanczos’s colleague, I take the opportunity to acknowledge the rational stand that Nandor Tanczos has taken in the House on law and order. It is an election year next year, when everything winds up, and everybody wants to be the hanging judge and the toughest on law and order. I have been around in politics for about 24 or 25 years, and I have heard at every election from parties in Opposition—

💬 Hon Bill English: It used to be you, Phil.

I have heard mostly from Bill English’s party. He will remember that Jim Bolger was promising capital punishment, and we remember that in 1990 there was all this talk about the National Government getting tougher. National is the classic “lion in Opposition, lamb in Government”. Let us face it: it did nothing in Government. In 9 years National did not change the sentencing legislation or the parole legislation.

The one thing I disagree with Mr Tanczos about was his statement that I boast about our rising prison population. I do not boast about it; I regret it. I would rather it not be rising, but the truth is that by the time people have developed the entrenched recidivism of many in our community, by the time they have reached that stage, there are very few ways that we can protect the community, other than to take them out of circulation. We have the second-highest rate of imprisonment in the Western World, but it is well behind that of the United States, which is 700 per 100,000. The United States has 2 million people in prison. One in three of its black population at some time will be in the justice system. That is not a model we want to emulate. We already take a tougher line on imprisonment than any other Western country we would like to compare ourselves with—the Australians, the Canadians, the English, or the Scots. I do not welcome that, and that is why we have put the emphasis that Nandor Tanczos mentioned; that is why we not only are being tough on those people whom we have to be tough on, but are trying to deal with the causes of crime and trying to put fences at the top of the cliff.

The best way of doing that is through early intervention, at ages 0 to 5, when we have some chance of turning a kid’s life round. There are kids growing up in an unstable, insecure environment marked by abuse and lacking in love and security. We know that those sorts of environments produce criminals. Criminals are less likely to be born than to be created, and we have to do more in the early intervention area. This year we have foreshadowed that Budget 2005 will have a particular emphasis on early intervention. That is not to say we are not doing it now. What are we dealing with in Project Early? We are dealing with kiddies between the ages of 3 and 8 who are playing up in school, and have behavioural problems that are obvious. We are intervening at that point, and in 80 percent of the cases of those under the age of 7, we are able permanently to remedy the factors behind their behavioural problems. How much better to resolve the problem there than to have the human wastage and taxpayer’s expenditure caused by our letting that problem get worse and worse until we are forced to put people into jail! So we have to deal with the problem at both ends. We need to deal with the concept of restorative justice, and I know that the member has provided good support for that.

But we will hear, because it is an election year, that suddenly things are in crisis. Well, it is some crisis! The crime rate in New Zealand, according to police statistics—I never produce these statistics; these are police statistics—is 13.8 percent lower than it was at its peak, in 1996. Am I satisfied? No, of course I am not satisfied. There is more that we must and need to do—and we are doing that.

💬 Jill Pettis: They’ve gone very quiet.

They have gone very quiet. We have put record expenditure into policing, and we now spend more than a billion dollars on it. We have 400 more police officers, and they are doing the job we expect them to do. We have a record number of sworn police. We have tougher sentences, and I pay tribute again to Nandor Tanczos. The Green Party members supported the Sentencing Act and the Parole Act. That was not the “first, best” solution, but they acknowledged that those changes needed to be done, so that somebody like William Bell, who clearly poses a threat to the community and who cannot be given a second chance, is locked away for life. It will be 30 years before he can be considered for parole. That is tragic for that individual, but it is necessary for society. That person, under the National Party Government in earlier times, would have done 7 years in prison for murder. Now he is doing 30, and he will probably spend a lifetime in prison.

Where we have needed to, we have toughened the laws. We have toughened the DNA laws. Don Brash talks about DNA testing of everybody who is arrested. That is 110,000 people a year at $200 a pop. So we would have DNA sampling of somebody who has been arrested for being drunk and disorderly? Well, that will make the world a safer place! We have already dealt with that. The National Party was on the committee when we dealt with it. Mr Tanczos was on the committee. Anybody who commits a serious crime, including burglary, which has been redefined as a serious crime, will be liable for DNA testing, and everyone who is convicted and imprisoned will have DNA taken. We have done what we needed to do there.

The public opinion polls on the parole issue actually showed that the public thought Don Brash had gone too far. Yes, there are mistakes in the parole laws. We are constantly trying to improve them and make sure that the Parole Board gets it right. We have required the Parole Board to have as its paramount consideration the safety of the community, and not to release anyone who poses an undue risk. That is set out in legislation as clearly as it can be set out.

We are making the changes, crime is going down, and the laws have got tougher where they needed to be tougher, and they will continue to be tougher. We will move on the matter of the proceeds of crime, to get the proceeds off the gang bosses. By setting a civil rather than a criminal standard of proof, we can get our hands on the money that motorbike gang bosses and presidents can actually keep at the moment because the laws are not adequate. Those changes are being made. I am proud of what we have achieved in this country. It is not perfect but we do a lot better than others. We have a far lower rate of serious crime in this country than the English, the Canadians, the Scots, and the Australians have. We do better, and we are already tougher, in those areas. It would be a terrible shame if this National Party decided it would, as it has already shown, abandon any pretence of principle and go for the lowest common denominator—whether it be race or crime. Most of the population knows that it will not come to anything, anyway, because when National had 9 years to do something about this, it did absolutely nothing.

There is evidence that the wheels are falling off our justice system. If Mr Goff wants a crisis, then he needs to see it in his own portfolio. The merger of the Department for Courts with the Ministry of Justice has demonstrated that, and as the ministry takes and assumes the primary responsibility for that sector, it is absolutely important that some major changes take place rapidly.

In the estimates report of the Justice and Electoral Committee it said with regard to Vote Justice that the ministry had acknowledged it had “inherited a range of complex capability issues and risks” as a result of the merger. If we look beyond that to see exactly what it means, we find that the ministry informed the select committee that there was a culture clash between the Ministry of Justice and the courts sector, and that morale was particularly poor among the courts staff. So we find that problems are arising in the courts and justice ministry that have yet to be resolved, and that are hugely problematic.

The latest example, of course, has been the row around the Supreme Court and this Government. It is clear that, on the issue of the Supreme Court, the relationship between judges and the Government is fraught with tension. That should not surprise anybody, given the way that the Supreme Court was created. It was created against the tide of public opinion, and against the strong opposition of the business, legal, and Māori sectors. It was created with judges feeling that the politicisation of their positions had reached an intolerable state, and now we find the Chief Justice complaining about a lack of operational resources. That tells us less about the operational resources and more about the deteriorating relationship between the judiciary and the executive. The public arm-wrestling between the executive and judiciary for supremacy does neither any credit. When we see reports in the newspapers saying that Margaret Wilson has “snapped back at criticisms of her Supreme Court by the Chief Justice, Dame Sian Elias, as tensions between the government and the judiciary reach breaking point.”, people will inevitably have a lack of confidence in our systems. The Attorney-General is meant to be the independent arbiter between the two; however, on one day she supports the Chief Justice’s right to comment in the face of the Prime Minister’s criticism, and on the next day she rails against the Chief Justice, as again demonstrated in the Sunday Star-Times in its report on the issues. It is clear that this Government needs to sort this matter out, and it is clear also that at the moment there is nobody attempting to do that.

Of course, the primary issue that surrounds this matter is the court’s right to create law, and how far that right extends. I suggest that the move from the select committee to try to put into the Supreme Court Bill some outline of the role that the Supreme Court should have—which the Government squashed—is now something the Government thinks might have been a better idea.

But the court’s right to create law, and the matter of whether the courts should take the social and political consequences of their decisions into account, are key issues. They have been issues since, particularly, 1980 and the Lesa decision—the decision regarding Samoan rights to New Zealand citizenship. The Court of Appeal actually stated that the decision was influenced by political considerations. On the other hand, there is the decision in the foreshore and seabed case, where the court refused to intrude into the social and political consequences of its decision, and left it to Parliament to make a decision. The irony of that is that the Government has taken a contradictory approach. It is smarting over the foreshore and seabed decision, where the Government did not look at the political consequences, but is also sending warning shots across the bow of Supreme Court judges in particular not to engage in judicial activism. Once again, the Sunday Star-Times reported: “The set-to comes hard on the heels of Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen’s attack on activist judges, a thinly veiled reference to government unhappiness at the foreshore and seabed decision.” It is time that the Government took some action in order to do that, but the Attorney-General, whose unique role is to ensure it happens, gives us little confidence so far that she can be a peacemaker in this situation.

The second issue is resourcing. The Government is struggling in order to resource the justice sector properly. The Chief Justice, I must say, needs to advocate for all courts, not just the ones she sits on.

Vote agreed to.

Vote Official Development Assistance agreed to.

Vote Pacific Island Affairs agreed to.

Vote Food Safety