Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill

on behalf of the on behalf of the Minister of Justice: I move, That the Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill be now read a third time.

This bill delivers this Government’s commitment to supporting victims of serious violent and sexual offences. The bill recognises the ongoing effects of serious violent offending on victims. It creates a new civil order, called a non-contact order, to reduce the likelihood of offenders who commit serious violent and sexual offences coming into contact with their victims. Serious violent and sexual offences can continue to have an impact on victims for a significant period of time. If a victim is concerned that they might come into contact with their attacker, this can interfere with the victim’s recovery. Victims deserve to feel safe and supported during their recovery. This Government is committed to ensuring that their needs are met.

Currently, offenders are managed by a variety of mechanisms once they are released from prison. These include release conditions imposed by the court or the Parole Board, and protection orders or restraining orders. However, these mechanisms may not protect victims in all situations. Release conditions apply for only a certain amount of time, and a protection order or restraining order may not be available to the victims. The non-contact order created by this bill will fill this gap in legal protection for the victim. This Government is determined to ensure that victims of serious violent offences feel safe in their homes and are protected by the law.

The new order can be tailored to the circumstances of each case to ensure that the conditions are practical and workable. This flexibility should ensure that the order can be effective for victims, regardless of their situation. For example, it should be able to prevent the offender from making contact with the victim, regardless of whether the offender has moved next door, two blocks away, or 5 kilometres away.

The aim of the bill is to protect victims of serious violent offenders. As a result, the order can be applied to a person who has been sentenced to more than 2 years in prison for a specified violent or sexual offence. Victims will be able to apply for an order at any time after the offender’s sentencing. This will ensure that there is no gap in protection for victims after the offender is released from prison. The bill gives victims the ability to apply for a non-contact order without notice if the court is satisfied that delay would, or might, cause undue hardship for the victim. An order made without notice will be a temporary order. The temporary order will become final after 3 months unless the court orders otherwise.

The offender can request a hearing on whether the temporary order should become final. Orders can also apply to associates of an offender. This will ensure that offenders cannot encourage others to do things that cause distress to the victim that they themselves are prohibited from doing. It is important that offenders properly comply with non-contact orders and that breaches of orders are taken seriously. Therefore, it will be an offence to breach a non-contact order, with a maximum penalty of 2 years’ imprisonment or a fine of up to $5,000. This gives the court the ability to impose an appropriate penalty, depending on the seriousness of the breach.

The new order created by the bill will help to protect victims by filling a gap in the law where existing measures are not sufficient to limit contact with the offender. This bill reinforces the Government’s ongoing support for victims of serious crime and complements the recent passing of our Victims of Crime Reform Bill, which allows for the development of a Victims Code. This bill will help to empower victims and it delivers this Government’s unrelenting commitment to putting victims at the heart of our criminal justice system. I commend this bill to the House.

I rise to speak on the Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill and just note that, as we have said throughout this debate, this bill will do some good things. It responds to a pretty obvious and clear-cut case where a device like a non-contact order was needed in Invercargill. It was a case in which, on the completion of the offender’s sentence, a rape victim was then harassed and, presumably, intimidated by the offender in the period following it, and she had no recourse and no ability to do anything about it. So this bill will certainly fill that gap, and it is for that reason that, of course, we support it.

But it is deficient in a number of respects. I think that a Government that was genuinely focused on victims’ rights and on protecting victims would have ensured that the victim did not have to meet the cost of seeking and applying for and obtaining one of these orders. It would be a very simple thing for a Government to ensure that the legislation covered that. It could have ensured that an order such as this could have been provided for either at the time of sentencing if the sentence on the offender was a non-custodial sentence, or during the parole process if the offender was sentenced to prison, and certainly for a prison sentence of longer than 2 years. But this Government did not want to do that, because it has developed a strong track record of talking large but doing the bare minimum, and this is just yet another example of that. This Government is developing a track record as it goes into this election of not wanting to defend its poor track record and of not wanting to defend its poor performance not only in this area, in relation to victims and criminal justice, but in a whole host of other areas.

That is why we now have a party in Government that has stooped to the lowest levels of the gutter, sliming and slipping its way through, to divert attention from its own appalling track record. It just does not want to have to defend itself on what it has done, because what it has done has been so appalling, and in this case, when it comes to victims and victims’ rights, it has a pretty poor record. There is a lot it could have done. It has had 6 years to step up to the plate and do some real things when it comes to victims. But, oh no, the Prime Minister swans around New York and swans around Washington, pulling the strings of his party organisation and his office back here to dish up 11-year-old letters and make allegations against others in this House, because those members know that they do not want to defend their track record come this election. The Government will do everything that it can to divert the public’s attention from any real, serious issue, because it has now reached the grubby lower levels of the gutter, slipping and sliming its way through because it cannot stomach the fact that in the next few weeks, in the next couple of months, it is actually going to have to defend its appalling track record.

This is at a time when victims are suffering, at a time when the Government has cut $40 million out of the police budget and many millions more out of the justice budget, and at a time when courthouses cannot even protect courtroom exhibits in their courthouses, as in the case of police pistols that were the exhibit in a criminal matter and were nicked from the New Plymouth courthouse. The Government cannot defend that. Police stations around the country are either closing down or cannot do their job, police cannot get training on their Glock pistols, because this Government has cut their budget, and police cars are having to be rolled over way beyond the 100,000 kilometre rate—and Steven Joyce comes into the Chamber here smiling away, because they love it.

Government members do not care about the fact that the people who are the worst victims of a run-down police force and a run-down justice system are the poor and the indigent, the people who cannot fend for themselves. That is what this Government has come to, and that is why it will engage in the politics of diversion, of dissembling—

💬 Simon O’Connor: Lowest crime rate in 32 years.

The lowest crime rate? It is the lowest reported crime rate. You have only got to talk to front-line police—not something that Steven Joyce will have done for a long time. If you talk to front-line police, if you talk to the defence counsel, and if you talk to the Crown solicitors in this country, they will tell you what an absolute shambles the criminal justice system is. People have given up. They have given up reporting it now because they get told: “Well, the police cannot be there.” Victims of crime now are being told: “You take the photos, you make up the report, and bring it down to the station when you’ve got a spare moment.”

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

That is what people are being told, Mr Deputy Speaker. Victims of serious crime are no better off and the Government knows that this bill will be a baby step compared with the significant steps that are required to afford them better protection. Well, that is disappointing, but that is the Government we have got. It is the Government that we have got at the moment but it is the Government that the people of New Zealand know is about to go.

It is on its way out, because the people of New Zealand want a Government that identifies serious issues and takes serious steps on serious issues—not half-hearted steps, not steps that give the appearance of doing something—that actually put the burden and put the risk back on victims. That is what this bill does. This bill says that if you are the victim of a serious crime and you want to be protected from the perpetrator of that crime, you have got to stump up. You write out the cheque, you find a lawyer prepared to make the application, you find a lawyer that you have to pay the costs for, to make the application, and you know that the offender, if they have received a copy of an interim order or at least the application, controls whether or not there is a hearing. And if the offender demands a hearing, then the victim once again has to stump up for the costs of representation. That is what this bill does. That is how much this Government cares about victims, about doing something serious about victims.

This Government is saying with this bill: “Here is some protection we’ll give you, but you’re going to write out the cheque, because we have taken $40 million out of the police, we have taken many millions more out of the courts, and now the burden is on the victim.” That is how this Government views criminal justice and victims’ rights in this country. It is appalling and that is why people want an end to it. People want a Government in office that takes victims’ rights seriously—

💬 Hon Steven Joyce: Ha, ha!

—and one that provides real protection for victims, not a giggling Minister for Economic Development who laughs at the thought of poor people having to meet the cost of their own protection against offenders in this country, and not backbenchers, like Simon O’Connor, who laugh scoffingly at the prospect of poor people who are the victims of serious crime having now to meet the cost of their own protection, because he is happy to be a backbencher and support Ministers and cheer them on when they gut the police budget, when they gut the Ministry of Justice budget, and when they gut the courts budget, and they tell victims of crime that they must meet the expense of it.

Government members do not care that in one of the provisions in this bill they provide for it—and I know that Mark Mitchell will be most concerned about this because he has dealt with it before—but even when an order is issued from the court, according to this bill an offender can apply for a discharge of it at any time. Those are the words: “at any time”. So no sooner has an order been issued than an offender can rock on up to the court and apply for a discharge. Who will meet the costs of the victims’ representation? The victim themselves once again, because this Government does not understand that when 46 percent of people in this country cannot get a pay rise in any one year, people are poor, people cannot afford expensive legal services. If they are the hapless victim of a serious crime to which this bill might apply, they have to stump up and pay for their own protection. That is what this bill does.

Then the only other remaining question, of course, because it creates an offence if one of these orders is breached—a bit like protection orders at the moment—is whether the police really have the resources to enforce these orders when they are most needed. Can the police summon up the resources with a $40 million cut to their budget to provide protection to victims under one of these orders, when it is really needed? Can the police work with victims to prevent a breach of these orders? Well, you would have to say, on the current track record and with what is happening with police these days, that there is a real risk that once these orders are issued, there will be orders that will go unenforced. That would be a real pity. It is all very well putting this stuff on paper, but you have got to back it up with action. And this Government has proved time and time again that it will do the window dressing, it will play the charade, but it is not prepared to back it up with decent resources to protect innocent people.

So we will look very carefully at the way this rolls out. We will look very carefully and let us hope that victims in this country get a better deal. They will get a better deal, that is for sure, but it will be under a different Government.

That sounded like a leadership speech to me. I will tell you what—

💬 Grant Robertson: This certainly won’t be.

I know that Mr Robertson has bottled it. He has not got the bottle to stand up. He has not got the bottle to take the reins. He has not got the bottle to get out there and try to rebuild what is a languishing and suffering labour movement at the moment. But do you know what? Mr Little has. He has got the bottle. We came in together. We are both in our first term. I have got a lot of respect for Mr Little. He has got the bottle to stand up and say: “Don’t worry; I’ll take over. I’m going to take the reins. I’m going to fix this.” I am waiting with bated breath to watch for it in the next couple of days. He talked about Glocks. He is arming himself. He is getting himself ready. There might be a Mexican stand-off happening in that caucus room at the moment, but he is equipped. He is ready. He has got the skills. He has got the bottle. He will have a go at it.

The Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill is a very important bill. I just want to discuss some of the things that we talked about and some of the submissions that we heard during the select committee process. Of course, I want to acknowledge our select committee chair, Jacqui Dean, who is a very, very good chair of the Law and Order Committee. We work well together. I want to acknowledge Mr Goff, who is another very good member of our select committee. We do work well together. We do drive towards consensus. We had some very good discussion in relation to this bill, and I think we made some very good changes to it. I would just like to go over a couple of those.

Clause 5 of the bill as introduced defined a violent offender as being a person convicted of a violent offence for which they have been sentenced to 5 years or more in prison. The committee decided to make a recommendation that in actual fact some offenders who are convicted and sentenced to, maybe, 2 years in prison are still serious offenders, and they could still be a genuine threat to a victim. We felt we would like to lower the threshold and get it more in line with the Parole Act of 2002. The committee made that recommendation. It was a good one, and it is going to be a good change.

The committee also made a recommendation around clause 11(b), to provide for final non-contact orders to extend to associates of offenders, under certain circumstances. To meet the criteria the offender would have to have encouraged the associate to behave in forbidden ways, as set out in clause 11(a). The associate would have had to have engaged in that behaviour, so there would have to have been an act. It is not enough just to say that there is a possibility. The associate would have to have performed or done something, to fall within clause 11(a). The definition of “associate” was also inserted, in clause 4.

The bill also allows—and this was very important—for a victim to apply to a District Court for a non-contact order at any time after the offender has been released from prison. The committee recommended that this be amended so that applications can be made any time after sentencing. The significant thing about this change was that what it meant in practice was that a victim had to wait for the offender to be released before they could go to a District Court and make an application for a non-contact order.

What it means now is that on the offender’s sentencing—when they have been sentenced and they are on their way to prison—the victim can make an application then. What this means is that the order is then in place for when the offender is paroled or comes out of prison. The order is active immediately. It is already in place. But what it also means is that it gives the victim cover to make sure that the offender, whilst in custody, cannot contact her at all. This was a very, very good change. There was a lot of debate and talk around this, and it was a good, solid recommendation that came out of the committee.

The committee also recommended amending clause 7 to allow an application for a non-contact order to be made without notice if the court is satisfied that the delay could lead to undue hardship for the victim. We had a young lady who had the courage to appear before the committee and make a submission. Her circumstances related directly to this clause.

Finally, I would just like to say that I am very proud. This is a very good piece of legislation. It does go a long way to ensuring that victims do feel safe. I want to support the Minister’s comment in the opening remarks. This Government is very focused on making sure that victims feel safe and victims’ rights are adhered to.

Just very finally, before I finish I want to acknowledge that we are seeing the problems in Iraq. The Middle East is a part of the world I was lucky enough to spend some time in. I have a real love for it. It is a place that has got massive potential, a rich history, and I just want to acknowledge the people there. It is often the non-combatants, the people who are caught in the middle of this type of conflict, who get hurt the most. I just wanted to acknowledge them. Thank you very much.

The Labour Party supported the Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill on its introduction, and, of course, the Labour Party will always support legislation that is designed to protect and enhance the rights of victims. For too long in our system the victims have been the forgotten people. The way our British system of justice is set up is that we have the Crown against Smith, where Smith is the offender, the Crown is the State, the State prosecutes the offender, but people forgot about the victim. Under Labour Governments in the past we have had the Victims of Offences Act and the Victims’ Rights Act. Labour has consistently supported bringing forward the rights of victims, putting them at the centre of the system, and providing them with the protection that they need.

We supported this bill, but, as I said on its introduction, it was a deeply flawed piece of legislation. Mr Deputy Speaker, you are from Invercargill. The case that led to the introduction of the bill was in your electorate. You will be very familiar with it. It was a case of a young woman who had been the victim of sexual violation. The offender was charged. He was convicted. He was imprisoned. The woman felt, probably, that justice might have been done. But one day she came home from work to find that the person who had sexually violated her had moved into the house next door. She had absolutely no power to do anything about that fact. It is hard for any of us, who fortunately might not have ever had the experience, to imagine what it would be like to be the victim of a sexual violator and to find that that person was now living on your doorstep and every day you would be reminded of their presence and the act that they had committed against you.

So the Minister said she had solved this problem and she brought in a piece of legislation. Well, the tragedy of that piece of legislation is that it would do absolutely nothing for the woman whose case apparently led to the legislation being introduced. For reasons that none of us on this side of the House understood, the Minister of Justice said: “This will apply only if the offender has been sentenced to at least 5 years’ imprisonment.” In this case, the offender had been sentenced to 4 years’ imprisonment. I, for the life of me, could not understand why you would not provide protection across the board for any victim of a serious violent or sexual offence. I said in the debate on the introduction of this bill that this will not do. I said that there is in the Parole Act a definition that separates serious offending from less serious offending, and that was 2 years.

Well, the select committee members looked at this and heard the submissions and they said: “Yes, we’ll change it. We’ll change it to three.” Why three? That is just another figure plucked out of the air. I pushed for it and I approached the Minister personally, and, finally, we have got a threshold that makes sense—finally, we have a threshold that makes sense—and I welcome that.

We got other changes that made this legislation more useful. The bill as introduced by the Minister meant that you had to wait until the offender was released from prison before you could get a non-contact order. For many people, they would find out that they needed that order only after the person had been released from prison, and by then it was too late. They were in contact with the person and they had that sense of fear and dread that the victim will often feel when they are confronted with the person who offended against them. So we got another change made to the bill that said that the non-contact order could be applied for at any time after sentencing.

We heard from submissions before the select committee that often the offender will not be responsible for creating fear on the part of the victim, but the offender will delegate that to an associate who will turn up at the workplace, turn up at the educational institution, turn up at the residence of the victim, and the bill would not have been able to do anything about that. Well, we changed the bill again so that where there had been an instruction from the offender to an associate to act in that way, where the person had acted, and where there was a fear on the part of the victim, we could deal with the associate.

So in the end we made this weak and insipid piece of legislation a little bit more effective. But I want to say this to the Government members of the House. In my hand here I have got the regulatory impact statement. With this piece of legislation, which was introduced with such flourish, do you know how many orders they anticipated they would make a year?

💬 Le’aufa’amulia Asenati Lole-Taylor: 10.

Ten. Do you know how many inmates are released each year who have been convicted and imprisoned for serious sexual and violent offending? It is 1,000. It is 1,000 a year and we were dealing with 1 percent of them. Maybe with the changes in the bill we will deal with a few more. But the fact of the matter is that this sort of legislation is only sticking-plaster legislation. It does not go to the cause of what we need to do to prevent having victims. Having the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff does not stop the pain. It does not stop the hurt.

I mentioned in the debate on the last stage of this bill that earlier this week I had been to see the family of Arun Kumar, the Henderson dairy owner who was murdered in his dairy by a 13-year-old child. What struck me about that experience was that nothing I could say, nothing that Rajen Prasad or Phil Twyford could say, could in any way ease the pain and the tragedy that that family was suffering. When we see an elderly man who has lost a son, when we see a woman whose husband died in her arms, as Arun Kumar did, when we see the children who will never have a grandfather for their own children, you know that you have got to do something more than provide an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. You cannot bring back a life.

These are all of the facts that we have seen that have come out of this. There are young kids in the streets of Henderson who are not at school when they should be, there is a truancy service that is not apparently working, and there are kids who were demanding money and had been around the shopping centre for months, years, and nothing was done. There was no community police station and not enough police seen on the street. I noticed that it was the Minister of Police who led the third reading of this bill. Well, that Minister appeared before the Law and Order Committee last week and had excuses, only excuses, for the fact that six Budgets have been brought down by this Government and in every Budget the policing money that is expended on protecting our community has been cut in real terms—cut in real terms, every year. Since 2009, $114 million has been cut out of the police budget. It is no wonder the president of the Police Association, Greg O’Connor, says policing will get harder this year.

So the sticking-plaster legislation is OK, but what about the fence at the top of the cliff? What about decent policing? What about the fact that 16 community police stations have been closed by this National Government? And what do the people of Henderson say they most wanted? It was a community police station in the shopping centre so there was a presence there. Labour introduced 1,000 extra police officers in its last term in Parliament—

💬 Le’aufa’amulia Asenati Lole-Taylor: New Zealand First.

—in conjunction with New Zealand First. In the last couple of years our police staffing has been cut. I do not want to keep going to the funerals of people who have been murdered when that was a preventable situation.

I want to say something, finally, on the other side of this legislation about sexual offending. I was talking to Kim McGregor, who runs, and has done for many years, a group that works with the victims of sexual offending. Do you know what she told me? She said that for every 100 women in this country who are sexually violated, one—just one—will see her offender convicted and imprisoned for that offence. She said: “I deal with women every day of the week who will not go through our adversarial court system, because they do not believe that they will see justice done. They believe that they will be revictimised.” I say to the Minister and I plead with the Minister: no more sticking-plaster legislation; let us do something real. Let us change the system. Let us have an inquisitorial system where the victim is not the person on trial. Let us have a system that prevents people falling through the cracks. Let us do something more than simply address 1 percent of the victims of those offences, which is what the sum achievement of this bill actually is.

I rise to take probably a shortened call on behalf of my colleague Dave Clendon, who has followed the Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill through from the start and has, I know, appreciated the opportunity to be part of progressing and improving the bill. I am mindful of colleagues’ comments about some inadequacies that still remain—costs that will still fall on victims who want to avail themselves of this right, for example.

The Green Party has had a long interest in victims’ rights. Indeed, it was Nandor Tanczos who led the call for a select committee inquiry on victims’ rights some years ago. There are a number of aspects of our policing and criminal justice systems that are fundamentally broken, and I listened with interest to Phil Goff’s comments towards the end of his contribution to the effect that we need real and fundamental change to the system. Well, we agree with that. There are an awful lot of places where we could start. We could start, for example, by addressing the drivers of crime. We have actually done pretty poorly on that and it is interesting that in the House today we have been talking about vulnerable children. We have been talking about child abuse and here we are now talking about crime and punishment. Actually, the same things that drive poor outcomes for our kids, the same things that drive poor health outcomes, and the same things that drive poor educational outcomes are the things that drive crime.

Successions of Governments—I am not saying it is this Government particularly—have been poor at addressing those drivers of crime. Weirdly, the solutions to improving our crime rates are the same things we need to do to improve our child abuse statistics, to improve our health data, and to achieve better educational outcomes. We need to empower communities that are vulnerable and empower communities that are marginalised. We need to give them a sense of, and actual control over, their life circumstances, and we need to address the environments that surround them: the physical environments, the social environments, and the political and economic environments.

There have been any number of reports on how to address the drivers of crime, and yet we are still not making those fundamental changes. We need to address access of prisoners to the educational services and to the health services they need. We have any amount of data that says that people who are in prisons have high rates of intellectual disability, of learning disability, and of physical disability—extremely high deafness and hearing loss rates—and yet we do nothing about that, or effectively nothing. We have extremely high rates of alcohol and drug dependence amongst our prisoners and yet we are still not at the point of ensuring that all of those people who need those services have access to basic health services, including the alcohol and drug dependency treatment services they need.

Well, what do we expect is going to happen? Of course we are going to see high rates of recidivism and people leaving prison unable to rehabilitate. And rehabilitation services are the next part of the puzzle. Actually, we have not learnt anything, it seems, from the Scandinavian countries, which understand that the fundamental point of someone being in prison is to repair the relationship they have with society, to ensure that when they come out of prison—because almost without exception they are going to—their relationship with society will be different and they will not offend again. That is another one of the fundamental changes we need to make.

But this bill addresses one of the other areas, and that is the area of victims’ rights. Mr Goff commented that it is a puzzling aspect of, perhaps, the Westminster system particularly—and Simon Bridges will know the answer to this—that at the point that a crime is prosecuted, the offence is seen to be against the Crown rather than against the victim. For far too long we had a system where victims were almost entirely shut out of the picture. We have made some progress towards recognising and respecting the rights of victims. Again, there is still a big way for us to go. The particular aspect that this bill addresses is the aspect that enables the rent in a victim’s life caused by the offending against them to be continued by further victimisation and revictimisation by offenders. It is obvious that this facility should exist, and the Green Party will vote for it, as we have done at all previous stages. Thank you.

It is somewhat ironic that we listened to a Labour speaker, Andrew Little, who was not part of the Law and Order Committee process and we have now listened to a Green speaker, Kevin Hague, who was not part of the select committee process. Both of them had very different takes on the Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill, which upholds the great role that this Government is playing in protecting communities, preventing crime, and putting victims first. At the select committee we heard some very good submissions on this bill.

To be fair, life is full of incremental gains, and this bill, in my view, is all about an incremental gain. It is the incremental gain that victims of these crimes—and a lot of them are pretty unpleasant crimes too—are able to pick up. This bill enables that to happen, and by putting these non-contact orders in place, it tends to protect those people. It gives those victims a little more protection than they had otherwise. Certainly, whilst the offender is in prison, that is not an issue. It is once those offenders are let out of prison that it becomes a serious issue.

Of course, I think this bill has done a really good job in that respect and has added a whole lot to the contribution that this Government has made to law and order in New Zealand. I think that on law and order and justice matters Ministers Collins, Tolley, and Borrows have done an outstanding job for us. I think we should be very pleased with the way this has gone. I think we should be very proud of the little piece of incremental gain that this bill gives to the whole of the law and order sector.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 6 p.m.