Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill

I move, That the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill be now read a second time. This bill was introduced in October 2011, received its first reading in May 2012, and was reported back by the Law and Order Committee in October. I would like to thank the Law and Order Committee for its consideration of the bill and for the improvements it has made to it.

Overall, the legislation governing the administration of the corrections system is working well. However, some provisions have been identified as barriers to the effectiveness and efficiency of the legislation achieving its statutory purpose. Two bills were introduced to remove such barriers: the Corrections Amendment Bill, which relates to prisons and was passed last month, and the present bill, which aims to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the administration of sentences and orders in the community.

The Sentencing Act 2002, the Parole Act 2002, and, to a lesser extent, the Bail Act 2000 govern the management of offenders serving sentences in the community and of prisoners who have been released from prison. Major reform of the Sentencing Act and the Parole Act was undertaken in 2007. Since then a number of problems have been identified in administering the changes introduced by the reforms, particularly in relation to the administration of community sentences and orders. So this bill makes minor drafting amendments to these Acts to clarify operational procedure where an Act is silent or unclear, and where its interpretation has led to unintended consequences. The bill also introduces a number of minor policy changes to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of home detention, community-based sentences, and the electronic monitoring regime.

I will briefly outline some of the more significant changes. Currently a home detention sentence is suspended when an appeal is lodged. The bill provides instead that the sentence will continue to run unless the appellant is granted bail. This, then, recognises that some home detainees who appeal may pose a risk to public safety if released into the community without restrictions. Sometimes offenders who abscond from community-based sentences are not located until the sentence has ended. The bill provides that time will cease to run on a sentence of supervision, intensive supervision, or community detention if an application is made to the court to vary or cancel that sentence because the offender is not complying with it. This will help to ensure that offenders who do not comply with their sentences are still held to account.

Enforcement problems can arise because the boundaries of an offender’s address do not align with the boundaries of electronic monitoring equipment. Under the bill, where electronic monitoring is a condition of release or a condition of a community sentence, the offender will be required to remain within an area defined by a probation officer. Under current law, even a sentence of, say, 2 weeks’ imprisonment automatically cancels a home detention sentence. Yet in some circumstances the completion of the home detention sentence may be in the interests of the community. This bill will give the court discretion to allow a home detention sentence to resume after such a short sentence of imprisonment. Administration problems can arise if a court imposes a non-custodial sentence that is incompatible with another non-custodial sentence already being served. The bill contains provisions to prevent this.

As a result of ongoing analysis of issues addressed in the bill, the Department of Corrections has identified additional barriers to the effective and efficient management of offenders in the community. I asked the committee to consider some additional amendments that will remove these barriers, and the committee has included these amendments in the bill as reported back to the House. Some of these amendments are of a technical nature. However, they do include four minor policy changes that I wish to describe briefly.

Firstly, community magistrates currently have authority to impose community-based sentences, yet they cannot vary or cancel them. The bill now empowers community magistrates to vary or cancel community-based sentences that have been imposed by a community magistrate. Secondly, offenders who are serving sentences of home detention and community detention are required to stay at an address that the court specifies, on the advice of a probation officer. Sometimes the address will become unsuitable over the course of the sentence. When this happens, a probation officer may approve an alternative address, but has to apply to the court to have the sentence varied accordingly. Preparing these applications places an administrative burden on probation officers, and court time is not well spent considering them. The bill now recognises this by empowering the Chief Executive of the Department of Corrections to vary the address for sentences of home detention and community detention in these circumstances.

Thirdly, a similar situation can arise for offenders released from prison who are subject to residential restrictions. If their residence becomes unsuitable, a probation officer must apply to the Parole Board to have it changed, but the probation officer’s authority to manage the offender is limited until the board determines the application. So an amendment has been included to address this by enabling probation officers to approve an alternative residence while the board considers the application.

Fourthly, when an offender is serving 80 hours or more of community work, a probation officer may direct them to spend up to 20 percent of the sentence in training on basic work and living skills. However, probation officers can make such a direction only if the court so authorises them at sentencing or on application by the probation officer. Because it is subject to such a cumbersome process, enrolment in the training is limited and offenders may miss out on opportunities to reduce their risk of reoffending. To address this, the bill has been amended to allow probation officers, without reference to the court, to direct that up to 20 percent of the sentence be spent in training on basic work and living skills, if the probation officer believes that it will reduce the offender’s risk of reoffending.

The committee has also made some minor adjustments to the bill, on the advice of the Department of Corrections. Most of these are technical or consequential to existing amendments. Others develop some of the procedures introduced by the bill in ways that are necessary for their proper application.

In conclusion, the measures in this bill will contribute to public safety and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the management of offenders in the community. I thank again the select committee for all its hard work, and I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much for the chance to speak to the second reading of the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill and to just say, from the very outset, that Labour will continue to support this bill.

Can I acknowledge the members of the Law and Order Committee for the way in which it worked on this bill. Our select committee, as Mr Goff and I will say, works in a very collegial manner and, in respect of this bill, because we did not have any major opposition to it, we worked well. I note that the previous bill, the Natural Health and Supplementary Products Bill, that was debated had 739 submissions. This bill had only five. I think they were from the Law Society, the Salvation Army, and JustSpeak, which is the youth wing of Rethinking Crime and Punishment. They were the main submitters on this bill and we thank them for making their submissions and for making some very good recommendations on the bill to the select committee. Can we just also acknowledge the work of the officials who helped us during the select committee process.

Labour supports this bill. It does make some technical changes to enable the Department of Corrections to more effectively and efficiently manage community sentences and orders in our community. We do support the corrections system, which secures public safety and ensures rehabilitation. This legislation makes, as the Minister of Corrections said, changes to the barriers to the effective management of home detention, community-based sentences, electronic monitoring, parole, and extended supervision orders.

The Department of Corrections is set to become the largest Government department. I think it was the Deputy Prime Minister himself, Bill English, who said that prisons are a moral and fiscal failure. It is important to note that we do have an approach with the Department of Corrections that is evidence-based and that works well to make sure that we have effective rehabilitation of prisoners. Before I traverse some of the details of the bill, I just want to look at what Bill English said around the moral and fiscal failure of the prison system. We did have a submission from the Salvation Army that looked at some Ministry of Justice figures from 2009 that said 23 percent of those on home detention in 2009 were re-convicted in the following 12 months. Conversely, 52.6 percent of those who served a custodial sentence, who were locked up in our prisons in that year, were re-convicted in the following 12 months. So we are doing a much better job of reducing the recidivism rate of those serving community sentences and community orders than of those people whom we are locking up.

Let me be clear: there will always be an element of people in New Zealand who, when caught and convicted of serious, significant, or sickening crimes, need to be locked up and kept away from the rest of the community. Some are so bad that they may never taste freedom again. But for those criminals who are serving shorter sentences, we have to ask the question of whether the public is safer in the long term due to their incarceration. Are we serving our duty as the State to protect the public by rehabilitating people so we have fewer victims and less crime? The question has to be asked as to whether we are serving the dual purpose of punishment and ensuring that, upon release, those people do not go out and create more pain. Again, as I have said, the Salvation Army did quote those figures from 2009 that say we are doing a much better job of rehabilitating those on community orders than we are with those people whom we are locking up.

Safeguards must be put in place to make sure that we get rid of as much risk as we can when we have people serving community-based sentences. I believe that in the future we must look at community-based sentences as a way of being much more fiscally prudent, and ensure we are doing a better job of making sure we rehabilitate the people whom we are sentencing. On the fiscal side, it is costing taxpayers about $58 a day to keep someone in home detention, and that is roughly a quarter of what it costs to keep someone in prison, which is a cost of about $250 a day. So on the fiscal side of things, it makes sense to ensure that for those who we think can be rehabilitated and can serve a sentence in the community, it is much cheaper to do that, and it could be much more effective.

I would just like to look at the bill, as I have said, and look at some of the details. The Law Society did have some concerns around one of the points that the Minister raised about halting community sentences while a non-compliance order was appealed in the court. It believes that if the sentence continued to be served, some people could serve an extra-long sentence while the court considered that. I think that in the bill we have given the courts some flexibility to be able to use some discretion as to whether time has been served or time has not been served. Also, as the Minister mentioned, we have given the Department of Corrections some more flexibility around its ability to transfer community sentence hours to community sentence training.

I do want to note the work that the Minister is doing around education in prisons. I think she was recently at Arohata Women’s Prison in Tawa, where she was promoting some more education work within the prison and for inmates. As she said, and we agree with her on this side of the House, education is a very important part. That is actually the key to making sure that we rehabilitate inmates to make sure we reduce crime and reduce the number of victims when those inmates come out of prison. So credit where credit is due for the commitment the Minister is making to those education schemes.

One other point I want to look at is that we are giving a little bit more flexibility to the Department of Corrections, as Melissa Lee said, when there is a change of address, when a residence where a sentence of home detention is being served has become unsuitable. We think it has been onerous when in the past a parole officer has made a temporary change of address and has had to go to court to change the permanent address. We are now giving the chief executive the option of being able to vary a home detention residence so that we do not have the hold-up we have had in the past. I think that is another way in which the Department of Corrections can effectively and efficiently manage a home detention or community service order.

In conclusion, we will support this bill. It does make some technical changes that we think will help community services to be much more effective and efficient, and we believe that these kinds of sentences should be the way to go forward. Cheers.

As the Minister of Corrections, the Hon Anne Tolley, has so eloquently described the process that this Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill is to follow, I do not need to get into the detail too much, other than to say that I guess the bill is the second leg of the double. The first was the Corrections Amendment Bill, which was passed into law last month, and it tidied up a number of matters related to prison management. This bill tidies up a number of matters related to extended supervision and the sentencing and parole reforms of 2007.

I want to very briefly refer to the Law and Order Committee. Our chair Jacqui Dean would be wanting to thank all who took part in the process: the submitters and the people who helped work through this bill with us. The cooperation from all was quite apparent, and from our perspective it was a great result. I have no problem commending this bill to its next step in the House.

The Labour Party supported this bill, the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill, on its first reading. We worked constructively on the bill at the Law and Order Committee, and we are supporting the second reading of this bill. I think that shows that when you get substantive legislation—and in this case the legislation is dealing with relatively small changes—that is properly thought through and is genuinely motivated to get our justice system and our corrections system to work better, you will get unanimity surrounding it on the select committee.

I have to say, regretfully, that not all justice legislation is like this. Law and order in this country has for a long time been a political football. It is not like that in every country. In countries like Finland you actually do get bipartisan approaches. Those bipartisan approaches are based on what works, rather than what superficial appeals to public emotion about some of the pretty awful criminals—and they are—in our community. Too much of our legislation is simply strong on rhetoric and short on having any actual substance that makes a difference to making people safer. That is what we should be trying to do in this House—pass justice and corrections legislation that does make people safer. This legislation was formulated within the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Corrections—not in the National Party research unit—so it made it somewhat easier for people looking objectively at the bill to say: “Yes, this is a piece of legislation worth supporting.”

The bill amends four pieces of legislation: the Bail Act 2000, the Sentencing Act 2002, the Parole Act 2002, and the Bail Amendment Act 2011. I actually had the privilege of being the Minister who passed the first three of those pieces of legislation. They are landmark pieces of legislation. They literally and figuratively brought our justice and corrections system into the 21st century—they modernised it. The work that went into those pieces of legislation was extraordinary. I had a very good deputy secretary at that time by the name of Warren Young, who was previously a professor of criminology. We consulted widely, we worked hard on the legislation, and that legislation, I am very proud to say, has stood the test of time. The Minister of Corrections acknowledged in I think both her first and her second reading speeches that, by and large, this legislation has worked well and is administering corrections in the way it should. If we look at a corrections system that is working better today than it has historically, in part that is because it has decent legislation to operate under. Having said that, there is always room to make improvements.

What this legislation does is actually introduce—and it describes them as this—minor policy changes to improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of home detention, of community-based sentences, and of the electronic monitoring regime. It also makes minor drafting amendments to clarify operational procedures. Before I get into just some of the practical things that it does—and I will not go into them in detail, because they are not important—I want to contemplate for just a moment the effectiveness of the sentences of home detention, which we introduced in 2007. I want to do that at this time, because there are members who are still members of this House, now sitting on the Government benches, who decried the whole concept of home detention—it was soft on crime, it would make people unsafe, and it was evidence of a Government that did not stand tough on law and order. You know, those members will not get up in this House now and contribute to this debate, because now the evidence is there of how absolutely wrong they were.

The Government did a review on the sentence of home detention, and this is what it found. It found that the proportion of offenders sentenced to home detention in 2007-08 and in the following year, 2008-09, that were reconvicted in the following 12 months was 21.5 percent and 23 percent respectively. Although that was higher than what we might want, it was less than half of those who served the same length of time on short prison sentences, which was 50.3 percent and 52.6 percent. So what we have there is very clear evidence that if you are interested in actually changing the behaviour of people who have been offenders against the law, home detention is far more effective in doing that than is the alternative of a short prison sentence. It is not hard to work out why. When you are put in prison, you are in prison with a peer group of people who have committed much worse offences than you might have been in for on a relatively short sentence, and you take the cue for your behaviour from the peer group that you are living with.

The other advantage of home detention was, of course, the cost to the taxpayer. It does cost money to keep people on home detention. It is about $58 a day. But if you look at what it costs to keep a person imprisoned, it is $250 a day. It is just slightly less, actually—it is $249. It costs $250 a day to keep them imprisoned on a short prison sentence that may be 3 to 6 months, and they come out more likely to reoffend than when you put them in. The other good reason for home detention is this: the offender is still in the community—and it is usually his responsibilities to his family—and is still meeting his responsibilities to the community by going out to work, supporting his family, and paying tax on the income that he earns. So I hope that people who were so vehemently opposed to this, and who gave outrageous speeches in the House about what home detention might do—and I am thinking, I suppose, of people like Mr Ryall—might reflect on their rhetoric then and reflect on the reality of the fact that this sentence has in fact been very effective. So that reinforces the point I started making that when we pass legislation in this House on justice and on corrections, let us make sure it is evidence-based. Let us make sure it is rational. Let us make sure it actually does work to make our community safer. And let us forget the race to the bottom on who can flex their muscles and show that they are tougher on law and order, when, unfortunately, that so-called toughness often leaves the community worse protected rather than better protected.

It is good to see the National Party when it is in Government being more responsible on these issues than when it is in Opposition. Just very briefly on some of the provisions made by the legislation—[Interruption] I am sorry?

💬 Dr Paul Hutchison: I was just saying a very responsible Government.

No, no, it is a very poor Government, but forced to be more responsible on justice policy when it has to bear the consequences of what it says than when it is in Opposition, when it makes outrageous and dishonest statements.

Some of the changes that are being made—I am not going to go through all of them—to the Sentencing Act, and things like requiring pre-sentence reports before the offender is sentenced to home detention or community work sentences, make sense. You could not be opposed to that—clarifying the maximum number of hours that they may be required to work under community work sentences, clarifying the situation when an offender who is serving a home detention or community-based sentence is subsequently sentenced to another home detention or community-based sentence, and electronic monitoring, where you actually align the sentence to what the electronic surveillance equipment allows, because the two were not in alignment and that was producing a silly situation.

We also looked at some changes that the Minister put forward in her Supplementary Order Paper, with community magistrates being able to alter or cancel sentences previously imposed by community magistrates, allowing the Chief Executive of the Department of Corrections to approve changes of address for home or community detention, and allowing probation officers, rather than the court, to direct that 20 percent of a community work sentence of at least 80 hours be spent in training in basic work and living skills. They are sensible changes, they have been supported by the Opposition on the select committee, and we will always support things that are sensible. We will oppose things that are not evidence-based, things that are simply designed for political purposes, things that are dishonest in what they claim for the public, and things that are counter-productive in what they actually produce in terms of community safety.

I am pleased to take a short call on this bill, the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill, which the Greens have supported to this point. We will continue to support the legislation.

I recall in my first reading speech that I confessed we were somewhat suspicious of this bill when we first saw it, because it was a Government justice bill that on the face of it actually did a lot of good. At that point—a year or so ago—we did not have much experience of Government justice bills that threatened to do good, rather than be regressive and backward-looking. So, yes, good sense prevailed. It is a useful set of amendments that are being made, and for that reason we are pleased to continue our support. The point has been made that this bill amends legislation that is, in every instance, relatively new—certainly nothing more than perhaps 10 or 12 years old. But, clearly, some of the work of the bill is to acknowledge technology changes, particularly in the area of electronic monitoring and those sorts of things.

We had some really interesting conversations at the Law and Order Committee in terms of how continued technology changes might require us to adapt and adopt in terms of the increased sophistication of GPS, which will enable us to much more readily identify exactly where offenders are located. I think there will be a lot of goodwill to amend our legislation, our regulations, to enable us to adopt that technology as it evolves and improves.

Some of the other minor—well, not minor—amendments we agreed to were giving more discretion to people at the coalfaces, if you like, giving more discretion to probation officers to make and effect changes without necessarily having to have recourse to the courts. We think that is appropriate, giving these people, who are disciplined, hard-working people, a degree of authority. Discretion making is a good thing, with the one provision that we must also acknowledge that they must be well supported in that work. We must not devolve responsibility without also devolving the ability and the resources those people require to do the very difficult work that they do in the community.

I would say in a general way we are supportive of this bill because we see community-based sentences as the way of the future. We know community-based sentences are far, far preferable to imprisonment, particularly to short terms of imprisonment. Mr Faafoi and Mr Goff have already rattled off the numbers, and that is useful, so I need not delve into it, but we know community-based sentences are dramatically less expensive in financial terms than a short imprisonment, to the tune, I think, of barely one-quarter of the cost. We know the recidivism rate of people who have served community sentences is also dramatically lower than for people who do short prison terms—or, indeed, long prison terms. So we do see that community sentences are the way forward. We should be resorting to them much more routinely. We need to be quite creative in how we assign and how we structure the requirement that people do community work, do community service, or, indeed, do home detention, in order to repay, to be punished, and to acknowledge that they have done wrong to the wider society.

One of the great advantages of community sentences generally is that they remove that transition phase. If I may be so bold as to insert an advertisement into these comments, we saw last year an excellent book written by Anne Opie called from Outlaw to Citizen: Making the Transition from Prison in New Zealand. It highlighted the enormous social and economic cost of imprisoning people, acknowledging that very, very few inmates in New Zealand do not ultimately end up back in our communities. To the extent that we can, we should keep people out of prison in the first place. Prison brutalises people. It dehumanises them. It reduces or even eliminates the ability of those people to function in normal society. It is not helpful that we imprison such large numbers of people in New Zealand. Anne Opie made the point that her book was very solidly grounded in academia, in research. Anywhere you see in a bibliography references to Derrida and Foucault, you know you are not in for an easy read, but it was also blended with real-life stories based on interviews, the lived experience of New Zealanders who have been through the prison system and have come out worse off—and we are collectively worse off.

As others have commented, and I am under no illusions, we will always need some form of imprisonment. There are those people who are so damaged that they cannot be, and will never be able to be, released back into society, for its general safety and well-being, but that does not describe the something like 85 percent of our prison population who could be dealt with in ways other than imprisonment. So refining, improving, and broadening the range of community-based sentences that are available to the courts, that are available to us to clearly signal our disapproval of people’s offending, and to ensure there is a level of restraint on their freedom for a time is important, but the purpose must always be to make them better able to operate in civil society and less likely to offend against it.

I am pleased that we have got a degree of unity in the House on the importance of community sentencing and some of the ways and means by which we might ensure that people do become contributing citizens, that they become the citizen rather than the outlaw—the recidivist outlaw, whom we are seeing far too much of at the moment. I think I can leave my comments there, except to once again close with yet another advertisement. I do believe that there is a great deal of good research being done—

💬 Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman: Very commercial. Didn’t know he had it in him.

Very commercial today, indeed, but all in a good cause. This evening I am looking forward to going to the launch of yet another book. Professor John Pratt, a professor of criminology at Victoria University, is releasing a book that is essentially a comparative study of New Zealand corrections, the justice system, with those of the Nordic—the northern European—countries. His findings in brief—and I do him a disservice by trying to sum them up in a line or two—are that effectively we are getting it very, very wrong with our focus on a punitive prison-based system, rather than one that seeks to deal with the individual and with their behaviours, and endeavours to keep those people within the community, rather than isolate them from it, except in those extreme cases that I referred to earlier.

So we do have an emerging body of knowledge, an emerging body of research, that tells us how in New Zealand we can get it right. [Interruption] Thank you for the indication of support for my comments, Mr Hayes. I value that highly from you. We have a body of research and information telling us how we can get it right in New Zealand. We have been getting it wrong for a long time. Increased focus on community sentences, improving the quality of those, improving the likelihood of success, turning people round, turning them away from a vicious cycle of offending and reoffending is clearly to our collective good, and we are happy to support this legislation. Kia ora.

Rather than babble on with inane comments, I would simply like to say that this bill, the Administration of Community Services and Orders Bill, is an excellent piece of legislation, which I support. Thank you.

I actually thought that the member who has just resumed his seat, John Hayes, would consider this bill, the Administration of Community Services and Orders Bill, to be an important part of electioneering, which is something that the National Party is very good at doing during the time of an election.

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. This bill, which has been introduced by the Government, is for the purpose of fixing loopholes in the current legislation or the current administration of non-custodial sentences. The current system is flawed, and this bill attempts to create certainty in our justice system, and it is about time. Law and order is a crucial selling point while electioneering, I say to John Hayes, and therefore it should come as no surprise that this Government is trying to close loopholes that have surfaced over the years regarding administrative limitation.

💬 Kris Faafoi: Did you say that?

I do not think he was listening. It is about time that this Government strengthened these policies so that they do not create or foster unintended outcomes. The last thing that New Zealanders need is loopholes in the justice system that favour criminal behaviour.

New Zealand First strongly believes that to achieve law and order effectively in New Zealand the public should have confidence in our justice system. New Zealand First also maintains a strong stand that for a nation of our size we have far too many people in prison. So let us not go into the details about the cost involved while the Minister of Corrections is ignorantly building new prisons around the country that we do not need.

We all know that putting someone in prison and throwing away the key does not solve anything. Having said that, the other option is non-custodial sentences. This is what this bill intends to fix. Yes, we agree that the prison population should be reduced. However, in placing offenders in our communities, it is of utmost importance that they are closely monitored. Community safety is absolutely vital and a priority for our nation. All New Zealanders have a right to feel safe and free to go about their daily lives within our communities. People in this country should not have to feel threatened or intimidated by offenders.

As policy makers, we need to realise that the machinery is not confined to only front-line staff. We ourselves need to be more empathetic towards the administrative nature in which policies will function. We cannot just come up with an idea and theorise all the pros and cons if we are not going to consider how practical these policies will turn out to be.

One particular issue that I highlighted in the first reading of this bill was the issue of information sharing between the Department of Corrections and the probation service. It is all well and good to ask for mandatory pre-sentencing reports to be done, but will the probation service be provided with the resources to do so? I say to the Minister, do not be afraid to give up the good to go for the great. For years it has been requested that the probation service be given access to the prison service’s integrated offender management system, or IOMS. New Zealand First has some concerns—

💬 Hon Anne Tolley: They’re getting it. It’s happening.

But they have not done it yet, Minister.

New Zealand First has some concerns around the delivery expectations of a number of these amendments, particularly those that rely heavily on the Community Probation and Psychological Services for their oversight and administration. Let me say, before I make reference to that, that I believe that the current chief executive, Ray Smith, is to be commended for the step that he has taken to move corrections forward. From my experience, his one-team approach will be a tough assignment.

One of the toughest nuts to crack will be probation. This is an organisation that has dragged its feet in terms of changing culture, improving efficiency, and dealing to a culture of cliques and cronyism. As a prime example, I believe the probation service is still waffling about having access to or sharing the integrated offender management system with its one-team partners. I note that the probation service has a high number of psychologists within its ranks, as does corrections generally. Many of them are new immigrants from the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Europe. Of course, they bring with them fancy bits of paper proclaiming all sorts of qualifications. What they do not bring is real cultural understanding, and by that I mean Māori and Pacific cultures. Those cultures make up the vast majority of the prison population. A short Te Reo course, study papers from a journal, or an overnight stay at a marae plus a few kia oras here and there just do not cut it.

Common sense tells us that the probation service needs real people with drive and real-life experience who have worked at the coalface to make a real difference. The endless meetings where our highly qualified experts bang on about pie in the sky and old-world theory, and throw around a few clichés, do not cut it for me. Believe me, I have observed the endless, mindless chatter and backslapping going on at non-events in my previous role. It is a culture that is brought about by so-called experts who like to baffle their people with an endless supply of bovine effluent that serves only to muddy the already murky waters within the Community Probation and Psychological Services. Yes, I have seen the glossy pictures, awards, and all the smiling faces, yet the real question lingers: can we place yet more responsibility on these people to administer this legislation? Do we trust them not to, once again, pay lip-service to the amendments that are before us today?

Today I make a challenge to the Minister. Does she have absolute confidence that the “One Team Corrections”, and in particular the probation service, are up to the task? It seems common sense that if a pre-sentence report is required before an offender is sentenced to home detention and community detention, access to file notes, incident reports, and misconduct reports will be useful. In doing so we can avoid the countless errors made over the years with offenders. It is crucial that this Government takes steps to strengthen the way in which home detention is supervised and the monitoring requirements in relation to community-based sentences.

Probation officers are given more powers, but will they have the resources? Will they have the resources? With this bill, probation officers will be given the authorisation to direct up to 20 percent of community work sentences of at least 80 hours to be spent in training on basic work and living skills. The initiative has been introduced to reduce barriers to the training of offenders. As a strong supporter of rehabilitation methods, I say that it will be vital that probation officers use this authorisation with discretion. Yes, we want to see these offenders develop living skills to ultimately prepare them for reintegration back into the communities. However, we are sceptical of the approach allowing probation officers powers that only the judiciary once held. We want to know what cost will be incurred with more offenders directed for training.

Just last year our Minister of Corrections, Anne Tolley, signed off on a $300 million public-private partnership deal with Fletcher’s to design and build in South Auckland the new Wiri Prison. This is astounding because in the same year we also have had numerous reports and mockumentaries stating our harsh reality regarding child poverty. What does this signal to the rest of the world, and, more important, what does this signal to New Zealanders?

New Zealand First supports the intention of this bill to remove barriers to managing offenders in the community safely and effectively. A genuine Government is not a searcher for consensus but a moulder of consensus. On that sobering note I can say that New Zealand First supports this bill. Thank you.

Bill read a second time.

The House adjourned at 12.57 p.m. (Thursday)