Estimates Debate — Justice Sector

We now come to the justice sector—volume B.5, volume 7. The question is that Vote Attorney-General, Vote Corrections, Vote Courts, Vote Justice, Vote Parliamentary Counsel, Vote Police, and Vote Serious Fraud stand part of the schedules.

I am very proud to say that under this Government’s very tough and focused stand on law and order, New Zealand’s recorded crime rate is, almost without exception, falling. It is at its lowest level since 1978. That is a record that this Government should be well proud of. But it is not just the Government, of course, that is delivering services in the justice sector. It is all of those—our police, our Department of Corrections, our Attorney-General—who run our courts system, and all of those in the justice sector who are delivering on behalf of the people of New Zealand.

One of the focuses for the National Government is getting the key justice sector agencies—that is, the Ministry of Justice, the police, and the Department of Corrections—to further drive crime down. That is what they are doing, because what we want to do is reduce the impact of crime on all New Zealanders, and we are also focusing on the victims of crime. I know that my colleagues are keen to pick up that aspect of the justice sector.

However, several challenges do remain. When she came to our committee, the Minister of Justice, Amy Adams, made a particular point of focusing on those issues. We know that the incidence and also the impact of crime is very unevenly spread. Research has found that 6 percent of adults experience 54 percent of all crime. That is not a figure to be proud of, and that is a figure that this Government is focusing on.

One area of concern is the overrepresentation of Māori in our criminal justice system, both as offenders but also as victims of crime. Māori are imprisoned at a rate of six times the rate of non-Māori, and there are other statistics that do not make for good reading. Whether or not they make for good reading is no reason not to focus on them, and that is one of the focuses of the Minister and the Ministry of Justice.

The other focus that I want to talk about in my contribution is family violence. The Minister acknowledged to the Justice and Electoral Committee that although crime is at a 63-year low, the high incidence of family crime is unacceptable to her. It is unacceptable to us, and so it should be. Reducing the incidence of family violence is the top priority for the Ministry of Justice. About half of all homicides in New Zealand are as a result of family violence. On average, 14 women, seven men, and eight children are killed by a member of their family every year. These are shameful statistics. Around half of all violent offence charges before the courts relate to domestic violence, and in 2013 there were 11,700 prosecutions for domestic violence - related offences.

So what are we doing about that? In July of last year, the Government announced a new package of family violence reforms, and I am going to go through those because they are significant and they are important. There is the review of the Domestic Violence Act to ensure that it keeps victims safe and also holds offenders to account. There is the trialling of mobile safety alarms for victims so that they can notify the police of an emergency and of their location. Just as a sidebar, the police are now no longer necessarily sitting back at the station, waiting for those alarms to go off. They are out in the community, using new technologies out on the streets, and being proactive in protecting victims of crime.

This Government has established a Chief Victims Advisor, and that adviser is to the Minister of Justice, to advise on the needs and views of victims of crime, including domestic violence victims. It is the views of the victims of crime that are so terribly important in putting victims at the centre of our justice system. We have heard, through a number of bill considerations, that it is the victims who need to have a voice. Whether it is through the victim impact statement or whether it is putting a voice to the impact on victims, that is so necessary.

I rise to take a call. I want to speak about both Vote Corrections and Vote Attorney-General. As my colleague Kelvin Davis has highlighted, the terrible fiasco that is the Serco contract at the remand prison at Mt Eden is a disgrace. The performance of the Minister of Corrections has been abysmal, so much so that he really is very aptly called the Minister of Corrections, because I have never seen a Minister have to make so many corrections in the House after so many mistakes.

One of the core responsibilities of the State is that if it incarcerates someone and takes away their liberty, it should at least protect the person from harm. The fact is that this Minister of Corrections has so woefully overseen the Serco contract that we have seen, through television, assaults and people who have died as a consequence of their treatment in a corrections facility. It is a woeful indictment of the National Government’s conduct of this performance, and it is a failure of its responsibilities to New Zealand. It is what was predicted would happen with Serco, because the only way it can significantly save costs is to have lower levels of staff and, therefore, lower levels of supervision of prisoners. That results in the sorts of debacle that we have seen overseas, where it has been severely criticised, and in New Zealand.

I want to talk briefly about Vote Attorney-General. Last Friday in the High Court, Justice Heath delivered the first declaration ever under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. For the first time since that Act was passed, 25 years ago this year, there was a declaration that legislation pushed through this Parliament was in breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. That legislation arbitrarily stripped all prisoners of their right to vote. There is not much sympathy in society for prisoners, but, as we have seen in the Serco case, they should have some rights.

Why the High Court made this unprecedented declaration of non-compliance with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act is that it found that the National Government legislation, which was opposed by the Labour Party and other Opposition parties in this Parliament, including the Greens, was arbitrary. Previously, if you were in prison for more than 3 years you lost your right to vote. The legislation stripped the right from all prisoners and that was found to be arbitrary. Why? Well, if you are someone who has decent home circumstances and can get home detention, you can vote. But if you are someone from a difficult situation who has not got anywhere to go, and therefore you do not get home detention and you are put in prison, and you do not get the right to vote. That is arbitrary. What else? Well, if you have a 2-year prison sentence and it happens to fall between elections, you get the right to vote, but if your 2-year prison sentence happens to traverse a voting period you lose the right to vote.

We sought, then, an urgent debate on the issue in Parliament—it is difficult to get these issues debated in Parliament because the Government is clearly, or should be, embarrassed about this terrible outcome—and we were refused. It is within the jurisdiction of the Speaker to refuse that, but it highlights the need for a change to the arrangements in respect of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

As Andrew Little said in a recent speech referring to the Labour Party policy at the last election, we think we should adopt the recommendation of the Constitutional Advisory Panel that says that when the courts find legislation to be in breach of fundamental rights—and this is one of the fundamental civil liberties of any democracy; choosing whom you are going to have to run the country—that sort of taking away of rights can change electoral outcomes. We saw that in Florida in the presidential election, when they stripped so many people of their voting rights and changed the outcome of the world, given that we had George W Bush, who then invaded Iraq, and it led to these terrible problems, in part, that we have got on the other side of the world.

When these sorts of things are identified by the courts, they should automatically come back to Parliament and be re-debated. It does not mean to say that Parliament should hand over to the courts the right to strike down primary legislation—I do not think we should do that—but I thought that the recommendation of the Constitutional Advisory Panel of this middle course should be followed. If a declaration of non-compliance with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act is made, it should come back to Parliament, be put on the Order Paper, and the legislation concerned should be re-debated by this Parliament rather than the breach being ignored.

I have been looking forward to taking a call in this appropriations debate in the justice sector area. There is a lot to cover, and I want to take a double call, which I will obviously call for in due course, to cover off some of that. I think the starting place for me is to look at where we are sitting, and then I want to talk a bit about where we want to go and the direction of travel that we have prioritised in this Budget.

The headline, really, is that crime in this country is at a 35-year low. That really is a tremendous achievement, and a huge amount of credit has to go to everyone who works in the sector. It is not just the Government—there are a lot of reasons why things are working well at the community level—but, certainly, the police and the justice sector agencies should really be commended, I think, for a tremendous deliverable for their work in that space.

We have a Better Public Services target—target seven—that looks at crime in this country. We set a target of getting crime down by 20 percent by 2017. I can tell this Committee that we have already reduced total crime by 18 percent, and we are well on track to reach our target long before the final target date. Violent crime is down by around 10 percent. That one is harder and slower to move, as you would expect, but none the less good progress has been made. In youth crime we set a target of a 25 percent reduction, which we then increased to 30 percent because we have already exceeded it. Youth crime is down 38 percent.

I do just want to take a moment to commend the tremendous work of the Youth Court in New Zealand and the system that has been developed in New Zealand, which is held in high regard internationally for the way we work with our young offenders. What we know is that our best chance to stop people becoming clients, if you like, of the justice sector, is when they are young. Equally, if they get on to a path of repeated offending as children, then they are the ones who are most likely to become long-term offenders. If you take the 1970 population cohort and you look at all the crime committed by that particular cohort, 80 percent of all crime committed by them is committed by people who had their first conviction before the age of 20. So working well with our young offenders is fundamentally important, so as to not let them get into the cycle of a conviction and a sentence from which it is that much harder to come back and re-enter society. So in the youth crime space tremendous work has been done.

I also want to touch on one of the initiatives that I very well remember being passed when I was a member of the House, when the Hon Simon Power was in my role, and that is the offender levy. Legislation that was passed at that time imposed a levy of $50 on offenders to help contribute towards providing better services for victims. At the time, one half of this House completely derided it and said that it would never work, that it was a nonsense, and that it was window dressing. One half of the House said it was a stupid and that they would get rid of it. Well, that levy has exceeded all collection expectations. So far we have collected $16.5 million, which has been entirely—entirely—set aside for victim support services. Because of that, we have been able to provide services that were never previously available to victims. More than 40,000 victims have had services funded by this Government, thanks to that one piece of legislation, which was completely derided and criticised by the Opposition. One of those services, of course, was the 24/7 support service offered to victims by Victim Support, which is funded by us.

Ms Dean, the chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee, talked about family violence in her speech on this section. I am pleased she did, because, as Ms Dean noted, this is the area that I have made my No. 1 priority. I did that with some degree of trepidation, because this is a hard area to make a dent in, and if I was a more self-preserving Minister, I probably would have picked things that were a little bit easier to deliver on. But, like my colleague Hekia Parata, I am here to make a difference on things that matter to New Zealand. We are not here to do the easy stuff, and if this country really wants to get a grip on one of the most egregious, horrific, and embarrassing statistics in our society, we have to deal with family violence.

Let me just tell the Committee a couple of things that highlight how unacceptably high the incidence of family violence is. We have the highest rate in the OECD of reported violence against intimate partners. That is not what anyone in this House would accept for a country like New Zealand. We have more than 100,000 notifications to the police of family violence incidents each year. That, effectively, is one every 5 minutes—every 5 minutes. So during my speech there will be at least two notifications to the police of family violence.

What is really scary, though, is the statistic that tells us that, on average, a victim of family violence will experience 21 instances of family violence before she—it is generally she; not always, of course—will pick the phone to the police. So we are getting one call to the police every 5 minutes, and yet we know that behind that there is this enormous history of offending that has not even been registered into the system. Half of our homicides come from family violence, so if we want to make a continued dent in that hard, sticky area of serious violence, it has to be through dealing with family violence.

On average, 14 women, seven men, and eight children are murdered in this country every year by someone they have a family relationship with, and that cannot be allowed to continue. We had a remarkable statistic from my colleague the Hon Michael Woodhouse about police time. There was a discussion in the last speech around making better use of police time. Well, 41 percent of all police response time is spent on responding to family violence. So if we want to have more police out on our streets keeping us safe and doing the things we would want them to do, we have to deal with this issue. The statistics are just mind-numbingly horrific, but what I am encouraged by is the fact that I have not found anyone in this Committee, in the NGO sector, or anywhere in New Zealand, actually, who is not committed and willing to help try to solve this problem and make things work better.

I want to thank members of this Committee who have worked cooperatively, collaboratively, and across party lines with me to think about how we can do this better. I will say that I do not believe that this is an area that any Government of any political colour has really got on top of. Nor do I think it is one that any Government has not tried very hard to deal with. For years and years we have had countless reports and initiatives and experts and spending, but the reality is that we are not getting cut-through. I cannot stand here and promise that we will solve that, but I can absolutely stand here and promise this Committee that while I am the Minister of Justice this is going to be what I think about every single day, and in this year’s Budget you have seen from us a commitment to ensure that this is right at the heart of our work programme.

Just yesterday the Minister for Social Development and I released a stocktake of how the Government has worked in this area to date. What is interesting to me is that it is the first time that that degree of comprehensive, all-of-Government assessment has been undertaken, and it is certainly something that the sector has been calling for for a while. We, as a Government—and I use that term not in the executive sense but in the Public Service sense—have to be better integrated in how we deliver our services. It is no good having different agencies looking at this lens through an entirely siloed, vertical approach without giving thought to how other agencies are interacting in this space. It is inefficient, it is expensive, and, actually, quite frankly, it can be damaging and counter-productive.

So Minister Tolley and I undertook a comprehensive stocktake, which revealed, quite surprisingly, that we are spending $1.4 billion a year on family violence—$1.4 billion—and yet very little of it is spent on prevention and screening. Almost all of it is spent on response. It is easy to look at this in the Budget round, but, actually, trying to re-engineer that work programme is going to be quite a piece of work. Later, in the coming weeks, you will see more announcements from us about how we see that work programme continuing to develop and evolve, and I can assure this Committee that, as I say, while I am in the role it is something I will continue to focus on.

Let me just take the time I have left to touch on a couple of other initiatives, one of which is the process to appoint a Chief Victims Advisor to ensure that the voice of victims remains absolutely at the heart of the development of Government policy. We saw what a tremendous advance it was to the quality of policy advice when we appointed, for the first time ever, a New Zealand Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor to really ensure that we had very good, high-level scientific analysis at the heart of the Government. I want that same sort of rigour around ensuring that the victim’s perspective is represented at the heart of the policy process, and that is why we are appointing that person.

Finally, the Harmful Digital Communications Act is a piece of legislation that I am incredibly proud of. It is being talked about now in a number of countries as a model on how to address this issue. There is still work to do to appoint the approved agencies that will have the core role in educating the community and user groups and working to resolve disputes, but this is legislation that reflects that harm in the modern environment can be caused in a myriad of different ways. We have to be responsive, and we have to be continually reviewing our harm frameworks to ensure we have those settings right. We know that harm in the online world is not only real and pervasive but incredibly damaging, and the number of suicides and cases of serious harm that have occurred as a result are unacceptable. I am very proud of that legislation.

Could I just begin my comments by acknowledging that the Minister of Justice has just said a great deal that I can agree with. I do not agree with all of National’s programme, clearly, but I say that in a context of believing that if we are to reduce crime and to make some real inroads into offending and our management of offenders, we need to endeavour to depoliticise some of the issues—to, perhaps, tone down some of the aggression, shall we say, between the various sides in this debate about how to deal with issues around justice.

So with that point, I would say that if one looks at the estimates for the whole suite of justice portfolios—corrections, police, courts, and so on—it is very difficult to make an argument that we are underspending on justice. That collective I have mentioned—the spend would be something well north of $5 billion, I think. It is a significant amount of money, and it has increased over recent years. Corrections, for example—in the early 2000s the spend on corrections, I think, was about $460 million. This year it is around $1.5 billion. That sort of increase is unsustainable. I think that the issue is not that we are spending too little, but that we are not spending it as well as we might do, and therefore we are not getting the outcomes that we might seek to achieve. “Justice reinvestment” is the phrase that is commonly used by advocates of taking some political risk—and there is political risk in it—but it is being willing to rethink and to reconsider where we focus the spend on justice, where we put the majority of that money, and what outcomes we will expect from that.

Offending is trending down. The crime rate, as the Minister noted, is at a historic low. The peculiar anomaly with that, of course, is that imprisonment is at an all-time high. We need to investigate and analyse that peculiar disconnect. I think that in terms of the popular perception that crime is actually on the increase, I think our friends in the fourth estate need to consider their dramatic over-reporting of crime, which we see constantly across all of our media. I will not dwell on that, but I do believe that is another matter that we need to pay some attention to.

To state the obvious, the best investment is that which prevents crime and that which reduces the numbers of victims. We will never eliminate crime and offending—that would be some sort of happy nirvana, some utopia we are unlikely to ever achieve—but, certainly, we can reduce it. To give credit where it is due, we have seen some very positive moves in terms of resourcing and practice. I think of the police, particularly with the Prevention First strategy they have adopted and neighbourhood policing teams. These are all very positive moves that will help reduce crime.

Progress reported.

Report adopted.

The House adjourned at 5.56 p.m.