Children, Young Persons, and Their FamiliesAmendment Bill (No 4)

I move, That the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Amendment Bill (No 4) be now read a first time. I introduce this bill, which will amend the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act and improve the operation, care, and protection of the youth justice systems. It is my intention to move at the appropriate time that the bill be referred to the Social Services Committee, that that committee be required to present its final report on the bill by 15 November 2004, and that the committee have authority to meet while the House is sitting but not during question time, during the evening of a House sitting day, and on a Friday of a House sitting week. That will enable the provisions relating to the remand of young persons to penal institutions to be reinstated by the end of this year.

This bill contains an amendment that will enable the Prime Minister to allow responsibility for certain provisions of the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act to pass to the chief executive of the Ministry of Social Development consequent on the establishment on 1 July 2004 of the family and community services group within the ministry. This bill contains measures that are designed to make the operation of the youth justice system more efficient and effective. The youth justice amendments contained in this bill largely stem from the ministerial task force on youth offending that was established by the Government in the year 2000. The Government accepted the findings of the task force, which were that overall, the youth justice - related legislation was sound, but that improvement was needed in the sector’s coordination, in information gathering, and in operational practice. The bill amends the objects of the Act to explicitly make the reduction of reoffending the focus of services delivered to young offenders. That will signal that actions taken under the Act should be aimed at preventing children and young people from developing patterns of offending that persist into adulthood.

The second group of amendments relate to victims’ rights and interests. The bill includes an amendment to modify the youth justice principles in order to signal the importance of addressing victims’ rights and interests. The bill will enable a victim or his or her representative to attend a court youth hearing without needing the leave of the court. The bill will also more closely match youth jurisdiction reparation provisions with those in the adult jurisdiction.

The next group of amendments relate to bail conditions and remands in custody. The bill includes an amendment to empower the police to get young people to comply with bail conditions without having to make an arrest, or if it is more appropriate the police will be able to arrest a young person without warrant for breaching his or her bail conditions. The bill includes an amendment to enable police bail to be granted to a young person following his or her arrest for a purely indictable offence. An amendment is also included to extend the Youth Court’s powers to order the detention of a young person who has seriously breached his or her bail conditions.

Remanding young people to institutions in certain circumstances is also covered in this bill. The bill will also extend until 30 June 2008 the ability of the Youth Court to remand a young person to a penal institution under certain circumstances. The renewal of those provisions is sought in recognition of the need for more time for alternative measures to meet the demand for residential beds to take effect. I note that the provisions introduced in 2002 expire on 30 June this year; therefore there will be a gap in the options available to the Youth Court until this bill has been passed into law.

Another group of amendments relate to the operation and enforcement of Youth Court orders. An amendment is made to ensure that orders imposed by the Youth Court on young persons approaching the age of 17 are completed. An amendment is made to allow the Youth Court to cancel and replace a supervision or supervision with activity order after the order has expired, where there has been a failure to observe the conditions of the order. An amendment is also made to allow the Youth Court to issue a warrant for the arrest of a young person who has failed to comply with an order. To ensure consistency with practice in the adult jurisdiction, an amendment is made to give the informant, usually the police, the right to appeal a sentence order imposed by the Youth Court.

The bill includes three amendments to improve the operation of the family group conference process. Those amendments will, firstly, provide additional discretion for family group conferences to be waived; secondly, simplify the structure and language of the section governing the power to waive family group conferences; and, thirdly, provide discretion to exclude certain relatives or caregivers from attending a family group conference where their presence may endanger the safety of the young person and disrupt the family group conference. Those are very practical changes.

The bill amends the Act by empowering the Youth Court to transfer all related charges to the District Court or High Court for hearing. That would occur when a young person is to already have one or more charges heard by a judge and jury in a District Court or a High Court.

The bill includes a number of procedural amendments. There is an amendment that will mean that breaches of a community-based sentence made by the District Court will be automatically dealt with in the District Court. The bill clarifies that the processes used for preliminary hearings in the Youth Court relating to sexual offences will be in accordance with the special provisions in Part VA of the Summary Proceedings Act. The bill makes an amendment to enable the police to lay charges for an offence within 6 months of the completion of an “intention to charge” family group conference when the young person fails to comply with the family group conference plan and has no reasonable excuse for that. The bill clarifies that when Youth Court proceedings have been completed, State agencies can retain the records relating to the investigations of the offence and the prosecution. The amendment is made to enable young persons under the age of 15 who have been proven to have committed a purely indictable offence to be transferred to the District Court for sentencing.

The bill includes an amendment to clarify that the role of care and protection resource panels is to promote the coordination of the provision of those services in relation to individual cases or a case. Those amendments will improve the care and protection and youth justice provisions of what is already a sound piece of legislation recognised for its innovation the world over, and that is the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act.

That completes what I need to say in relation to the bill. But as someone who has been around this bill and this area for a wee while—and I am looking across the House at other members who have been as well, and behind me is the current Minister responsible for the delivery of these kinds of public services—I say that the changes here are ones that all of us who have been in this area have experienced as ones that need to be made. Therefore I commend the bill as one that is full of good, practical ideas. I look forward to what people have to say about the bill, but I do expect it to have a good, productive passage through the House.

It is easy to see why the Minister for Social Development and Employment did not talk with any enthusiasm about the bill. Really, he went through his departmental notes on it with a lack of enthusiasm that shed light on the fact that this bill does not deliver the sorts of reforms that need to be made to the children, young persons, and their families legislation.

I want to start with a couple of things. It is interesting that a lot of this bill is about youth justice issues, and the way that the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services works in dealing with young offenders. It is interesting that the Minister of Justice, who talks particularly tough on youth justice issues, is not in the House today. I can see why when I look at the bill. National believes that this bill, in fact, waters down victims’ rights. The Minister was very quick to skip over that part of the bill, but we believe that it relegates victims’ rights to the periphery of the whole system, because what the bill does—and no doubt United Future has had a big part to play in this—by the inclusion of clause 6, is downgrade the principle of the court being required to have “due regard to the interests of any victims” to the court just having to “recognise properly” the interests of victims. Well, what does that mean? What is the legal test for “recognise properly”? We have checked it out and have found there is no legal test for “recognise properly”. It is something totally new in the law. The advice we have had is that, in fact, it waters down the rights of victims. The Minister should stay in the Chamber and listen to this; he gives a pious speech where he says he wants to hear the debate, then runs like a scared rabbit! In fact, this bill waters down victims’ rights.

The next point—and I will be really interested to hear what United Future has to say on this—is why this bill says that the youth offender can have as many support people in the room as he or she wants, but the victim cannot. Why is that? What is fair about that? The offender, some young, out-of-control thug, can front up with 20 of the gang, and the victim is not allowed to bring into the room whomever he or she wants. How fair is that? I tell Judy Turner that it is clause 31 of the bill, if she has not read it, which, going by the way she is looking, she clearly has not. Victims’ rights should be fundamental to the system, not some afterthought, which this Government seems to treat them as. We will be very interested to see whether that provision is toughened up, or whether we will have another weak youth justice bill from this Government.

I also want to talk about the key recommendations of Judge Carruthers of the Ministerial Task Force on Youth Offending. I am sure that members who have read that task force report will look at it and ask how come Judge Carruthers did a whole report on youth offending, and none of the recommendations were picked up. Why was that? Why did the Labour Party Government not pick up Judge Carruthers’ recommendations? Were they wrong? Labour members do not want to answer that. Was the judge too weak or too tough? There is no answer to that question. Why is the Government ignoring Judge Carruthers’ report just like it ignored Judge Mick Brown’s report on the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services? Why is it doing that? Is it that the Chief Youth Court Judge, Judge Carruthers, had nothing of value to say on this issue? Is that the reason?

Why does this bill not take up the recommendation of longer periods of residence with supervision? I tell this House that there are young people out there committing crimes who have a range of issues that are wrong in their lives. They have conduct disorder problems. They have mental health issues. Judge Carruthers went away and studied that. He came back and said that the Government needed to have places where those people can go and be supervised and looked after for long periods of time, so that we can wrap some services around them and look after them. Does the bill do that? Not at all! There is not even a mention of it in the bill.

💬 Hon David Benson-Pope: What a loss this member will be to Parliament.

Mr Benson-Pope has woken up from his deep slumber. Why is that measure not in the bill? Does Mr Benson-Pope think Judge Carruthers’ report had any value? No, he does not. He shakes his head.

💬 Hon David Benson-Pope: What a waste of space. No wonder he is leaving.

He says the report is a waste of space. I think that is a disgrace, and I am surprised that United Future would support David Benson-Pope in saying that Judge Carruthers’ report is a waste of space. I am surprised about that. It is vital, if we are going to get young people out of a bad environment, that this Government does something, but it is not doing anything.

💬 Hon David Benson-Pope: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. That member is deliberately misrepresenting my comments. I called the member a waste of space. I did not refer to Judge Carruthers’ report.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: That is not a point of order. [Interruption] The member will be silent when I am ruling on a point of order. That is not a point of order. When the member interjects he takes his chances. That is not a point of order.

The member decides that the judge’s report is a waste of space, then thinks he is going to get told off by upstairs, so he tries to change what he said. He is the man who shook his head and said the report was hopeless.

💬 Hon David Benson-Pope: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. That is the second time the member has deliberately misrepresented what I said. Is that acceptable in terms of the Standing Orders? [Interruption]

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: I warn all members that when a point of order is being heard there will be silence. That is not a point of order, and I ask Mr Sowry to continue.

The member knows there is a remedy if he thinks he has been misinterpreted. He knows that he sat there, shook his head, and said that report was a waste of space. He knows that the Government is doing nothing to—

💬 Hon David Benson-Pope: The member’s telling lies.

No one is in control here.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member will withdraw and apologise for that interjection.

💬 Hon David Benson-Pope: I withdraw and apologise.

It is good to see that Mr Benson-Pope is keeping up the standard that he has long held in this House. It is a very high standard for other members to aspire to!

This bill does nothing for youth offending—not a thing. The next time a youth offender mugs, maims, or hurts somebody, and—under this bill—fronts up at the hearing with 20 of his mates whereas the victim is allowed only one, people will need to blame the Government. When the youth offender is not given proper supervision, is not given a residential sentence with proper programmes wrapped around it, which is what Judge Carruthers recommended, people need to blame the Government, because none of that stuff is in this bill, and that is a disgrace. This bill is a lost opportunity for young people who need those services. They just want somewhere to go to be kept safe. They will not be given the chance to turn their lives round. Justice is about locking people up but it is also about putting programmes around them to see them through. The Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act actually has done a pretty good job of that. This bill does not add to it, but makes things worse for the victim and worse for the young person. Is it any wonder that David Benson-Pope has been sent down to the House to hurl some personal abuse across the Chamber to try to distract things, and that the Minister gave a lacklustre speech then scurried out of the Chamber so that he would not have to be held accountable for this legislation?

I say to the United Future party members that I hope they have as much influence over the Government as they claim—it would be nice to think they have as much influence as they claim—and will stand up and say to the Government that they do not support victims being sidelined, they do not support Judge Carruthers’ report being sidelined, and they do not support the bill.

It is a real pleasure for me to speak during the first reading of the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Amendment Bill (No 4). As the Hon Steve Maharey said in his opening remarks, this bill improves the operation of the care and protection systems and the youth justice systems by amending the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act of 1989. It contains measures to ensure that the operation of our youth justice system is more efficient and more effective. Its primary focus is to ensure that the aim of the legislation and the policies that underlie it are focused on reducing reoffending, and that is its overall theme—looking at the interventions that are offered, the programmes that are offered, and the services that are delivered to young people who are within the youth justice system. That focus on reducing reoffending is fundamental to the principles of this bill.

This legislation that we are considering tonight is a direct response to the findings of the Ministerial Task Force on Youth Offending, and, despite the ignorance of the previous speaker, implements all the key findings of that task force—the ones that are required in legislation. A number of the issues that were referred to by the previous speaker are not required to be implemented by legislation, but one can see from the results of the Residential Services Strategy, and from the range of programmes that the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services is developing in the youth justice area, that that task force has made a significant contribution to this work. The task force found that, overall, the youth justice - related legislation was sound, so we did have a fundamentally sound basis on which to build; the key improvements that were needed were in sector coordination, information gathering, and operational practice.

The bill also recognises the central role of victims and victim reparation in response to offending. That is a critical and important focus that I am sure will be welcomed by not only members of this House but the wider public. It allows the victim to attend the relevant Youth Court hearing without the leave of the court, and amends the provisions relating to Youth Court reparation. It empowers the police to make young people comply with bail conditions without the police having first to make an arrest, which has long been a source of frustration for the police. They can now become much better engaged with the young person, and can ensure that the young person complies with his or her bail conditions, without their having to go through a formal arrest process.

It also improves the operation of the family group conferences. Family group conferences are regarded internationally as being a leadership model in terms of ways of dealing with people in the youth justice system. The bill provides additional discretion for family group conferences to be waived. If a family group conference has just been held and there has not been time to implement all the recommendations, there seems very little purpose in having another conference to duplicate a previous process, so we now have a legislative trigger for that waiving to occur. The bill also provides discretion so that certain relatives or caregivers can be excluded from a family group conference because their presence might endanger the safety of the young person and disrupt the conference. For sensible operation of the family group conference, that legislative provision is welcomed. And the bill clarifies the role of care and protection resource panels.

I know that the select committee will enjoy the wider debate that will be enabled by this legislation. It does improve both the care and protection provisions and the youth justice provisions of what is a fundamentally sound Act. In my view the bill is excellent legislation. I commend its progress to the select committee.

The previous National Party speaker in this debate will be sorely missed from the House. He gave a speech much more in keeping with the needs of children and young families, and dealing with young offenders, than the Minister. I had written the word “lacklustre” on my speech notes, after listening to the Minister. Mr Sowry had obviously come to the same conclusion. It was not a very difficult conclusion to reach, at all.

This minority Labour Government is clearly coming to the end of its term of administration as a Government. It has no enthusiasm for children and young family work—none whatsoever. It was hardly even a bland speech by the Minister. He was bored to tears while giving his speech, and he could not even stay in the House long enough to hear any sort of response from the Opposition. There was no enthusiasm whatsoever for what he had to say. As far as the next Labour speaker is concerned, she merely read out a few departmental notes before she decided to vacate the House, as well.

I say to the Minister: what about doing something about Saliel Aplin, Olympia Jetson, Kelly Gush, Coral Burrows—all the children who have suffered under her administration—and people like them who will be coming before the courts, if they are given the opportunity to live, because of the poor family situations in which they are found? They will be up before the children and young persons and their families legislation before too long. This Minister just could not be bothered. She has no real enthusiasm for what she is doing, either.

What needs to be done in the area of youth justice is that young people and their parents must be made more accountable to the community for their crimes. We have to do something not only about dealing with young people, but we have to do something about their families and their parents, as well, so they will have a wider degree of responsibility for the offences that are being committed.

New Zealand First’s view is that we will focus on entry-level crime in order to put a stop to young people entering a life of crime. We will lower the age of criminal responsibility, and young offenders will be dealt with by the District Court and the High Court, as opposed to just the Youth Court. Family group conferences are becoming a soft touch for young offenders and those who attend them. Along with staff of the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services, they go there and hold hands. That is just a soft sop to what is happening today. New Zealand First will make sure that the conferences remain available for those under the age of 14 years who choose to offend, but even then, offenders under that age will be entitled to be dealt with under this provision only three times—just three times. If they choose to offend again, they will be dealt with by the adult criminal courts.

💬 Judith Collins: That’s our policy.

That was our policy at the last election, which I am repeating. I note from the comments made by Judith Collins that it is now the policy of the National Party, as recently announced by Dr Don Brash. I thank the member for reminding me of that fact.

New Zealand First will also provide the Youth Court with guidelines as to when anonymity of proceedings should be removed. We do not want anonymity of proceedings there; we want these young people to be responsible publicly for their misdoings, and we will provide for the Youth Court to have guidelines as to when anonymity of proceedings should be removed in order to reinforce the offender’s accountability to the community.

One of the important things in dealing with youth crime is prevention, and one of the ways of preventing youth crime is to increase the drinking age again. That is our policy. It was our policy at the last election, and we have maintained it. The drinking age must go back to 21 years, because we have seen younger and younger people committing offences under the present rules governing the drinking age. New Zealand First will make it clear that violent young offenders should indeed be treated differently from non-violent offenders.

Our attitude is quite different to those of this minority Labour Government, which has no enthusiasm for dealing with young offenders. It just slaps them over the wrist and sends them on their way. We intend to be tough on young offenders. We will have the options of special, secure training-order sentences involving supervised controls and intensive rehabilitation. That is the key in many respects—rehabilitation. It is all very well putting people in jail and it is all very well giving them parole, but we have to make sure that a proper rehabilitation process and a relearning process is available to them. In certain circumstances we will have secure and even military training options. We have long maintained that view, and we will continue with it. Also, we will widen the range of offences for which youths are automatically subject to adult processes, such as attempted murder, aggravated sexual assault, and serious repeat offending.

If the Labour Party is serious about dealing with youth crime—I am talking about the choices available in respect of youth crime, as mentioned in the introduction to this bill—then those are the sorts of things it should really be dealing with, rather than pussy-footing around with measures as it is doing with this legislation.

One of the issues when dealing with young offenders and locking them away is that they should be kept separate from adults—and that would be for quite a time, as well. We have too many situations where not enough provision is made for young people to be kept separate from adults when they are locked up. That is a failing of the present system, and it has been a failing for many, many years.

New Zealand First will support this legislation only to the select committee, at this stage. We are hopeful that the Government might be encouraged to take a firmer hand, with the support of New Zealand First, in doing something more to prevent youth crime. Too often young people commit crime because they do not believe they will ever really have to suffer any particular penalties. Today some of them offend, secure in the knowledge that after 10 years—thanks to Labour and the Greens—their crimes will be clean-slated and they will have no responsibility whatsoever for them. That is how soft this Labour Government is on crime. It is a sad day when we have no enthusiasm from this Government and its Minister for Social Development and Employment. He is filling in for the Minister of Justice, who could not be here, obviously. Neither was there any enthusiasm from the Associate Minister for Social Development and Employment (CYF), Ruth Dyson, in the area of the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services, where there are great tragedies. Of course, as far as children and youth crime are concerned, by the time those children commit the crimes at this level and rate, at the ages of 12, 13, 14, and the like, they are already well and truly on the way to a life of crime. Often it is part of the way they have been brought up—or have not been brought up, as is the case with many of them—and they find themselves in difficulties.

I would have thought we would hear more from the Minister in charge of the Department of Child, Youth and Families Services about what is being done to prevent these types of things from happening. Rather, we heard a rather bland, boring speech being added to the Minister’s lack-lustre one. New Zealand First wants to make sure that young people are not totally dependent on benefits and the like, and that their families are encouraged to get on with making a contribution to society, rather than slipping away and being forgotten about, as is the case under this minority Labour Government.

The Green Party will also be allowing this bill to go to the select committee. The bill contains a number of provisions that we think are worth supporting and we would like to see them progress. However, we have concerns about a number of provisions. There is quite a mixed bag of provisions but, on balance, we decided that we would allow the bill to go to the select committee where we can look at it. There is a lot of detail to be worked through, and we will see where to go from there.

I would like to address the comment in the explanatory note that the bill is about implementing what came out of the ministerial task force on youth offending. It states that the task force found that, overall, the legislative and philosophical underpinnings of the New Zealand youth justice system were sound. That is something that the Green Party does concur with. It identified that major areas needing attention were sector coordination, information gathering, and operational practice, especially with regard to young people with serious offending patterns that were likely to persist into adulthood.

Again, that is something that the Green Party agrees with. We feel that the philosophical foundations of the youth justice system are extremely sound. In fact, the New Zealand youth justice system is hailed around the world as being at the forefront of good practice in terms of youth justice. I note also the comments made by Judge Becroft, when he was the head of the Youth Court, that there has been a lot of media and political hype around youth offending. But if one looks at the evidence, at the facts—and that is something that we here in the House should be more prepared to do—we find that youth offending has not increased disproportionately and that youth offending patterns have been fairly stable. The big panic about young people seriously offending is not borne out by the evidence.

It is interesting that one of the provisions that the bill proposes to put into the Act is a better recognition of the reduction of reoffending. That is extremely important. It is so obvious as to go almost without saying, but it concerns me that often our debates around justice issues focus on punishment, to the exclusion of all else. I do not say that punishment has no place in a criminal justice system—of course there is a place for it, and we must make provision for it—but it is not the most important aspect. The most important aspect has to be to reduce reoffending. It has to be to reduce the numbers of victims in the future and the severity of the harm caused to victims in the future. Therefore, a clear focus on the need to reduce reoffending is absolutely vital, and we think it is important that that should be in the bill. We also support the better recognition of the role of victims and victim reparation in responding to offending.

I sat on the Justice and Electoral Committee when we looked at the Sentencing Act and the Victims’ Rights Act and sought to put in place some rights for victims in the system. We think it is absolutely vital that the same rights for victims should be extended to the youth justice system. That is absolutely important.

When we talk about reoffending we are talking about rehabilitation, and Dail Jones mentioned that in his speech. I am not sure the Green Party would share his view that the way to achieve that is through military boot camps, but we agree that rehabilitation is absolutely important. It is interesting to go back to the Roper report and look at what it said about the need for habilitation centres. It made a very valid point, which is that there is no point in talking about rehabilitation for people who were never habilitated in the first place. What we have to do is find ways of teaching people how to be effective and functioning human beings, because it is the tragic case in Aotearoa in 2004 that there are people growing up who are not being socialised properly into being human beings. They are treated worse than we would treat an animal, and that is the tragedy.

With those people, there is a pattern set up of intergenerational cycles of offending and it is absolutely vital that we start to address that and break those cycles. That is where we have to look at habilitation and whether it is possible to socialise someone into humanity at that stage. I believe that it absolutely is possible for the vast majority of cases. There are always some cases where it is simply too late, but that is a rarity and I think we have to put all of our resources into ensuring we do everything we can to make that happen.

We are concerned about some of the provisions in this bill—for example, automatically sending a youth to the district court who breaches a community-based sentence, and allowing a youth under 15 years of age to be sent to the district court for sentencing on purely indictable offences. The Greens are concerned that this is part of a broader push to bring young people into the adult justice system and to bring the same kind of “tough on crime, we will be meaner than you are to criminals” rhetoric—that I think is motivated by politics more than evidence of what will actually work—to bear on young offenders. We think that is entirely inappropriate. We have seen the problems that happen when young people are treated in the same way as adults. I notice that there is provision in terms of the detention of young people and there are real concerns about that. We do not think that the way to approach this is by taking that “tough on crime” approach to young people. We think that our international obligations require us to recognise and treat young people distinctly. Once again, the boot-camp approach is not the one that we would support.

As I said at the beginning, we are supporting this bill to select committee. As I have said, there are areas that we think are of serious concern and we will be addressing those in the select committee. We will be talking with the Government to see what changes we can achieve, but we also recognise that there are a number of things in here that are useful additions. They are about making the youth justice system work better. One of the things that I do not think this bill effectively deals with is the question of enforceability around family group conferences. This has brought family group conferences into the greatest disrepute, because young people apparently express remorse—perhaps genuinely do so—but when they come out and find that the agreements are not enforceable in any practical way, then they have no incentive to fulfil those agreements. We think that that is the key thing that needs to be addressed. I know that Stephen Franks is concerned about that. Judith Collins was also nodding her head. Stephen Franks has talked about this with restorative justice, and it is the same issue.

We think that is absolutely vital. The philosophical approach is the correct one, and the concern for us is how we extend that more fully into the adult justice system through the use of restorative justice, Māori justice processes, and the like. But it can work only if it is properly enforceable and if it is able to maintain the respect and the regard of the public. We have to remember that in the vast majority of cases family group conferences are extremely effective, and it is only a small minority that have the problems, and that is really what we have to tidy up.

I was quite prepared to fill in the gaps after Judith Collins, who I am sure would have given a speech based on direct personal experience of and a long familiarity with the criminal justice system. Listening to my colleague Nandor Tanczos, someone who intends to support this bill, was an interesting exercise. The ACT party will not support this bill, not even its referral to a select committee. We think it is a waste of time for the select committee and for this House. What the bill does is commonly referred to as tinkering, but we believe using the word “tinkering’ demeans the criticism of the bill. The problem with this bill is that it maintains a pattern that fills our jails. If there is a message that ought to be sent by the youth justice system, it is that the community is serious about crime, that it does not tolerate silly excuses, and that it is not easily gamed. The sort of exercise that we see not with first or second offenders, for whom the family group conference system was developed, but with people who have had four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, or 10 second chances, shows the system is entirely unsuitable.

It does not matter to me or to the ACT party that the international community has been persuaded to applaud the family group conference, on the basis of its fine objectives. A justice system should be measured by its outcomes. The measure of those outcomes should not be recidivism or reoffending rates but the offending rates, because the purpose of criminal law and criminal law procedures is not simply to meet the needs of offenders. Instead, it is to persuade a whole lot of people who may conceivably tip the balance and decide to offend that it will not be worth doing that. So to have a youth justice system that sends out a message that the community is a mug and the police and the social workers are drips driven by drippy rules simply encourages people to choose crime—let us not call it by that neutral term—to hurt their fellow citizens, to steal from them, to attack them, to threaten them, to write graffiti, and to trash and vandalise property. We say that is a choice. Young people are quite capable of knowing the moral quality of that choice, yet we are in a society that patronises them by treating them as if they have no capacity to understand the nature of their actions. This pitiful attempt to introduce some more elements of the adult justice system into youth justice just highlights how patronising we are towards young people.

I know it is easy to mock the process of drawing on personal experience, but I cannot go past personal experience in my case. I grew up in a State housing area. Until I was 13 my father had not bought a house for our family, so we were one of the many families with five children, surrounded by families of a similar size, in a State housing area. We ran in gangs, and our pleasure in running in gangs turned partly to vandalism because that was how we made our mark. When I think about what restrained us from a lot more serious offending, it was actually very simple: the fear of being caught and punished. The punishment that we all most feared was being sent to a borstal. I am not claiming some sort of New York slum background; I was a very privileged child. I had loving parents, and I found school easy. I am not trying to say that I came out of a criminal background, but certainly in our community there were plenty of occasions when we broke the rules. But we did not expect the police to go easy on us. We expected the entire community to dump on us.

This bill now states that the principal focus of the criminal justice system for young people is on the offender. The principal focus of the criminal justice system should be on the victims, on those who have not offended, on those who may be thinking of offending, and on those who need to know that it is not worth offending. To recognise the central role of the victims, what does this bill do? It refers us to the utterly effete provisions in the Sentencing Act. I remember what happened when I tried to get a definition of victims’ interests put into the Sentencing Act: the Greens and Labour voted it out. They wanted to have only a slogan in section 7(1)(c). That is the reference in the Sentencing Act to victims that the Minister is now proudly boasting that he will incorporate in relation to youth justice. That reference states: “The purposes for which a court may sentence or otherwise deal with an offender are— … (c) to provide for the interests of the victim of the offence;”. We have no idea what those interests are; this Government has refused to define them. This Government has suddenly found that it hates judicial activism, but has left it to the judges to decide from the context what the interests of the victim may be. Perhaps those interests may be in victims not being confronted with a family group conference where they see an insolent family that thinks the whole affair is a waste of time.

What is this Government doing? This bill states that one does not need to hold a family group conference if certain things are satisfied. What are those things? One requirement is that a family group conference is to be held within 6 weeks of a previous one. Would we not think a simple rule would be that such a person has been given a second chance? Such a young offender has had everyone hanging around waiting for every precious drop of remorse that falls from his or her lips, and for agreement to do something else, so what are we having a second family group conference for? One can think of a family that has been in a conference where the family members all undertook to make sure that the youngster did not fall off the rails again. Must they do that all over again? What possible point is there in doing that? I go further: the introduction—what is called the explanatory note—of the bill states that a family group conference need not be held where: “… previous offending is identified, or a young person offends, after being charged in a Youth Court …”. In other words, the young person has reached the level of seriousness in his or her offending of the 2,000 people a year who are held to have had offences proven against them in a Youth Court. I should say that that occurs in 2,000 out of about 40,000 apprehensions.

We lean over backwards to tell young people that their offending does not really matter, that it is not taken seriously, and that the State and the community accept feeble excuses and only want young offenders to put those excuses persuasively. Under the provisions in this bill young offenders do not need to have a family group conference if they have been in a Youth Court, yet when we look at the substantive provision, we see there are a whole lot more conditions. One is that the whānau must agree. There is a whole provision that states that we may not need to have a family group conference if it will be a waste of time, but only if the whānau agrees not to have a family group conference. People will soon work out from folklore whether a family group conference is a soft option—and which whānau will not agree to one.

The measure of a youth justice system should not be what the anointed experts tell us about it. It should be our youth offending rates. This morning I was lucky enough to take part in a video conference with police chief Bratton. Chief Bratton was the man who brought the New York crime rate down by nearly 80 percent—over 60 percent in every category of recorded crime. He is now the chief of the Los Angeles police, and he made the point that Los Angeles’ youth crime has fallen dramatically. In fact, at a time when the US youth population has increased from 26 million to 34 million, serious youth crime and ordinary youth crime has fallen in every category by more than 30 percent. In the same period, our serious youth crime has increased by nearly 100 percent. So this vaunted system is a piece of tripe. The praise that we hear is self-praise. A whole bunch of people who had very virtuous intentions, and who thought there may be some benefit in being more understanding of young people, are now desperately trying to persuade themselves that they were right all along. It is only the unthinking offenders who have not realised that.

I anticipate that the select committee process on this legislation will be extremely interesting, because it appears that the two parties prepared to support it going through its first reading do so with a range of extreme cautions. I am not sure whether they are cautions on the same issues. None the less, United Future will support the first reading of this bill, but I want to say right from the outset that we do so with great caution on some points. Ensuring the objectives set out in section 4 of the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act are met has been a major concern for United Future. As the baseline review highlighted, the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services has, we believe, been set up for a bit of a fall. It has been given a set of responsibilities that it really cannot meet. One of the findings of the baseline review was that the department’s activities have been, by necessity, stuck at the critical end of the spectrum. I have often referred to the phrase “the tyranny of the urgent”. It is our worry that the implications of the department failing to deliver the level of preventive work needed to stop the massive tide of child abuse and improve its youth justice outcomes means that vulnerable families do not receive help that could actually prevent abuse, and, instead, the negative cycles of abuse and crime are perpetuated.

United Future has some reservations about the bill. One of its main objectives is to redefine the Government departments that can be responsible for meeting the obligations of the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act. That responsibility will now move beyond the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services to include the Ministry of Social Development. As far as United Future is concerned, that does not go far enough. We would like to see the Act amended so that not just other Government departments but non-governmental organisations can be included and can pick up some of the work, and particularly some of the prevention work that is going undone. We would like to encourage the Government to give that serious consideration, from the point of view that even if its own policy and ideology prevents it from taking advantage of those provisions, there are certainly those of us who, for the future of this country, would like to see those provisions addressed. We think there is a degree of dishonesty in the legislation, because although at present the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services cannot contract that work out, it manages very subtly to talk to different agencies, and to get around the provision very cleverly. The department seconds social workers from organisations like Presbyterian Support and the Salvation Army, and has them officially working for the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services, rather than taking the more honest approach of just giving a contract to the agency it seconds the workers from. So United Future would like to see those provisions extended beyond just the Ministry of Social Development to include the very fine non-governmental organisations that are well able to do the work.

United Future would also like to refer the Government to our policy on a dual-track model in this process. It is based upon models that are already working on the ground in the United States, in Canada, and in Australia—countries that face the kind of numbers crisis that we face here in New Zealand. Those models have made a huge difference in those countries. We are very excited at the appointment of the new Chief Executive of the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services. She is a lady who has had experience in implementing such a programme.

My colleague Marc Alexander has some real concerns about the youth justice issues. The reduction of offending and reoffending is an objective of the department’s activities, but we are very concerned that an offender’s first or second offence may be waived, and that the amendments in section 4(f)(ii)(A) and (B) of the Act inserted by clause 5 create the possibility of legal obligations to reduce reoffending, which youth offenders may profit from. There is an interesting measure in clause 12, which will be interesting to consider in the select committee, that talks of reasonable force being used against a child or young person. That seems to be in direct contradiction to the overturning of section 59 of the Crimes Act, which this Government states is one of its aims. So it will be interesting to overcome that contradiction. Another concern is section 239(3A)(a), (d), and (e), inserted in the principal Act by clause 10(3). Those provisions limit the age and culpability, in terms of a court order, to a youth of no less than 15 years of age, set a time limit of 2 months or more for an offender to be on remand pending a trial, and also provide that detention can be rescinded if it compromises the ability of the department to meet its demand to detain other young persons.

I think other members of the House have covered our concerns in terms of the need at this very early stage of offending, when a young person is beginning what could develop into a life of crime, to send very clear messages from the beginning that a young person cannot start to play one criminal act off against another criminal act, or start playing a game with our criminal justice system. We need to send the message, from the earliest moments that the young person is apprehended and found to be in breach of the law, that that behaviour is not acceptable. We should not send the message that multiple offending will somehow reduce the overall response and consequences. I think we need to think very seriously about the message we are sending through the youth justice system, and I agree that we need to look very closely not just at the consequences of crime but also the causes of crime, when talking about young people. We need to think creatively about interventions into families where crime is a reality, but I think that one does not do it by softening down and compromising on the truth, which is if someone has broken the law, he or she has broken the law, and society frowns on that very, very strongly. We want young people to see that crime does not pay. So we have some real concerns we want to see addressed, and by the sounds of things, the Green Party has a set of concerns, too.

I opened up this speech by saying there will be a very interesting select committee process on this bill. In taking it beyond a first reading, I anticipate a number of serious changes will have to happen. There are, however, some good things in this bill. For instance, the family group conferences have some interesting issues that need addressing, and I think there is a serious attempt in this legislation to do that. It does seem ridiculous that when there has been a family group conference, there is an attempt to bring an intervention, but before there has even been a chance to start to implement it, the young person may be caught in breach of some other law, his or her parole, or something like that, and before there has even been time to implement the last family group conference, another one needs to be set up. That seems to undermine the whole process, so I think some common sense can be applied there. I think there is a genuine attempt in this bill to do that, and we would want to be supportive of those things that do reek of common sense.

But we must make sure that the messages sent to youth offenders are very clear, and that we do not send mixed messages. Nor should we start into a process whereby young people could for one moment believe that when they are caught by the police, charged, and found guilty, they can start to play a game with the law, can start adding up offences, and can have one offence waived because another one is on the books—that some sort of game will be played. That is a very, very concerning message. United Future would be very keen to see those kinds of concerns addressed. So although we will be supporting the first reading of this bill with caution, we look forward to seeing some big changes made during the select committee process.

It has been very interesting to listen to the contributions from the House on this bill tonight. There is a great deal of common ground. Members clearly have slightly different views on issues, but there is certainly common ground for dealing effectively with youth offending.

I think this bill is a band-aid bill. Unfortunately, it has lots of good intentions and purposes, but I really do not think it will go tremendously far towards resolving some of the issues of youth justice. I commend the Minister for Social Development and Employment for wanting to deal with the issues, but wanting and doing are two different things.

There has been a lot of talk around the place about family group conferences. One of the things Mr Tanczos mentioned that really annoys people who are victims is the fact that family group conferences tend to go on and on—there is one after another—but there does not seem to be any result. Someone says: “Yes, I agree; I’m a bad boy and I’ve done wrong.”, and the next thing is that that person is doing it all again. That is one of the things that very much annoys not only the victims but the police, the social workers, and all the people involved. It makes a mockery of the family group conference. However, my having said that, on a positive note, we do know that family group conferences do work for the vast majority of offenders and victims. We as a House should give a tick to family group conferences and say that we accept that, for most instances, they do work.

But there is a small proportion—something like 5 to 10 percent—where, clearly, the family group conference will never get anywhere, and that is because the family group conference relies on a couple of things. It relies on the goodwill of the family. Not all families are created equal, and occasionally there are, unfortunately, families who are criminal families—who always have been and always will be. Expecting them to be supportive of measures to stop their children from committing more crimes is utterly ridiculous, and we need to accept that. It also relies on the young offender’s genuine wish to change. One of the things that clearly comes out from the research and from the anecdotal evidence of those who know a lot about this area is that one of the most important factors in youth offending is the friends and associates of the young person. As parents should know, if their children are hanging out with young people who are always in trouble, the chances are pretty good that their children will always be in trouble, too. So the family group conference does not necessarily deal with that situation. If a family is dysfunctional, if it is split apart, if the parents are not talking and cousins, whānau, or whatever are not functioning properly as a family unit, the chances are a family group conference is not going to do an awful lot of good.

There has been quite a lot of talk—and very good talk—about victims’ rights tonight. Of course, the victims are always the poor people who go along with a genuine wish to have their issues addressed. They want to see the offender sorry for, and doing something about, the crime. Quite often, of course, youth crime consists of something like graffiti. Certainly, in Papakura, in my electorate—I knew I would come to personal circumstances here, because Mr Franks invited me to—graffiti is a major issue in youth crime. We might ask whether it really hurts anyone. Well, yes, it does, actually. It creates a feeling of victimisation for the people whose property is damaged in that way. One of the things the Papakura police instituted a while ago, which I was very supportive of, was having the young offenders, with their parents’ consent, clean up the graffiti. I thought that was a fantastic measure, as did the parents of the young offenders. Then what happened? Some do-gooder, whom I happen to know, being a lawyer—

💬 Dail Jones: Not a lawyer?

Yes, she is a lawyer, and I do know her. She is a nice person, but, unfortunately, she does not live in our electorate and does not have to deal with the issue. She made a complaint and a newspaper, the Sunday Star-Times, got hold of it and all hell broke loose. The poor old Papakura police, who were doing such a fantastic job in getting these young toerags, as some of us would call them, to clean up the mess, and in giving the parents a bit of support in showing these kids a bit of discipline, were suddenly told to stop that now. It was working, and they were told not to do it. Now, what has happened is that graffiti has gone up again in Papakura. That is an instance where the police were doing the right thing and, unfortunately, their Minister did not support them. Unfortunately, the hierarchy did not support those on the ground who were actually doing something, who were helping the parents, and who were taking the situation out of the justice system as such. No social workers were needed in that case, so it could not have been any good!

I think that is one of the areas that maybe the select committee could look at. We could look at those sorts of measures for getting young people to understand that there are consequences to their offending—consequences not only to the victims but also to themselves, and that is an important thing. The National Party has undertaken that when we are in Government, after the next election, we will reduce the age of criminal responsibility, and there is a very good reason for that. We have young offenders in the community aged 12 or 13 years who are being run by older offenders—those who are aged 16 and over. Those people get the young people to go and do their dirty work for them, knowing that they would escape any particular criminal responsibility. That is what they do; they run youth gangs within my electorate and many other electorates in this country. That is where the vast majority of new offending is coming from.

We need to be able to deal with that sort of behaviour, and we need to be able to make those kids more scared of the justice system than they are of their mates. They have to understand that we are not being kind by letting them get away with it; what we are doing is setting them up for a life of crime—that is what we are doing. By being too soft on kids when they are young, we are letting them get away with thinking there are no consequences, until they are so far into a criminal system that they cannot get out because they are so scared. They are more scared of losing the gang’s friendship, the gang relationship, than they are of losing their families—which often are split anyway—and, certainly, they are more scared of that than they are of the justice system or of the police.

There are some things in this bill that we are quite supportive of, so it will be very interesting to see it at the select committee. I hope it is going to the Social Services Committee—

💬 Dail Jones: Law and Order?

The Law and Order Committee? Which one is it going to? No one in the Government knows which select committee it is going to.

💬 Dail Jones: Is there a Minister in the House?

There is supposedly one here. Having said that, I point out that we have some grave concerns about many aspects of this bill. It certainly will not fix anything much in its current state. It will be good, though, whichever select committee it goes to, to have an opportunity to put a little bit of backbone into it and a little bit of good National Party policy.

I will speak for only a few minutes on this legislation because, like previous speakers—

💬 Martin Gallagher: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. I actually did rise. I understood that the senior Opposition whip was moving a point of procedure—albeit that he is not sitting in his normal seat.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member is quite right. The member has the call, but he should be in his correct seat. [Interruption] Sorry—he should call from the National side.

If the member is seeking a call, I am happy to let him take the next few minutes and then I will take a call. But I do point out, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I am entitled to take a call from anywhere I like. Indeed, I think I can even take a call standing in the middle of the table.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member should go over to the National side of the Chamber to speak.

No, not at all.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member retains the call?

I am very happy to allow the member, if he wishes, to take the call and I will then run for another call. We might have to take the leave of the House for that to happen, though.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: OK, if that is agreed to, the call will go to Martin Gallagher.

Right, and then I will still get a call?

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes. Is there any objection? There is not.

I will not be long, and I thank the Chair. I commend this bill. I look forward to it going to a select committee. I have heard quite a bit of the contribution tonight. I take the opportunity to pay tribute to the wonderful people in Hamilton who are working with youth offenders, the fantastic leadership of our police, and, certainly, the police officers working in the whole youth-offending area whom I have spoken to. They are doing a wonderful job. Recently I attended a major meeting of all the people involved with our various youth-offending teams in the city. What a wonderful job they are doing, and I take this opportunity to place on record my profound respect for those people, who really walk the talk. This bill is a positive step forward. I look forward to it going to a select committee. I look forward to the probing and analysis that the select committee will do, which Judy Turner and others have alluded to. I look forward to this bill being returned to the House in due course.

Given that the House will rise in 2 or 3 minutes, and to save my speech being interrupted, I seek leave for the House to rise, and for this bill to be recommenced tomorrow.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member is seeking leave for the House to rise now, and for his speech not to be interrupted. Is there any objection to that course of action? There is.

I will be happy to spend a few moments on this bill, because it has one or two things in it that need to be discussed. One thing that causes me concern is the issue of victims’ rights. One of the sad things in this country that is starting to become more and more apparent to me is that we worry so much about the offender and not about the victim.

It is really important that we put time into those who offend. Firstly, we should find out why the offending is happening. Indeed, in my view, we do not put enough emphasis on finding out why it is happening and how we can stop the next wave. For me, that is an important point. Indeed, there is a lot of information around about why young people offend, but we do not do enough, or give enough resourcing, to prevent it from happening. The sad consequence is that we now talk of this nation needing more places to incarcerate people.

At the same time, we have a system that does not do enough to support people who are victims—particularly young people, who often are victims. That really concerns me. We see so often, when Family Court conferences, etc., are held, that the perpetrators are entitled to bring along a lot of support—indeed, as many people as they want—but the victim is not allowed to bring support, or if he or she has support people, they are not allowed to participate to any extent. As I read and understand the bill, it does not do anything to address that at all. It gives quite an imbalance as to what could happen in a case where somebody has been offended against, and that is rather sad.

I hope the members on the select committee that addresses the bill will study that issue quite seriously. There needs to be a far better balance, when we are trying to address this issue. The whole purpose of Family Court meetings is for those who have offended to get an understanding of what they have done to their victim. Quite honestly, if we cannot get both sides of the story out in that circumstance, then we are failing. We have a responsibility, when we are setting up a system, to make sure it works for all parties concerned. I have briefly read this legislation as to its intention, and that certainly has not been addressed by the policy being put before us by the minority Labour Government. That is one aspect that I do urge the select committee to have a very, very serious look at.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.