Parole Amendment Bill

In introduction I would just like to challenge a point a couple of my colleagues made—Barbara Kuriger and Jonathan Young, and then the Hon Annette King—about calling Wellington, and New Plymouth, the coffee and cafe capital of New Zealand. Let me introduce you to Gore. We have cafes, a coffee culture, the New Zealand Gold Guitar Awards, and A and P shows galore—

💬 Hon Member: Big fish.

—and a huge fish. Just moving on to the Parole Amendment Bill—just a segue there slightly—it is an honour to rise to speak in support of the Parole Amendment Bill in its third reading.

As we heard last week, one of the main objectives of this bill is to decrease the number of unnecessary parole hearings for offenders, which will in turn decrease the amount of stress, trauma, and heartache that victims of crime must endure. Each year there are 5,000 parole hearings, and on average there are three parole hearings per prisoner before parole is granted, at a cost of about $1,000 per hearing. This bill requires that when the Parole Board declines a parole application it sets the next hearing date. There is also provision for the board to identify relevant activities relating to the risks the offender poses to the community, and the offender must achieve these before their next hearing. If the offender achieves them early, then the case can be brought forward.

There are strong incentives also for prisoners to address their reoffending and their offensive behaviour before they reintegrate back into society. If we can curb this behaviour before they leave prison, we can reduce the chance of their reoffending when they get back into New Zealand society.

This bill also provides for greater flexibility for the Parole Board to set hearing dates to align with the completion of rehabilitation programmes that are currently running. The Department of Corrections is strengthening the focus on rehabilitation with the introduction of case management systems for all prisoners, and they can refer prisoners for an early parole hearing if they have made significant progress.

Some more work that has been going forward in prisons over the last few years is that more drug and alcohol treatment programmes have been introduced. All prisoners now have an education screening and individual learning plans. By 2017 all prisons will be working prisons. This is helping to prepare prisoners for reintegration into the workplace and reintegration into society.

The current changes are having an impact, not just the parole work but also the wider work being done in the corrections space. The Southern Police District, which takes in Central Otago and Otago, as well as Southland, has one of the lowest levels of recorded offences per 10,000 people with one of the highest resolution rates. From 2012 to 2013 to the financial year of 2013-14 there was a 5 percent reduction in crime nationally. The total number of burglary offences has reduced by almost half in 20 years, to 2,433 recorded offences in the last financial year. This is evidence that National has embarked on a comprehensive programme of reform to protect communities and to prevent crime by putting victims first. It is working, and New Zealand now has its lowest crime rate since 1978.

As a Government we are delivering on our Better Public Services programme, and that is one of our core priorities in this term of Government. We have set challenging targets in terms of crime. We want to reduce the crime rate by 15 percent, violent crime by 20 percent, and youth crime by 25 percent by 2017. We enhanced these targets just last week. We have already met and exceeded two of them, and now we are increasing them to a total reduction of 20 percent in crime. The proposed changes in this bill will only enhance that.

It is critical that we stymie reoffending and prevent first-time offenders from becoming recidivist offenders, but to take it one step back, there are a lot of initiatives under way, directly and indirectly, that prevent members of society from becoming offenders and therefore entering the justice pipeline.

The first one I want to talk about is the Social Sector Trials. We are lucky to have one of these taking place in Gore, actually. I met with them last week. It involves representatives from the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Social Development—including Child, Youth and Family Services and Work and Income—a number of the schools in the area, and the police. They meet on a regular basis and they pool their resources together by identifying families and individuals who need Government support and are receiving Government support. They try to get them back into an appropriate programme, whether that be reintegration into the education system or reintegration into the workplace, in order to prevent them from becoming participants in the justice pipeline.

This is one example of a wider initiative that is taking place that will enhance the work that is being done in the justice sector to try to prevent people from entering this downward-spiralling, unfortunate situation.

Another example of something that is taking place in my electorate that works in with the Social Sector Trials in order to prevent people from entering the justice pipeline and therefore coming before the Parole Board, is the Student Engagement Initiative. It is a programme run by all of the high schools in the area, in consultation with the Ministry of Education, again to reintegrate students who are currently falling between the gaps in the education system.

Another initiative that is taking place across the country is to do with 2,000 of the Government’s toughest clients. These are males who are currently in care in New Zealand; some of them have been in care with more than one or two families. There is one child in my electorate, who is 12 years old, who has had 93 foster care families that have looked after him—and he is only 12 years old. He is one of this group of 2,000 children. Based on 30 years of records that have been collected by Treasury, the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry of Justice, and the Ministry of Education, their future prison costs combined will cost the taxpayer $750 million, in prison costs alone, if they continue on the path that they are currently going down, which is exiting the education system and not getting a proper education that will then see them being able to participate in the workplace.

By continuing to service the system that cares for children and the prison system in isolation, we are not going to be able to define a result and help these people out. We need to be looking—which this Government is doing—at how different agencies are interacting with different members of society, and getting them to work together for the common resolve, which is to enhance the life of individual New Zealanders and prevent them from becoming part of the justice pipeline, which ultimately sees them before the Parole Board in the future.

While it is a bit disconnected from the purpose of this particular bill, these New Zealanders who are currently on the pathway to being a part of, or a recipient, or a beneficiary of the outcome of this bill—if we can prevent them from getting there, then it will only enhance the impact that the changes in this bill will have.

So if we can do that, it will have a positive impact not only on those individuals but on the communities in which they live, on their families, on the justice system more generally, and on the well-being of victims of crime as well. As we see the changing dynamics of the parole system, the needs of the victims and of offenders, it is timely to reconfigure the parole system in order to meet those changing and evolving needs. So it is in that context and with that background that I commend this bill to the House.

May I just begin by responding to one or two of the points made by the member Todd Barclay, who has just been sharing his wisdom with us. I agree that there have been some positive moves made by this Government, particularly around corrections: the notion that every inmate, as they enter prison, will receive some screening for alcohol and drug issues, problems, dependence, whatever; the idea of a needs-assessment when people go into prison, which is positive and long overdue; the provision of meaningful work in all of our prisons for those inmates who choose to do it; and programmes around rehabilitation and reintegration. These are all good things. Unfortunately, what we are seeing is a lot of rhetoric about them but very little investment. We spend something like $1.4 billion on corrections and a minuscule part of that budget is being committed to these quite positive changes. Drug and alcohol assessment on entry to prison—we simply do not have the skilled and experienced people to do that; nor are we investing in creating that pool of people who could do that very positive work. I do commend some of the changes on paper, but now we need to put in the investment, reinvest the justice dollar into putting these things into practice in a meaningful way. I look forward to the member’s support within his party to see that that investment is made.

I return to the Parole Amendment Bill. The Greens have tried hard to like this bill since it was introduced, but unfortunately we find it is flawed. I guess the fundamental flaw is that it was introduced as a reaction to some very noisy vocal minorities who were calling, ideally, from their point of view, for an abolition of parole—the simplistic and completely adrift notion that we should actually do away with parole completely. I fear this bill is essentially a political response to try to placate those people. In defence of parole I would quote the former chairperson of the New Zealand Parole Board in the 2012 annual report of the Parole Board, headed at that point by Judge Sir David Carruthers, who said: “The most important reason for a Parole Board lies in the fact that the international research shows that managed release on parole with a right of recall back to prison during the term of a sentence is about four times more effective in preventing reoffending than automatic release at the end of the term of imprisonment.” Releasing people back into the community with conditions, with management, with monitoring is vastly superior to this flawed notion of simply making them stay in prison up until the last minute of the last day of their sentence.

What this bill does, of course, is increase the permissible time between parole hearings to allow for the increase in the maximum term of a postponement order from 3 to 5 years. Again, a number of speakers on this bill have talked about this giving the Parole Board more flexibility. In fact, the board already has some flexibility. Where it sees that a particular individual is almost certain not to get parole—I think section 27, from memory, of the Parole Act allows for postponement orders. There are existing mechanisms that can fulfil the aims of this legislation. What this bill does is it creates a mechanism where inmates can apply to have a parole hearing subject to completion of relevant activities, and that is seen as a positive thing. However, it assumes that inmates know their rights, are able to articulate them, and are literate enough to read the legislation to understand what their rights are around these issues. Unfortunately, the profile of a standard inmate in our prisons does not match that person who is literate, confident, and able to assert their rights.

We know that some of the relevant activities—that is, the milestones, although we are discouraged from using that word—that prisoners must meet to be considered for a parole hearing under this new rule could include things like group or individual counselling, literacy work, drug or alcohol programmes, and work training. These are all good and positive things and should be readily available to inmates. But the reality is that they are not. They are not now, and we have no reason to expect that they will be sufficiently available in the future.

We had one excellent submission from one Sue Shone, a parole lawyer. She came to the select committee in March of last year with a couple of very good case studies of inmates who were motivated to get themselves on to parole, who were doing all the right things, but who, for very sound and understandable reasons, were not getting access to some of these programmes. One inmate who was required to do group counselling pointed out that if he was obliged to do group counselling it would put him at considerable risk. He was endeavouring to extract himself from a gang. Group counselling would oblige him to state publicly and in front of other inmates his ambition to get away from the gang, which actually would put him in considerable danger. There were other similar examples presented to us of inmates who had the goodwill, the motivation, but simply were not getting access to the programmes that the Parole Board was keen for them to do, that the inmates themselves were keen to do, and that could have led to their release on parole, and ultimately their reintegration. Unfortunately, the—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

Before the dinner break I was beginning to talk about motivation. We had what I thought was a rather debatable claim from the Department of Corrections officials. They told us that in respect of inmate motivation, “entitlement to an annual hearing”—a parole hearing, that is, of course—“provides no incentive for unmotivated offenders to address their offending behaviour.”, the proposition being that if inmates know that the delay or the time between the parole hearings can be extended, they are more likely to be motivated by that. That is not the experience of people working in prisons, of inmates themselves, of their families. Inmates are not foolish. Well, at some point they are to get in there, I guess, but in terms of Parole Board hearings, they understand very well that simply sitting and doing nothing for a year and then walking in front of a Parole Board is not actually going to advance their cause. The inmates understand very well that in order to improve the likelihood of them getting parole, they will have to demonstrate behaviour changes, attitude changes, completion of programmes—whatever it might be. So to suggest that this change, the extension of the term between the mandatory hearings, is somehow a motivating factor—I think it could actually be quite the opposite: inmates could become quite unmotivated if they see that the horizon to the next hearing is being extended.

As we have discussed in earlier speeches in this bill, the fact that the availability of the hearing is dependent on prisoners conceding guilt could simply lead the prisoners to lie. There are people in prisons who do declare themselves innocent, and, on rare occasions, those are actually true claims.

Briefly I will speak about the human rights issues that we are running close to the boundaries of. The changes in this legislation take us further away from the UN Human Rights Commission requirement that effectively says that to ensure an offender’s continued detention beyond their parole eligibility does not become arbitrary, there must be regular, periodic reviews of the individual offender’s case. So this is built into the UN Human Rights Commission documents to which we are signatories. To the extent that we allow the term between hearings to become extended, the decisions can run perilously close to being seen as being arbitrary decisions, given that there will not be the level of interrogation, the level of evidence of investigation, into just what is going on. Crown Law is satisfied that the current arrangements keep us well within the boundaries of the Human Rights Commission requirements, but moving to the extended breaks and the extension of the 3 to 5 years could be a step too far in terms of assuring that we do stay in line with our international human rights obligations.

Finally is this question of “relevant activity”. Assuming that when inmates appear in front of a Parole Board all of the information about their activities over the previous 1 or 2 years has been correctly recorded is disputable. We have had recent examples where inmates’ security classification reviews have been found to contain significant errors of fact that worked to the detriment of the inmates. For these reasons and many more we will not be supporting this bill.

Tēnā koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Wharenui. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Parole Amendment Bill, with some reservations, and I shall expand on those reservations during my contribution.

As New Zealand First members have said previously in this House, we would like to see more support for the victims of crime. We would like to see that the concerns of the victims of crime are addressed by all of those who are involved in the reduction of crime in New Zealand. The crime rate at present is unacceptable to us. A review of parole laws is well overdue. This bill does go some way to making New Zealand a safer place for our families and our futures—our children. In saying that, we also need to be sure that those who apply for parole are not given that request too easily. The offenders must exhibit solid reformed behaviour before being released into our communities. Otherwise, we will continue to see the same issue that we have been seeing in the recent past, which is reoffending. This puts more pressure on the victims, and their families and communities, and in many cases it revictimises them.

This bill quite rightly aims to reduce the costs incurred by the number of parole hearings when it is clear that the prisoner has not achieved the prescribed milestones in their rehabilitative programme. However, it does not go far enough in supporting those offenders who have a genuine desire and motivation to address their offending behaviour and their offending lifestyle. New Zealand First would prefer to see that no offender is short-changed when it comes to rehabilitation, because the safety of our society, at the end of the day, relies on releasing rehabilitative offenders who will not repeat that behaviour and thus harm law-abiding citizens.

At this point, I would draw the attention of this House to the fact that privately run prisons do not have a single key performance indicator addressing the rehabilitation of prisoners. These are organisations that base their businesses on profits, not people, and yet they receive no financial penalty if they do not provide rehabilitative programmes on a par with those in the State-run prisons. Although these organisations’ contracts have financial loss if they accidentally let someone out, and even though they have to meet certain performance targets, none of these targets are about the rehabilitation of prisoners. Prisoners in privately run prisons do not have access to the programmes that our publicly run prisons have. My point is that you could have a situation where a prisoner in a privately run institution has his or her parole pushed out under this legislation with almost non-existent rehabilitative support and, therefore, has almost no chance to meet the criteria for release when they do go in front of the Parole Board. This is not fair on the prisoners, and not, at the end of the day, fair to the general public, whose taxpayer dollars are paying for both systems—the State-run prisons and the privately run prisons.

There are many who believe that if you do the crime, you do the time, and that life should mean life. Well, this is not the conversation we are having here today. New Zealand First understands that our laws allow for parole and that the Department of Corrections professes to be committed to reducing reoffending by 25 percent by 2017. That, we think, is a noble goal. So New Zealand First agrees that now is the time to make changes to the parole laws so that we can be sure we are fair to the victims and we achieve our goal of reducing reoffending.

To carry out the changes foreseen by this bill, the department will need more resources, and the public-private partnerships such as Serco will need to be included in any of these programmes. These programmes should be included in their key performance indicators. If State-run prisons are expected to perform to a certain standard, then so should the privately run prisons, because both of them are funded by the taxpayer. We will be looking closely at the 2015 Budget to ensure the Government puts its money where its mouth is, and we will be checking that public-private partnerships have rehabilitation programmes in their key performance indicators.

So let us get this right. Let us punish where it is needed, educate where it is needed, resource where it is needed, and call for performance where it is needed because, after all, our victims deserve it. All New Zealanders deserve it. Thank you.

I am very pleased to stand and speak to the Parole Amendment Bill, here in its third reading. This is good legislation. The bill proposes a number of amendments to the Parole Act 2002. The explanatory note states that the amendments are to reduce the number of unnecessary parole hearings, but not to increase the length of time an offender spends in prison; and also to improve efficiency by simplifying pre-hearing processes and clarifying when an offender’s attendance at a parole hearing is required. The proposed changes do not affect the earliest date at which an offender would become eligible for parole, nor the actual length of an offender’s sentence, but they do create incentives for prisoners to engage in rehabilitation activities and thereby become less likely to reoffend when they are released. It also reduces the trauma for victims who are faced with unnecessary annual parole hearings when the prisoner has not made efforts in rehabilitation and the outcome is known, but the parole hearing continues because of the mandatory annual review.

The ability to extend the period between parole hearings up to a maximum of 2 years instead of every year, as is currently the case, does not mean that the prisoner will experience a longer sentence. The United Nations Human Rights Committee has held to the fact that to ensure that an offender’s continued detention beyond their parole eligibility date does not become arbitrary, there must be regular periodic reviews of the individual offender’s case by an independent body to determine whether continued imprisonment is substantively justified. The human rights committee has held that 12-month intervals between parole reviews with judicial review rights meant that continued imprisonment was not inherently arbitrary. The European Court of Human Rights has held that a 2-year interval between parole reviews did not render detention arbitrary, because the decision to fix that interval was approached with flexibility and with due regard to the individual’s circumstances.

The bill provides that if the Parole Board declines to release an offender on parole it must ordinarily specify a date within the following 2 years for the offender’s next parole review, instead of every year, as is currently the case. As part of that decision there is also provision for the board to identify relevant circumstances, formerly called milestones, relating to the risk the offender poses to community safety, for the offender to achieve before the next hearing. This is an element of consideration and flexibility. If the offender achieves these early, the case can be brought forward. The bill also extends from 3 to 5 years the maximum postponement period for offenders serving indeterminate sentences and determinate sentences of 10 or more years. We do expect a 5-year term to be reserved for the most extreme cases, as the current 3-year term is used only a handful of times every year.

Each year there are about 5,000 parole hearings. On average, offenders have three hearings before being granted parole. In putting victims at the heart of the justice system we are delivering on our promises. Our plans to reduce unnecessary parole hearings for offenders will reduce stress for victims of crime. Victims of crime should not have to face the very stressful prospect of parole hearings year after year when an offender is clearly not safe to release into the community and has made little or no effort at rehabilitation. The measures that this bill proposes will also save the taxpayer approximately $700,000 a year.

Our changes will provide strong incentives for prisoners to address their offending behaviour. The Department of Corrections is strengthening its rehabilitation focus with the introduction of case management systems for all prisoners. It can also refer prisoners for an early parole hearing if they have made significant progress, such as reaching rehabilitation milestones or successfully completing programmes. All prisoners have education screening with individual learning plans designed for them. Obviously they have been speaking to our Minister of Education. The number of prisoners gaining qualifications has increased by 830 percent, up from 197 in 2008-09, when we came into office, to 1,833 in 2012-13, which is a significant increase. Almost 3,000 prisoners have started literacy and numeracy programmes in the 2013-14 financial year, up 155 percent compared with 2007-08. An almost 1,500 percent increase in places in drug and alcohol treatment programmes for prisoners has happened since 2008. So there is ample opportunity and evidence that prisoners in corrections are being encouraged to undertake, and are undertaking, increased rehabilitation programmes.

This bill does not affect the earliest date at which an offender would become eligible for parole, nor the actual length of an offender’s sentence, but proposes greater efficiency in the parole process, protects victims from unnecessary trauma, and provides a greater incentive for prisoners to engage meaningfully in a personalised rehabilitation programme. This helps to achieve our Better Public Services targets. Results so far are impressive, and we continue to build on them. Our target was to reduce prisoner reoffending by 25 percent by 2017. We have seen a 12.2 percent reduction in offending so far. Our target is to reduce overall crime rates by 15 percent, violent crime by 20 percent, and youth crime by 25 percent by 2017. The result so far is that the total crime rate is down by 16 percent, violent crime is down by 11 percent, and youth crime is down by 30 percent, exceeding its first target of 5 percent and its second target of 25 percent. We are giving prisoners far more opportunities to rehabilitate and, of course, in that regard we are making our communities, streets, and homes safer places for New Zealanders.

This Government has done a tremendous amount for what could be deemed the lowest socio-economic group in our society. Twenty-eight thousand children in New Zealand have a parent in prison. Our work to build rehabilitation, and, in this bill, to ensure that people engage in rehabilitation, is doing so much for the safety of our society and doing so much for children whose parent, sometimes even both parents, are prisoners. New Zealanders deserve to feel safe in their homes and communities. National is focused on preventing crime and reducing the impact of crime by improving the responsiveness of the justice system for victims. I am very happy to stand in support of this excellent bill. Thank you.

It is a pleasure to rise and take a call on this bill, the Parole Amendment Bill. Parole is controversial. There is nothing like the stories that appear when someone has been released on parole and has reoffended while in the community. The community deserves to be protected and have the best things in place to ensure that our prisoners, when they are released on parole, do not reoffend. It is controversial, so this is an important bill, as it seeks to address some of those concerns that the community has.

One of the things that this bill seeks to address, of course, is the frequency with which parole reviews are conducted by the Parole Board. Currently, with the requirement of being reviewed at no more than 12-month intervals, one of the major concerns, of course, is whether the prisoners have had sufficient time with which to engage in the programmes of rehabilitation. That is really important because rehabilitation speaks to preventing the reoffending. That is really what is at the nub of this, I believe: our desire to ensure that not only do we protect the public from reoffending but, if we look at it in the wider context, that we protect victims of serious crime from being harmed in the first place.

The view taken in this bill to extend the review period gives the prisoner the opportunity to work through those rehabilitation programmes. We know that having the current period of 12 months means that sometimes they are only part-way through, and we know that programmes are effective only when they are completed, so this gives us an opportunity to ensure that those programmes are indeed completed and completed effectively.

It also seeks to address the concerns of victims about those offenders who do not take responsibility for their offending, and the burden that it places on the Parole Board when offenders are appearing often, with the view that they are not going to accept responsibility. Given all of the work that sits behind that review process, moving the reviews to every 2 years rather than annually saves us thousands of hours of Parole Board time and, from what I understand from the work the Law and Order Committee did, thousands of actual reviews, which is significant. It does give that offender the opportunity to work through the issues and hopefully work to the point where they are able to take responsibility for their offending and thereby take the full effect of the rehabilitation programmes offered to them.

There are some benefits that have been mentioned about what can be supportive for victims. As far as I can see, the benefits are twofold for victims. Firstly, victims—particularly victims of crimes where the offence is serious enough for a person to be imprisoned—can respond in two ways, really, to the offence. Either they will want to be engaged in the process or, like many of my colleagues have already talked about, many of them are really wanting to put the offence behind them. So by extending the period of review, it does give the opportunity—for those people who really are revictimised by the process of annual reviews and the process of being contacted by the department to be notified that the parole is coming up and their intentions around the particular hearing—to relieve and mitigate some of the stress for those victims.

Secondly, there are those who are wanting to engage in this process knowing that the review is done after a period of time in which the offender is able to engage in programmes where there may be some success in terms of accepting responsibility, so that the victim actually has some peace in this process. So I commend it in that regard, but I will return to the victims of crime at the end of my presentation, because they are the most important component of this work. There is also the aspect that this potentially is a positive incentive for offenders who will consider taking responsibility and then take advantage of the rehabilitation that is offered to them.

The bill provides for the alignment of the core milestones. I have heard some other speakers this evening talk about that. The parole hearings are lined up with the completion of programmes and it provides a better opportunity for a successful rehabilitation. What this offers is the opportunity to really look at prevention of reoffending. That sits at the heart of this bill. Recidivism of offenders is an important issue for us, and we want to do everything we can to maximise the rate of prisoners not reoffending. Good access to good programmes, good access to support, and good access to prisoner release programmes give us a very good opportunity to ensure that we do what we can to reduce reoffending in the community.

This bill provides some flexibility around the use of postponement orders, which means that some hearings might be extended to as much as 5 years, but that will occur only when the sentence is of an indeterminate length, such as life imprisonment, or when there is a sentence of 10 or more years.

I want to turn to the victims of crime, who are, obviously, the most impacted by this. Victims are, as some of my colleagues have already spoken about, at the heart of this. What can we do to prevent not only the reoffending but the offending from occurring in the first place? There are several bills that we have looked at that provide opportunities to tie that all together. But would it not have been a more appropriate process to look at legislation that actually looks at the issue of prevention of crime in the first place, rather than legislation that tidies up aspects of bills?

Some of the things that we will be discussing over the next few days, including tomorrow’s member’s bill on paid parental leave, look at some of the aspects of the lives of children and how by providing a really good start in life for children we can prevent what happens later in life, prevent crime, prevent prison rates, and prevent poor health outcomes. We need to actually include that discussion in this debate, because crime and offending do not come from nowhere; they come from somewhere, and having a great start in life actually provides support around that. There will be some discussion in the next item on the Order Paper, which looks at tidying up a few of those issues.

But what do we do once we have been through our processes? What happens to prisoners when they are actually released back into the community? That is a big issue, I feel. We are getting good rates with better educational achievements of prisoners, but what are they leaving prison to go to? We need to look at employment and we need to look at housing, and there are some other major concerns to address to ensure that when they are released into the community, they do not continue to reoffend.

This bill is in its third reading and we will commend it to the House. Thank you very much for permitting me to take this call.

Just before I get on to the facts of the night, I thought I would mention a couple of other things. Firstly, I guess I wanted to pay tribute to Celia Lashlie. I had a lot to do with her in my time with the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs. She was an amazing person who had an amazing way with young people and certainly played a large part in the very topic we are talking about here tonight in respect of our law and order community. That was the first thing I wanted to talk about. The second thing was the fact that Chris Gayle just hit 200 in a world cup game—the first time it has ever been done. I think that is pretty significant, given that the world cup is very topical at the moment. I thought that was very important. Right, on to the Parole Amendment Bill—you can talk about only so much fact in one of these things, so I needed to talk about a few other things. During the course of early discussions on this bill I went to—

💬 Kris Faafoi: Heaven forbid you get weighed down with facts!

Mr Faafoi, interestingly, was part of the early discussions on this bill. He was a member of the select committee when it was introduced, I would imagine. But I want to talk about the structure of the Parole Board and how that works and then I want to get on to one or two other things that we found during the course of the investigations into this bill. We had the opportunity early in the piece with this bill to visit a parole hearing. I was fortunate enough to go to Wanganui where I attended a parole hearing of one of our most notorious parolees. It was a really interesting process. You get to see how the process works. There are three people on the Parole Board: a convenor and two others. They bring the prisoner into the parole hearing and they present the evidence. The prisoner can have a representative with them, they can have a lawyer with them, or they may choose to be there on their own. Certainly, the whole process for me was very impressive. I think that to see how the parole system worked made a big difference to the understanding of how this whole bill proceeds. So that was the first thing we found out.

The second thing we found out was that the Parole Board does not necessarily have access to all the information that we felt it needed. It certainly did not have access, necessarily, to any protection orders that had been given to those prisoners who were appearing before the Parole Board. We felt that was necessary. Our understanding now is that the Judicature Modernisation Bill that is coming into the House right now, in fact, will take care of some of those issues. It was a significant process. Prisoners were going into these parole hearings but, at times, the Parole Board did not necessarily have all the information that gave it the background on that prisoner. So that was a bit of a challenge, we felt, for the Parole Board, and we made some inquiries into that. I think we have now got to a point where we are satisfied that it creates an environment where the Parole Board can operate fairly.

There are, as Jonathan Young said, an average of some 5,000 parole hearings—in fact, there were over 6,000 parole hearings in the last year we had statistics for. That is a lot of parole hearings. This bill will relieve us of about 800 of those parole hearings. To appease New Zealand First, which always wants to put more money into everything, that will save us about $700,000 in the Parole Board’s operational costs. I think aside from the fact that it is saving money, it is easing the situation for victims, firstly, because they get notified as parole hearings come up. There will be 800 fewer notifications of victims a year, if you look at it from that perspective—[Interruption]—kicked the bucket. That will make quite a lot of difference to the—now I have lost my concentration as well. So having the saving of that money and the information that needs to come to those parole hearings will make a difference to the victims. It will also make a difference to those prisoners who are constantly dragged before parole hearings, at least on an annual basis. They sometimes end up with up to four or five parole hearings—in fact, I think the average may be four parole hearings before they are released. So that will alleviate that problem quite a bit too, so it will probably take at least two hearings out of that.

I think that there are some really good features of this bill. Although this bill affects only 6,000 parole hearings, I guess, it is really probably affecting only 1,000-odd people a year—so it is a very small part of New Zealand’s overall well-being—it does, none the less, have a positive effect on all of those victims and certainly on those people who come before the Parole Board. So there are a whole lot of other things that came up as part of this. The select committee considered some 12 submissions in the course of this bill—almost all of them positive; some of them pointing out, as they always do, some of the pitfalls that, I guess, you find with this kind of legislation and, obviously, human rights becomes a factor in all these sort of things. You get these submissions on those lines, but on the whole the submissions were positive and supported the bill, so I think it came out pretty well from that perspective.

So there are some other things that the bill created. The Parole Act, interestingly, was initially introduced in 2002 by the Hon Phil Goff, who was on that select committee as well. It just shows that you can be here for a long, long time and you get to change the bills you started with. He has certainly achieved that on a number of occasions. The bill requires that when the Parole Board declines a parole application it sets the next hearing date. That gets set, and those parolees—the people whom it applies to—get a set of conditions that they must, I guess, comply with. So they have either got to go through some kind of alcohol and drug programme, or they have to come back with some form of employment as they leave prison, or they may have to come back with accommodation that they can go to when they leave prison. There are a lot of things that they can be required to bring back to the next parole hearing. If, of course, the offender achieves these early, the case can be brought forward.

As I said earlier, it provides that the victim, offender, or other authorised person can attend a parole hearing remotely, such as via video link or phone. I certainly have not seen that in action. The parole hearings we attended were all right there. The bill also provides that as well as the victim, the prison managers and police must be notified of hearing outcomes. They are also to be notified of the next parole hearing date and any milestones, as I said earlier, that the offender has had set for them. So there are some conditions that make the thing much sounder than it was before. So I think we are getting on pretty well with a lot of the changes to this bill. The board, after the initial appearance, must consider the prisoner for parole at least once every 12 months—so that is what happens now, as I said. Once that has happened every 12 months, and once the conditions are imposed, then, I guess, the Parole Board will make a decision as to when they come back before the board for the hearing. Chris Gayle is at 220 now.

💬 Brett Hudson: Give Symonds a go.

He will get there shortly. It was a very interesting bill to be a part of. I think that during the course of it we did turn up some information that was well worth discovering, and certainly it helped us to get through and come up with what I think is a very good conclusion. So I have a great deal of pleasure in supporting this bill as it goes through the House, and it will very soon be through the House.

It is my pleasure to take a call on this third reading of the Parole Amendment Bill—after the contribution from the member on the other side of the House, Ian McKelvie, sponsored by Cricinfo!

Look, parole is a very loaded topic. It is one where on all sides of the equation I think you try to strike a balance. That may mean that people around that conversation may not get everything they want, but I think in this instance the balances that were sought have been found after some pretty good work at the Law and Order Committee. Those balances are around the rights of victims, and we have heard a lot of talk around the revictimisation of victims who have to go through unnecessary parole hearings.

As a former member of the Law and Order Committee, in the 50th Parliament, I was on a trip to Christchurch Prison—and prisoners do watch Parliament TV—and someone came up to me and said that they liked my contribution on some piece of corrections legislation. So they will be keeping an eye on our contributions, and they will be watching us. For those at home, or those who are not at home but are incarcerated, the Parole Board has to consider you for parole every 12 months, basically.

As we have heard in other submissions from speakers during this debate, a lot of those hearings are unnecessary. I believe that the Law and Order Committee during the submissions process heard from the Parole Board that sometimes it takes two, three, or four appearances before the Parole Board before the person before them is seriously considered to be worthy of being considered for parole. If you are on either side of that equation—either as a victim or as an offender or an inmate—a lot of that time would be just a waste of time, or would be spent reliving a pretty nasty experience. So from that perspective we think the ability to move the minimum time frame between parole hearings from 12 months to 2 years is a good thing to make sure that you do not have the unnecessary Parole Board hearings that we have seen.

Can I now step over to the victims’ side of the equation here and say that if the offending was serious—and I know that there were submissions from the likes of the Sensible Sentencing Trust; I do not always necessarily agree with everything that it has to say, but I think it makes a worthy contribution at these kinds of times—there is a sense that if they know that the person up for parole is not going to be granted parole, then that makes it pretty difficult for those victims every 12 months, having to relive the ordeal that they have gone through, or what their loved ones have gone through, which is a very, very difficult experience. I do not think we as a Parliament, or the officials who overlook this process, want to unnecessarily put victims through that kind of stress—through that kind of torment—every 12 months.

What we think on this side of the House, which is why we are supporting this legislation, is that the extension of the window between parole hearings to a maximum of 2 years is a wise move. It will save, we have been told, around 800 parole hearings per year, which is roughly, I think, somewhere close to 10 or 15 percent, so it is a significant amount. Also, I think the caveat there is that there is, I guess, an enticement for offenders that if they do meet—and I think in the legislation it was changed to “relevant activity”—some milestones or they do behave, they will be reconsidered for parole earlier.

I guess that is the trade-off that you do have in this legislation. Someone may come up, and the Parole Board may say: “You are not ready, and we don’t think you’re ready. You are going to have to wait 2 years until we reconsider your application for parole.” But if that inmate goes away and says “I don’t want to wait 2 years.” and they are of the mind to go and get themselves back on to something like a drug and alcohol rehabilitation scheme and they do good work, they have the ability—if they meet the criteria before that 2 years is up or whatever the time frame is that the Parole Board might rule—to do the work in order to be considered earlier for parole. I think that strikes a good balance in terms of saying to a person: “You are not ready yet, but if you go away and meet these objectives over the next 12 to 24 months, then you will be considered for parole.”

There is some international research that I think the Law and Order Committee was privy to, which basically said that if someone serves out their whole sentence, their likelihood of reoffending is higher than someone who might have been rehabilitated and then been given parole earlier. So I think that, given that kind of finding from international studies, what we are doing here is a pretty important thing to make sure we bring down recidivism rates as well. Again, another one of the things that we are trying to balance here is reoffending after those inmates have either been given parole or served their sentence.

I know that members of the Law and Order Committee got to sit through some parole hearings. I think that being on the Parole Board would be quite a thankless task. That is one of those jobs where, like judges, referees, or cricket umpires, you have to be perfect on day one and get better after that. I think the way that they have to operate and weigh up all the risks of reoffending by someone who has looked to rehabilitate is something that I do not think the general public appreciates. Of course, we all hear when things go wrong and when someone who has been given parole has reoffended, but I think—and I do not have the numbers in front of me—that on the whole the rigorous decisions of the Parole Board are ones that are pretty good.

My colleague Poto Williams spoke about the kind of support that inmates need after release. It is one thing for us to say “You need to rehabilitate yourself and meet certain milestones while you’re in prison.”, but I think it is very important to make sure that they do not reoffend once they leave prison—the kind of support that we should give them after they leave prison. It is easy for us to say “You’ve done it. You’ve ticked the box here. Out you go into society.”, but it is not that easy. There will be some people who say “No, you shouldn’t give them any support after they leave.”, but I believe that if we are going to put within this legislation some milestones for them to meet that could give them the possibility of getting out of prison earlier, we need to make sure that there is support for them after they leave so that these people who have offended—and some of it will be serious offending—do not reoffend again. We cannot just chuck them out into society and think everything is going to be hunky-dory. It is not always that way, especially if we are, in one sense, fast tracking their exit from prison.

So I would hope that the Government, when it thinks about resourcing the likes of the probation service, thinks about the kind of flow-on effects that this kind of policy has, because we cannot just front-load it and try to make everything good while they are in prison and then forget the issue when their name is not on the whiteboard any more and they are out in society. I hope that we are wise and we are very prudent and make sure that there is support for them out in the community.

I think we need to give credit where credit is due, and having been through quite a few prisons and seen some of the work that is going on in the drug and alcohol rehabilitation programmes, I think a lot of good work is being done. I think we have all got a vested interest in making sure that there is less offending and there are fewer people in our prisons because, as Bill English has said, it is both a fiscal and moral failure. We do not want to be spending billions and billions of dollars on incarcerating people. We want to make sure they are all contributing members of society. But the fact is there are people whom we need to rehabilitate. Good work is being done now, but through this legislation I hope the Government can realise we need to do more for those offenders in order to make sure there are fewer victims.

I understand that this call will be a split call between National members.

It is a pleasure to rise and take a call on the Parole Amendment Bill in this third reading debate. Can I begin by paying tribute to the Hon Amy Adams, the Minister of Justice, who is currently shepherding this bill through Parliament, but also her predecessor, Judith Collins, who introduced this as justice Minister.

I believe passionately in redemption, rehabilitation, and the power of education, of drug and alcohol treatment, and of literacy training in prisons to be able to transform the lives of those who have offended very gravely against society. Not everyone can be fully rehabilitated—there are those offenders—and this Government is progressing other legislation to deal with those who are not able to be treated for the offending that they do perpetrate, particularly on the most vulnerable in our society. I am proud to be part of a Government that, through this bill along with other pieces of legislation such as the 1,000-page Judicature Modernisation Bill, is reforming some issues at the heart of our justice system to make sure we do have a system that protects New Zealanders, that makes New Zealand a safer place, that keeps our communities safe, that reduces crime, but that does also deal with the issue of the people who have been incarcerated and what becomes of them when they are released back into society, as inevitably the vast majority of them will be.

May I congratulate Opposition members on agreeing with, certainly, the Law and Order Committee deliberations and the findings that came out of those hearings. In particular, there were a couple of pieces that I picked up in the previous speeches that I thought I would touch on. Poto Williams said that helping offenders work through their issues, in part through an extension of the time of the process that they might go through, was a positive part of this bill and I could not agree more. There are occasions when an extra year to work through courses such as drug and alcohol rehabilitation—funding for which has been quadrupled by this Government—will have a positive impact on that offender’s likelihood of reoffending when released. I also agreed entirely with Kris Faafoi when he said that this balances the need to maintain rights for the victims but also a focus on the rehabilitation of the offenders.

But there are a few specific instances I would like to reference in the brief time I have. I did not sit on the Law and Order Committee but I had the privilege of sitting in on one of the hearings of evidence in Auckland in which we heard very moving and sobering evidence from a very brave woman, whom I am not going to name in the House, who was the victim of a double murder in which both of her parents were killed by two offenders. I was impressed with the view that this particular victim of crime—of the most serious crime you can imagine—took in that she felt that one of the offenders had made significant inroads into being rehabilitated. She felt that that offender was, in fact, led by the other one. And when the victims themselves feel that the person who offended against them no longer poses such a risk to society, it is good to see legislation giving that person an ability to have their voice heard at an appropriate time and in a convenient and sensitive manner.

Similarly, this particular victim felt that the other offender, who was the ringleader in this particular double murder, had not been rehabilitated. So it is absolutely right and proper that instead of being hauled before a Parole Board on an annual basis, which is a very upsetting experience for victims of these serious crimes, the board has the ability to determine that, in fact, no positive change has been made by that particular offender, that there is still a significant risk of reoffending, and, therefore, that offender will have a 2-year delay before they are reheard by the Parole Board.

Also, I look at some of the technical changes in this bill, including the ability to have hearings conducted by video or phone link. This is a sensible, progressive change in the modern era. Not only will it contribute—as my colleagues on this side of the House have alluded to—a $700,000 reduction in costs, which is a saving to the taxpayer that can be much better spent on crime prevention, but also there are safety considerations for corrections officers, police, prison guards, and those who deal with offenders in the transport. We are going to keep those staff much safer by greater use of videoconferencing. Thank you.

I call Brett Hudson—a 5-minute call.

It is an absolute delight to speak to this bill, for more than one reason. One, because it is a very sensible and pragmatic bill that will help to place victims at the heart of the justice system, which is a key priority for this Government. Also, because there is broad support, or there appears to be broad support, for this bill across the House. Thirdly, because we all seem to think that it is the same provisions of the bill that are so positive for victims and also offenders, in fact.

If we look, for instance, at reducing the number of unnecessary parole hearings by permitting Parole Boards to extend the period between hearings from 1 to 2 years—or, in the case of indeterminate sentences, in fact, from 3 to 5-year intervals—then that is obviously a positive thing not only for the victims, who will perhaps not feel as revictimised as they might do under the existing conditions of having hearings each year, but actually also for the offenders in some ways. You could argue that coming up to a Parole Board each year, irrespective of what progress has or has not been made, could actually lead to a situation where some inmates build up false hope of their real chances of being released at that point in time. So one can only imagine that when they are unsuccessful—the average is three hearings for each release, so they most often are—they quite possibly leave those hearings feeling quite quashed, and that in itself is not that good for rehabilitation. Although that is important, let me not detract from the fact that the heart of this is actually ensuring that the victims feel they are placed at the forefront of our priorities.

The other really positive thing that I saw in this bill is this idea of relevant activities. Although we might be putting in place something that is going to say to inmates that the interval between their hearings is going to be extended, by taking into consideration at the board hearings these pre-determined, if you will, relevant activities and milestones, there will, in fact, exist provision to bring those hearings forward. So an offender or an inmate who chooses to focus on the rehabilitation services and opportunities in front of them has the opportunity to bring forward the date when they will be considered again. That surely gives those inmates hope and a real sense they can have some control or some influence over their destiny and the time they will spend in prison. That, I think, is a very, very important thing, as well.

There are another couple of considerations that I think are very positive, and they actually return back to the victims, too. It is extremely positive to see that victims will not only be notified of the first hearing date but actually be notified of when the next date is scheduled, too, so they will not be in any uncertainty. If there is an order given that it will be a 2-year time frame, the victims have the same knowledge and certainty of that as, in fact, the inmate does, and also of any milestone, any relevant activity or activities that might change that and bring the date forward. That surely helps the victims of those original crimes to be able to better prepare themselves for those hearings when they are going to come up.

Also a part, which I think it is fair to say would probably have come as a bit of a surprise to most New Zealanders, is that under the conditions as they exist today there is no provision for the Parole Board to be made automatically aware of civil protection orders that may exist. There is the ability for the board to request information. That information is then considered by a judge, and the judge makes the determination of whether the board is made aware of the information at that time. These amendments will permit the boards to become automatically notified of it, which surely leads to better consideration by the boards, better judgments, better decisions, and, ultimately, better outcomes for the victim principally, but, as I have said earlier, actually, when you think about it, also for the inmates.

Overall, what I can say about this is that we could talk about saving $700,000 a year, and that is always a good thing. We could talk about being very much focused on rehabilitation, the introduction of case management systems for all prisoners, and the introduction of working prisons schemes across all of our prisons to help prepare inmates for their release. What I would like to conclude with is to say that this bill is putting the victim at the heart, where they should be. It is a pragmatic and sensible bill, which I commend to the House.