Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill

This bill obviously sits in two rather concise parts. Part 1 is really the opportunity for the Committee to talk about the relevant legislation, which this bill heavily references. I think it is really important that we make sure that those references are accurate. As a member from the Greens has already pointed out, where the bill was seeking to mirror the legislation that sets out what identifying particulars the police can seek, it actually went broader and further than existing legislation in New Zealand. I think it is important that we pay attention under the preliminary provisions to ensure that this bill does not overreach. Because as the Minister said in her first reading speech, she has tried to draft a piece of legislation that substantively mimics existing legislation in New Zealand. So that is why in my contribution to the Committee I will be looking at the comparisons between this bill and existing legislation.

I want to start with the purpose clause because obviously in the purpose clause you would hope that the Government would capture the primary aim of this legislation. The purpose clause states that “The purpose of this Act is to obtain information from returning offenders …”. Note there that it is from returning offenders. There is an absence of talking about, obviously, the agreement that we have signed with Australia, because we know now from the Minister of Justice that we are receiving incomplete information for some offenders. So we are in this Act setting out how we will obtain information from returning offenders and, secondly, “establish release conditions for offenders returning to New Zealand following a prison sentence of more than 1 year in an overseas jurisdiction.”

There are two really important points in that purpose clause. Firstly, there is the question around the other jurisdictions. We are talking about just overseas jurisdictions in this purpose clause. A lot of the discussion in this House has been restricted to Australia. I would find it really helpful if the Minister in the chair could share with us, because none of the regulatory impact statements discuss any additional analysis carried out beyond Australia, what kind of information-sharing agreements we have with other overseas jurisdictions that will allow this bill to apply to them? How workable is it for those overseas jurisdictions? With New Zealand and Australia we know we have comparable legislation. Is it possible to make sure that we interpret overseas offences in the same way for a jurisdiction that goes beyond Australia? That is the first point.

The second point from the purpose clause is that nowhere in that purpose clause does it talk about the safety of the community, reintegration, or rehabilitation. The words, again, are simply to “establish release conditions”. The reason I raise this is that within the Parole Act, which is heavily cross-referenced in this legislation, yes, there is a relatively short purpose clause but that is because within the Parole Act 2002 it was pretty groundbreaking in the fact that it established a set of what were called guiding principles. So section 7 of the first part of the Parole Act 2002 talks about the guiding principles of the Parole Act, an excellent piece of legislation that the Hon Phil Goff worked tirelessly on right up until 2002 when it was introduced. Some of those guiding principles are around the way that the Parole Board itself makes a decision about the release of a prisoner. Obviously that goes beyond the jurisdiction of this purpose clause because the decision has already been made for release. But it also goes to the guiding principles of release conditions.

For instance, we see in the relevant guiding principles of the Parole Act, which is heavily cross-referenced in this bill, that in section 7(2)(a): “Other principles that must guide the Board’s decisions are—(a) that offenders must not be detained any longer than is consistent with the safety of the community, and that they must not be subject to release conditions that are more onerous, or last longer, than is consistent with the safety of the community;”. Those would have been useful guiding principles to establish in the purpose clause of this legislation because, as the Minister has set out, we are trying to mirror that legislation in this legislation and those guiding principles sitting alongside that purpose clause would have given, I think, some groups both the comfort and the satisfaction that we are not trying to apply here double jeopardy, an extra layer of conditions on someone who has already served their time, but rather a proportionate set of conditions. So that was a lost opportunity, I think, in that purpose clause not to have, say, some principle clause alongside it.

Coming back, then, to the idea, though, of reintegration and reducing reoffending. If we look at the regulatory impact statement, when it talked about the purpose of this bill, it said that “The overarching goals are to protect the public from reoffending, and provide greater support for the reintegration of returning offenders.” That, in the executive summary of the regulatory impact statement, is meant to be the main goal of this bill, and yet none of that language is contained in the purpose clause. Because if, for instance, you were looking to the overarching goal of protecting the public from reoffending and providing greater support, you would surely use the evidence that the Ministry of Justice has around what the most successful way to prevent reoffending is.

I had a little look on the Ministry of Justice website to find what it was setting out as best practice when it comes to reducing reoffending. It has a little document here called “Effective interventions to reduce re-offending”. Again, if that was the primary purpose of this bill, I would have expected some of this to be contained in the purpose clause, or even in the bill. But when we look at this set of guidelines—yes, it does pertain to youth offending, because, obviously, that has been a focus of the Ministry of Justice. It is an area where we assume that we have a better opportunity to reduce reoffending, but the principles are the same. It states: “Good interventions that reduce re-offending are based on key principles to ensure they are effective when implemented, and include key components …”. These are the key components—this is what I would have expected, either in the purpose clause or, at least, in Part 1 of the bill: “To ensure interventions are effective they: start with a good assessment of a person in the context of their friends, family, whānau, and community to identify needs and re-offending risks.” Nowhere do we see, in the purpose clause or in this bill, set out that there would be any analysis of that kind of those offenders.

Secondly, “work with the young person holistically to provide timely and appropriate support …”. We know there is no support set out in this bill for those being reintegrated, because there was not even a Budget bid made for it—it is simply around monitoring. Also, “focus on getting a young person back into education and training …”—and in this case it would be work—and “focus on transition back into the community”. So if the overarching goal, according to the regulatory impact statement, was protecting the public from reoffending, I would have expected to see some of the Ministry of Justice’s guiding principles around reducing reoffending somewhere up front in this bill. They are completely absent, not just from the purpose clause but from the bill itself.

Instead, what does it canvass as the options? In the regulatory impact statement, option 1 is enhanced support services; option 2 is registration and monitoring of returned offenders—and we know that the definition of those is set out in Part 1; option 3 is a mandatory system imposing release conditions on specified groups of offenders; option 4 is a discretionary system where the District Court imposes release conditions on individual offenders. We have, essentially, in this bill a hybrid of options 3 and 4. Maybe that is why the purpose clause has not included anything that speaks to the wider issue of community safety by reducing reoffending, because it did not opt for that option. It could have combined them, but that is not what the bill has provided.

I want to come down a little further, under the interpretation clause, because as I have set out, we need to make sure that we analyse each of these clauses to check that they are being used appropriately. I want to ask the Minister in the chair a question though. Under “overseas jurisdiction” it includes the self-governing States of the Cook Islands, Niue, and Tokelau. Why has that been included? It “excludes the islands and territories within the Realm …” but not the protectorate. Is there anything to suggest from Niue or the Cook Islands or Tokelau that they plan on bringing in a regime like that? Because, otherwise, it seems interesting to me that they are specifically included in this regime and in this monitoring regime.

I would just like to follow on, obviously, from Jacinda Ardern, who has raised some very good points about the purpose of this bill—that is, the purpose being “to obtain information from returning offenders and establish release conditions for offenders …” There is nothing there about rehabilitation and the reduction of reoffending. These people, who are going to arrive on our doorstep within the coming days, have no support conditions around them to help them get back on their feet, having been deported from their support systems—their family and friends—which, as Jacinda Ardern says, is one of the key elements of reducing reoffending and helping people to rehabilitate.

But I just want to touch on the release conditions, and release conditions in the interpretation clause mean “a standard release condition or a special condition”. I have pulled out the Department of Corrections information from its website there. It says: “Standard conditions apply to all offenders and can include: reporting regularly to community probation.” That sounds well and good for somebody who has been released from a New Zealand prison out into their community near their family and friends, but what happens to these men and women who have turned up in New Zealand, who have no connection to New Zealand, and who might arrive in Auckland, for example, but find that the best place for them, somewhere where they can try to find work or maybe establish themselves with a family member, is somewhere else around the country?

I take the example of Raymond—and I forget his last name again, sorry—who left New Zealand as a young child and lived all his life in Australia. He is 50-something now, but he originally came from somewhere near Dunedin. On his return to New Zealand, he has been put up by a compassionate couple up in Whangarei. For now, Whangarei is where he is living, and he may have to report to a community probation officer in Whangarei, but the reality is that he does not have a job in Whangarei and he is looking for work elsewhere. So he is going to be moving around the country to various places while he is looking for work, and it is going to be difficult for him to find where those community probation offices are in the various towns that he may have to move to in order to earn a living.

So there are restrictions on living and working arrangements. Well, the biggest restriction for them is the fact that they do not have anywhere to live. They arrive in New Zealand, I am told that they will get a couple of hundred dollars in their back pocket and then 5 nights in a motel or hotel somewhere, and then they are on their own. How on earth are their living arrangements going to be restricted when they have nowhere to live? Will they be banned from living in shop doorways on Lambton Quay or under bridges in Auckland?

There are restrictions on associating with certain people. Look, these guys are going to turn up in New Zealand with no support networks around them, no family, no friends, and nobody to turn to. I have already said in the second reading that my concern is that they are going to be just fodder for gang members, who are going to see these guys who they know have possibly been in prison and in detention centres. They will be ripe pickings for the Killer Beez, the Mongrel Mob, and the Headhunters, without the support networks around them, which are really necessary. Remember, this bill addresses just the monitoring of release conditions; it does not address anything around supporting them in their social environment.

Another standard condition is the limitations on the offender’s ability to move to a new residential address. Well, it goes without saying that they are going to have difficulty moving to a new residential address. In fact, they are going to have difficulty moving to any address, let alone to a new residential address. We understand that these conditions are there so that if they are a sex offender, they do not actually end up living next to a school or a park or a playground or an early childhood centre or somewhere where there are vulnerable people. We understand that. But it is one thing to have these standard release conditions for prisoners released from New Zealand prisons; it is another thing to have them for people who are coming back from Australia from detention centres or having been released from prison in Australia.

I would also just like to touch on the interpretation clause—and again I spoke about this in the second reading—and the definition of a “returning offender” and a “returning prisoner”. “A ‘returning offender’—(a) is a person who has been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction of an offence for conduct that constitutes an imprisonable offence in New Zealand and, being liable for deportation or removal as a result of that conviction, has returned to New Zealand; and (b) includes a returning prisoner.” The other one is the criterion for a person returning as a prisoner, I think it is meant to say—the wording in the heading in clause 17 is a bit weird. “The Commissioner must determine that a person is a returning prisoner if the Commissioner is satisfied that the person—(a) has been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction of an offence for conduct that constitutes an imprisonable offence in New Zealand; and (b) has, in respect of that conviction, been sentenced to—(i) a term of imprisonment of more than 1 year; or (ii) 2 or more terms of imprisonment that are cumulative,”.

The reason I raise this is if you look at Kō Rūtene, a guy who has not been charged, let alone imprisoned, let alone detained—do conditions like this apply to a man like Kō Rūtene, who is detained in a detention centre or a prison in Australia without charges and may, in time, be sent back to New Zealand? Does this—

💬 Hon Amy Adams: No.

The Minister is shaking her head. So Kō Rūtene will come back to New Zealand, if he is deported, and he will just fit back into society? That is good to hear—that is good to hear. The question is why on earth he is locked up in Australia in the first place, and our Government is doing nothing to address that. Maybe it has information that we do not know, but it just seems really strange on face value that this is a guy who was there to protect the Prime Minister in Afghanistan and would have laid down his life if he had to, and yet the Prime Minister will not get off his feet in order to assist that gentleman.

As we go through this bill, no doubt there is going to be a number of issues that we raise. Again, the whole speed of this process has meant that there are, I believe, drafting errors. I will just return to the heading of clause 7, which says “Who is returning offender”. That does not quite make sense to me. The heading for clause 17, “Criteria for determination that person is returning prisoner”—again, the old schoolteacher in me is slightly offended by the grammar. Maybe I am just missing something in my naivety, but as we go through I am sure that more errors will emerge. It is just an example of why it is necessary to take our time in drafting legislation and not rushing it through, as this has been, in 12 days, I believe—because we have known that this situation has been on the cards for the last 12 months. Kia ora.

Normally in this part of a Committee stage debate we would have the opportunity to reflect on comments that submitters to the select committee had made, and so on. Many of the things that we would reflect on at this point in the proceedings would be whether the bill is going to meet the stated purpose; whether there were other options that were not considered that should have been; whether, in fact, there are parts of the bill that do not address some of the issues that it purports to address; and whether there are, in fact, gaps in the legislation. Of course, our ability to do that comprehensively and thoroughly is somewhat constrained in this instance, because the bill has not been to a select committee. It has had its first and second readings already today, and it will probably be passed into law, if not tonight then certainly at some point tomorrow. Therefore we have to, I guess, guess at what people might have said when they were submitting, and try to identify the gaps in the legislation within a very short and constrained period of time.

The first thing that leaps out at me in reading through the legislation is one of the big gaps, for me, and that is if the purpose of this bill is to identify people who will be at risk of reoffending when they are deported to New Zealand, the first question that I have is not about whether we should be fingerprinting them and all of those things, which the bill adequately deals with; it is about what this bill does about reintegration and support within the community for people who have offended whilst in Australia, for people whose base is primarily in Australia—or another country, because, of course, this bill is not specific only to Australia. There is nothing in the bill that deals to that.

Of course, reintegration is one of the most important factors in preventing reoffending. Everybody who works within the corrections system will say that for a prisoner who has recently been released—and bear in mind, the types of offenders whom we are talking about in this legislation have been released only within the last 6 months or so—the amount of support they get within the community during those critical first few months is actually a big factor in whether or not they are likely to go on and reoffend. There is very little in the bill that deals with that issue.

The second part of the bill that leapt out at me was the fact that this requires the Department of Corrections to trigger things in the first place. There is nothing automatic about this. This requires the Department of Corrections to be on top of things, and I have to say I have some real concerns, given the recent performance of the Department of Corrections, as to whether or not it is actually up to the job of doing that. We have seen huge issues and huge concerns raised about the performance of the Department of Corrections, and yet we are now placing this enormous emphasis on it being the agency that would have to instigate any of these things to take place. That concerns me greatly.

So we come back to the basic question, which is: why are we here, what are we trying to achieve, and will this bill actually deliver on it? Our priority is, and I am sure, actually, this is a shared priority across all of Parliament, keeping New Zealanders safe—keeping New Zealanders safe and making sure that we are adequately monitoring and supporting people who have previously been sentenced to a term of imprisonment who are released into the community. We should not approach that differently if they have been released from a term of imprisonment in a different country from the way we would approach it if they had been released in New Zealand. That is a principle that I think we all support. The question is whether, in fact, this bill adequately addresses that.

There are also questions that I have around the fairness of the way this legislation is being approached and the fairness of the way some of the people who find themselves subject to this might be treated. I have got questions about why the 6-month provision applies in the way that it does. As I said a moment ago, this applies to people who have been released from prison within the last 6 months. What if it was 7 months? What if it was a serious offence that they were released from only 7 months ago? How does the 6-month time frame get arrived at? That is something that I would very much like to hear further feedback on.

The purpose clause, clause 3, which I want to turn my attention to, makes it clear that these provisions apply only to someone who is “returning to New Zealand following a prison sentence of more than 1 year in an overseas jurisdiction.” I think that this is something that people at home would maybe get a little confused by, given some of the recent rhetoric around that. So, yes, this bill would cover rapists and murderers, absolutely, but it is also going to cover a number of offenders who are much, much lower down the scale of offending. Some, you could even say, would be deemed to be petty crimes, although the phrase “petty crime” is something that I am hesitant to use, because all crime is a crime, at the end of the day.

But these are people shoplifting, for example—in some areas that would have a prison sentence of more than 1 year, so someone could be deported back to New Zealand for shoplifting and they would fall within this category. There are probably some vehicular offences that may end up in this category as well, and I think we should consider all of the range of offences that might be covered by this legislation and not simply say that the only people who are going to be covered by this are rapists, murderers, child sex offenders, and so on. That is not the case. It is going to cover quite a spectrum of people, and the response to the different levels of offending needs to be different. Again, there is very scarce detail from the Government in the supporting material supplied around this bill for how that response will be different, depending on the nature of the offending that has taken place.

We are only on Part 1 now, and I want to get into the substance of some of my wider concerns when we get to Part 2, which contains, I think, the operative clauses of this. But I do want to put on record just my general concern about the gaps in the legislation, because simply collecting the information and bringing someone under the purview of the Department of Corrections actually, really, is just a fraction of the situation. I am far more interested in what the Government is going to do to support reintegration.

If we are looking at people who have been living overseas for a long period of time, they may have no roots in New Zealand whatsoever—no connection with the communities that they find themselves in. They will be isolated, and, in fact, fingerprinting them, even putting them under supervision, is not going to change that, unless they are supported. They are still going to be just as likely to reoffend, even if they have had all their fingerprints taken and are being supervised. They are still just as likely to reoffend if they do not have the adequate support in place. I do not have any satisfaction or any evidence to suggest that the Government is truly prepared for that and truly has a plan in place for how to deal with that. Although the Labour Party is certainly supporting this legislation through—because we support the intent of the legislation, which is to keep New Zealanders safe—let us not overlook the fact that this legislation has not had the scrutiny that it deserves and that it should, in fact, be more thoroughly examined.

The final point that I want to make in this, my first contribution to this debate, and I hope to make many, many more, is I hope—

💬 Jacinda Ardern: Many?

Oh, many, many more. I hope that this legislation will be re-examined in relatively short order. Whilst I can understand why the Government wants to progress this legislation with some urgency now, because it has not dealt with the issue adequately up until now—it has known about this for a year, and it has taken it that long to bring it to the House, and therefore we have no choice but to progress it under urgency now—I hope that will not preclude it actually having a more thorough examination farther down the track. I hope that the House will be back reconsidering these matters with proper public scrutiny, including a full select committee hearing, so that we can actually make sure that we are doing the right thing and we are not just putting in place a knee-jerk reaction that will not do what it purports to do.

The heart of this particular debate on Part 1 is the purpose clause. The purpose clause sets out, in a reasonably anodyne way, that this legislation is about obtaining information from returning offenders and establishing release conditions for offenders who have come back to New Zealand having spent at least a year in a jail overseas. Well, “overseas” is a euphemism. We are not talking about overseas; we are talking about Australia. We know that the reason for this bill is that we are going to have a flood of people sent back to New Zealand because of the changes to the Australian Migration Act 1958, which was changed last year. I want to ask the Minister in the chair, Amy Adams, why she did not act earlier, if the purpose of this bill is actually to protect the safety of New Zealanders. There is not a person in this Chamber who does not want to protect the safety of New Zealanders. Why have we left it so late to pass this legislation through the House? We have got 861—861—deportees about to flood back into New Zealand.

But it is worse than that, because already, in the period, I think, between May and September of this year, 157 offenders have been deported back into New Zealand. I want to ask the Minister what the offending of those 157 people was. What level of risk do they pose to New Zealand society, and why did she do nothing, knowing that these people were coming back—having known that for a year? There are 157 people coming into New Zealand and we do not know what they did, or what level of risk they pose to New Zealand, or what things are in place to protect New Zealanders. I sat in this Chamber the other day, to be accused by the Prime Minister of protecting rapists and murderers who come from Christmas Island. There were none there, but amongst this group of 157 there very likely will be some rapists and murderers. When the Prime Minister can direct an accusation to the rest of the House about how we were backing the rapists and murderers and not worried about public safety—I want this Minister to come clean and say why this negligent Government has allowed 157 people who have offended overseas to come back into New Zealand, some of them possibly rapists and murderers, and why there was nothing put in place in a timely way to protect New Zealanders against that.

The purpose of this bill is to protect the safety of New Zealanders. We are accused of backing rapists and murderers, yet the Government sat on its chuff and did nothing while 157 offenders came back into this country without any release conditions at all, without the knowledge or the information on those people that New Zealanders have a right to know. The Minister has known about this and the pending flood of deportees that the Australians, very kindly, are dumping in New Zealand, for over a year—for over a year. Why do we get legislation not at the eleventh hour but at the 13th hour? There are already 157 of those offenders here, and there are a whole lot more coming. I think it is a fair question, Minister. Why could we not have put this legislation before the House a year ago? Is there any reason why we could not put this legislation—designed with the purpose of protecting the safety of New Zealanders—before the House in a timely way? We have had no explanation of that.

I want to say that if we were looking at the purpose of the bill, which is to protect the safety of New Zealanders, the first thing we would have done was have the guts to stand up to Australia and say “Some of those people should come back to New Zealand, and we will deal with them and we will have proper provisions in place, but some of them are your responsibility. If a kid goes to Australia aged 6 months old, has lived there for 30 years, has children who are Australians and parents who are Australians, and they are shaped by Australia, why is it our problem?”. Did our Government have the guts to stand up to the Australian Government and say that it does not protect the safety of New Zealanders to send people to this country who do not know this country, who have no support mechanisms, who have no friends or family here? They will be alienated. They will be angry that they are separated from their family. And the Australians—our mates, the Australians—have put the problem on us. So if we want to achieve the purpose—

Continuing on with the theme in relation to the purpose of this bill, and also the discussion in relation to rehabilitation, I just want to note for the information of those who are listening to and watching this debate that there were a number of options that the Government had. There were four, in the main that had, at various levels, greater or lesser rehabilitative support. I just want to identify the decision making that the Government went through and some criticisms that I have of it.

In the regulatory impact statement that comes with the bill there is a clear description of the objectives of this legislation, which largely go to the purpose of protecting the public from reoffending and providing greater support for the reintegration of returning offenders. It talks in this official document about there being a strong link between those two objectives. Improving public safety is very strongly linked to providing rehabilitation for returning offenders, so that they have options other than offending to live a good life.

It talks about how vital it is to recognise that returning offenders are potentially vulnerable. They are a vulnerable cohort, whether as a result of age, their socio-economic background, or their lack of social connections on returning to New Zealand. These all increase the risk of their reoffending if they are not supported. Core to reducing reoffending, and therefore risk to public safety, is making sure there is a great deal of support wrapped around those people who come to New Zealand from Australia under the deportation regime.

There are four options that were considered by our Government. One was an enhanced support service—more like a refugee resettlement service, if you like—a wraparound service around the returnees would look at all of their different needs over a period of time of 6 weeks to 2 months. It would be looking at where they were going to live, how they were going to get work, what kind of training they would need—all of those things to help them reintegrate. Option 2 was a register, a bit like the child sex offender register that we have operating here. Options 3 and 4 were mandatory supervision and discretionary supervision. This bill is a mix of options 3 and 4.

So the bill is a mix of options 3 and 4. But in this table, which people can get access to if they want to have a look at the papers, it is very clear that the enhanced support service has the best support for reintegration and, therefore, to help reduce the risk to public safety. It is the best option in terms of maintaining the human rights of returning offenders, making sure that their dignity is upheld and, therefore, our dignity is upheld. The best option in terms of cost-effectiveness—certainly the cheapest of the options—was to have this wraparound support service. This official document gives it a low score for public safety, which actually goes against what the whole paper is arguing—that the best support and wraparound services for these people improve public safety. I am not quite sure how they got there.

Then it goes on to talk about the effectiveness of enhanced support services—which are very cost effective—and that there are existing programmes, both the refugee resettlement programme and the corrections-funded Out of Gate programme, that already exist as models to use. So they did not have to reinvent a new system; there is actually one already in place that could be remodelled to fit the needs of these particular offenders. The cost is about $2,000 a person—compared with the existing system—as set out in the bill. We are talking around $4 million a year, I think, if I have got that right from the papers. Enhanced support services cost less than $2 million—about $1.5 million a year—so they are very cost effective. This is the kind of thing that we need to have alongside either a beefed-up or existing regime. In fact, that is what the regulatory impact statement also says. It says that all the options except for this support system require legislation, and that the enhanced support services could be easily run alongside any other regime we have.

And this is one of the arguments that have been made. If the Minister had engaged with members of the Opposition and with experts outside of the ministries—those who are involved in the reintegration of prisoners or who have been involved in supporting ex-prisoners and reintegrating them back into the community—I think they would have got better advice about how to mould a better policy that properly addresses both the risk to public safety and the connection with the need to reintegrate.

But they did not ask, and so there is a gap in the policy framework that does not properly meld the best practice that we know. We know that the more support for reintegration and rehabilitation, the less likely people are to reoffend. That has to be your first step in developing the policy for these returning offenders. Then from there you start to ramp up if you think that there is a need for more supervision, like we might see with those with very serious convictions or very recent convictions. But the starting point is missing, and so we are not going to get the levels of public protection that we could and should have because we do not have the enhanced support services that even the public officials know will work to reduce the risk to the public.

It goes to the purpose of the bill, which is too narrow and too constrained to really deal with the overall objective of the legislation. It goes to the failure of the Minister’s office to really work with others who are specialists in this area to get the best policy advice. As a result we have a bill hastily drafted that will probably fail in its effect.

I do want to pick up on the points that Metiria Turei was making in her contribution. I too want to refer to the regulatory impact statement, which, as the previous speakers have outlined, gives us what the Government’s objectives are for the legislation. It is on the basis of these objectives that the Labour Party is supporting this legislation, because we too agree with the idea of protecting the public from reoffending and providing greater support for the reintegration of returning offenders. I would venture to suggest that everybody in the House shares those objectives.

So when we follow those objectives through to the purpose clause, things start to go slightly astray in terms of meeting the objectives. It states: “The purpose of this Act is to obtain information from returning offenders and establish release conditions for offenders returning to New Zealand following a prison sentence of more than 1 year in an overseas jurisdiction.” Well, it certainly could be argued that that represents some steps towards objective 18.1 in the regulatory impact statement: “protecting the public from reoffending;”. Getting the necessary information is an important part of that.

What I want to focus on in this part of my contribution is that I think it fails completely to talk about objective 18.2: “providing greater support for the reintegration of returning offenders.” I do that on the basis of looking at the options that the Government considered when deciding what to do in this area. As best as I can tell, having read the regulatory impact statement and the bill but not having had the benefit of a select committee process, where this would have been discussed in some detail and where submissions would have been sought from the likes of the Law Society, for instance, which probably would have provided some very good advice right at this point on whether or not the actual drafted legislation meets the objectives of the Government and whether the purpose clause fulfils its role—so having had a look at that, it is fairly clear that what are options 3 and 4 in the regulatory impact statement, a “Mandatory supervision regime” and a “Discretionary supervision regime”, elements of both of those is what we have ended up with in the legislation in front of us.

If we then go to those two parts of the regulatory impact statement and see what the officials thought those two options did for the principle of reintegration, which should be core to the purpose of this piece of legislation, under the mandatory supervision regime the officials concluded that there would be good support for reintegration. However, they highlighted the risk that a mandatory system “will treat all returning offenders as a homogenous group with similar reintegration needs. Offenders will be returning for a broad range of offences … [and] a formal system of supervision for a significant proportion of the offenders does mean that there would be a significantly higher level of support to reintegrate than the status quo.” That will work for those people if they get on to the conveyor belt of support in terms of what is defined in this part of the bill as a standard release condition.

Where things get more concerning is when we do move into the area of a discretionary supervision regime. The concern I have here—and this is written quite well by the officials, I think—is: “A discretionary order means that many returning offenders would not be subject to it and would therefore not receive the benefits the order may provide in terms of support for reintegration.” That is an area of grave concern for us, because what we are looking for when we talk about reintegration are issues like employment prospects, accommodation, health needs, and community support, which Kelvin Davis outlined in his contribution. If we do not have a consistent regime in place here, a regime that is appropriate for each person who is returning, then we run the risk that a number of those core elements of reintegration will not be picked up. This is the danger in this clause, looking at the purpose of the bill—that we actually, in a rushed, hasty process, have not got in front of us enough advice, in my view, as to whether those concerns raised by officials in the regulatory impact statement are met by the bill. We have got the statement that “special conditions” can apply. Maybe—maybe—they will apply, but we do not know that for sure. So I lack the confidence, standing here today, having not seen a select committee process and having not got further advice on this matter, as to whether or not those core issues about employment, accommodation, health, and community support are dealt with.

What we do know is that the people coming back—

I have just been listening to the debate over this first part of the bill, and I wanted to wait to get a bit of a sense of some of the issues that members wanted to raise before I responded. So I want to go through a few of them.

Kelvin Davis, in his contribution, was asking the question about whether and how the regime would apply to someone who may have been deported from Australia who had no criminal convictions. It is a fair point and I want to make it very clear. I indicated in nodding and shaking my head what was happening, but I thought it was better to get it on the record. I want to be really clear about this. This bill is not about replicating the decisions Australia has made as to who should be deported. We do not take that into account. So if Australia deports someone because they are of a bad character, it says, or because they have some other concerns to Australia, that is not a trigger under this bill. The only thing that triggers the provisions in this bill is a conviction for offending that in New Zealand would have been an imprisonable offence and for a minimum length of time.

So if someone was convicted in—I happen to know that in Thailand it is an offence to insult the royal family. Well, that is fine; it is not an offence here. So, clearly, if that person were deported back it would not be triggered. Similarly, if a particular person in Australia is deported back to New Zealand who has no criminal charges or convictions but for other reasons, which the Australians, obviously, have to work through and to justify, they are not caught by this bill. This bill is not about being punitive and adding a layer; it is about trying to pick up exactly—well, “exactly” is too strong—or in as similar way as possible, the conditions that that offender would have been under, had they served the same sentence in New Zealand. That is why the test is always “Have you served the minimum of a year in prison?”, because that is the threshold we use for release conditions, and “Is it conduct that would have been imprisonable in New Zealand?”, because, again, we are not going to impose someone else’s standards, and, if it is, then we need to mirror what we would do in New Zealand.

The question was also asked about the 6 months. I think I mentioned in one of my contributions—the member may not have been in the Chamber earlier this evening or earlier today—that the intent of the 6 months is to say that these conditions are about monitoring an offender while they reintegrate from a period of being incarcerated in an institution. Once they have been back in society for some time, the need is not the same. These people have served their sentence. This is about saying, as they come out from that very restricted environment, we know that is a very high-risk time for reoffending, and so we want to support and monitor and oversee these prisoners in the same way that they would have been in New Zealand.

The call I had to make—and, yes, it is a line call; you have got to put it somewhere—is that if they have been out in the Australian community for more than 6 months, then that case cannot be made in the same way that we need to help them with that reintegration. Within 6 months, we think the case can be made. However, the question was asked about what happens if they have been out for 7 months and they still need monitoring. The bill provides that if they come back to New Zealand and are subject to an ongoing monitoring regime—let us say they have got lifetime monitoring because there was serious concern in Australia that they needed to be watched—then it enables the New Zealand authorities to go to the courts here and say “Well, actually, in this case, we think it is made out”, and would they look at it. It does not apply automatically, but there is that provision if they were subject to an ongoing monitoring regime.

The other point I just wanted to pick up on was Grant Robertson’s contribution just immediately before I rose to my feet, talking about issues like health and education and housing. And, actually, it feeds back to Kelvin Davis’ points, as well, around reintegration and the difficulties that some of these offenders are likely to have reintegrating, given that some of them—not all of them—have very few, if any, ties to New Zealand. That is a very valid concern. That is the concern that we have been raising actively with Australia all throughout this process. We have not got it to change its view on this, but this is one of the two key concerns that we are raising time and again with Australia: deporting people back to New Zealand who, other than their DNA, are really not New Zealanders. They were born here, they have citizenship—and with that go a whole lot of protections—but actually for a number of them that is the extent of their connection.

We absolutely agree that that creates additional difficulties with reintegration of some of these offenders and, I think, creates a very valid ground as to whether the moral view of whether they should be sent back has been properly applied. But, as everyone in this Committee has acknowledged, we can all have views on that, we can all express them, and I think many of us share them, but none the less Australia has made the decision and there is a certain extent of also having to deal with it.

So the bill is looking at the justice aspects of that. That is not to say that there are not really important issues around things like health and education and welfare support and employment and financial assistance. I can tell members in the Committee that agencies and Ministers in those areas are actively working to make sure that we have the right framework and advice and support in place. Once these offenders land in New Zealand they are New Zealand citizens and they have access to exactly the same support, entitlements, and assistance needs as their case warrants. We all know that the Ministry of Social Development and the like work through that on a case by case basis. None the less, they have a particular piece of work to try to work through those issues. I do not purport to have provided for all that in this bill. This bill is about picking up the parole oversight part of the puzzle. I am not saying that the rest is not critical; it is. I have not seen anything that suggests legislative change is required, though. That piece is also going alongside it.

The final comment I just want to make in this contribution on this part—because it is, obviously, the very reasonably functionary part of the bill; the next part is far more where the substance is, and so I want to save our time for that. But the other comment I am just going to make is that it does seem somewhat incongruous that on the one hand this is being called rushed and it is all being rushed and crammed through, and on the other hand we have taken far too long. You know, you cannot have it both ways—you cannot have it both ways.

The one point I would make is that when Mr Goff asked why this legislation was not in the House a year ago, Australia had not changed its law a year ago. We found out on 12 February. We started work immediately. We have not stopped work on since 12 February. This is the process it takes to get into this place. I am very proud that that process has worked well. Officials have had one hand tied behind their back, trying to get information out of Australia. Frankly, people who think that you can just have an idea one night and then get it into legislation in the House for something this complex are revealing, I think, the fact that they have not had ministerial roles dealing with issues of this complexity.

And that does not even take into account—even Jacinda Ardern mentioned it in her second reading contribution—that Labour could never have done this because it did not have the information-sharing agreement in place. Well, exactly. We had to have the information. We now have that information, and we have acted. So we started as soon as we found out. We have not stopped. It is in the House quickly because it needs to be passed quickly. But to suggest that somehow nothing has happened and it could have happened a year ago is wrong and, frankly, belittles the debate that we should be having on this pretty important issue.

I just want to pick up where we last left off. I do not agree with the Minister in the chair, the Hon Amy Adams. This is the Official Information Act response I received from the Ministry of Justice. Yes, she got a memo on this on 12 February, but this actually went through on 14 December in Australia. It was brought to the ministry’s attention by a media outlet at the end of January. Prime Ministers Abbott and Key talked about it at their ministerial meeting in February, and yet it has taken until now, 17 November, with 2 weeks of Parliament left to go, effectively, that we are actually rushing this through under urgency.

I do not buy the argument that we had to have the information-sharing agreement absolutely nailed down, because right now we still do not have good information coming out of Australia. Pretty much everybody knows that Australia, because of its complex federal and state system, is not providing the information that we need to be able to process in good time the people who are coming back from Australia. But what we do need, and what obviously the Labour Party will be supporting, is clearly to have the sorts of provisions that we would have for New Zealanders in a similar situation. I think that is a principle that I can certainly accept and that we can all accept. But to say that somehow that had to wait until 2 weeks in the middle of October before we started drafting this legislation is absolute nonsense. We could have had this in place some time ago.

We could also have been making a much firmer demand on Australia to provide that information. We had Prime Minister Turnbull come here just over a month ago. I do not know what happened in the meeting between Mr Key and Mr Turnbull, but I can tell you that from our side that was the only thing we talked about—the rights of people coming back and being sent back, and also the information that we had when we were in Government to make sure that we were able to protect ourselves. It really actually grates that last week, in an extraordinary sort of outburst from the Prime Minister, he pointed the finger across the Chamber and said to us that somehow we do not care about the safety of New Zealanders or about the possibility that rapists and murderers and whatever are coming back to New Zealand. Of course we do—that is why we are standing up and agreeing with this legislation. But to accuse us of that when this legislation had not even hit the House, when we already have 200-odd people who have come back under a regime where there are absolutely no protections is absolutely wrong.

I think the issue here is what the objective is of this legislation in the first part of the bill, which is to provide for similar management for offenders, whether a sentence is served in New Zealand or elsewhere. Obviously, that pertains mostly to Australia when they are coming back. It is about protecting the public from reoffending and providing greater support for the reintegration of returning offenders. I am reading from the national interest statement here, which makes the obvious point that the two are very closely linked together—that if you are going to be protecting people from reoffending, then the process of reintegration is essential to making sure that that actually happens.

Let us just remind ourselves what we are looking at here in terms of reoffending. The police, in the reports that are put out, recommend that 43 percent of the people who are sent back under the current conditions will require some sort of ongoing surveillance. That is a significant number of people. I recognise what the Minister was saying before about the numbers who are coming. Some of the numbers are now going to be including a larger group who will have more minor offences. But certainly since 2013, 70 percent of offenders have been convicted of serious offences including 30 percent for assault; 20 percent for armed robbery and burglary; 15 percent for rape or sexual assault, including child sexual offences; and 5 percent for manslaughter or murder. In 2013, 48 percent of those people coming back under the old regime and reoffended within 2 years. So half of the people coming back under the old regime reoffended within 2 years, and here we have a situation where Australia is, firstly, sending people back. I completely agree with the Minister that the moral case for doing that, which is for the benefit of Australia—leaving people without a spouse, a father, or a mother on that side, and, secondly, bringing somebody over here without any connection to New Zealand—is actually bad for both countries, quite apart from the people concerned. You begin to wonder whether Australia has lost its moral compass somewhere along the line.

The point is that with those people coming back, we have to make sure that they are looked after properly. Although I accept what the Minister says about this legislation being narrow and only looking at the justice part of the equation, what we are hearing out there is that there are offenders who have come back who are ending up in the doorways of Work and Income, waiting for it to open, who do not have jobs. We are hearing of people being sent back, looking to commit crimes. Crimes have already been committed by these people who have come back, as well, already. There is no plan in place to make sure that those people are reintegrated properly so they do not reoffend. Although I accept that this is not a central part of this legislation, for God’s sake, it has to go alongside it, surely. It absolutely has to go to alongside the legislation, to make sure that the two things are together. I do not see any evidence of that at the moment, with the reports that I am hearing of people ending up on the street and, actually, not being met at the airport and just being told to get into a taxi.

I just want to finish by saying that although we accept the purpose of this bill, the objectives of this bill, I do not believe that the way it is being put through, the way it has been introduced to the House, and the speed with which it is being done will do New Zealand any favours whatsoever. Thank you.

It has been interesting to see the uniform responses from Opposition members about the primary content of this part, which, of course, is clause 3, the purpose statement. What purports to be a purpose here is stated as being to “obtain information from returning offenders and establish release conditions for offenders returning to New Zealand …”. That is not a statement of purpose; that is a description of a mechanism for achieving a purpose or a range of purposes. It is a remarkably monocular view. I understand how it emerges: you get too close to a document and you do not get the distance from it to realise the gaps in it. This is the value of a multi-party, multi - stakeholder development of policy, which this patently is not.

The Minister of Justice put up some defence of this purpose statement, saying that those matters about support, which we have heard referred to already, are being dealt with elsewhere. The Ministry of Social Development was mentioned, as were various other agencies. What I do not see in this bill is any legislative framework that provides incentives for returning offenders to cooperate and to actively participate in their own rehabilitation and reintegration. That is what is fundamentally missing. The clues were actually there. The officials, I think, did a very good job of steering towards what could have been a much more balanced and much more useful and helpful piece of legislation.

We have heard reference already to this little table—this matrix of options—and the strengths and weaknesses. The enhanced support service was seen as being poor in terms of public safety. I agree that standing on its own a voluntary system of “Yes, I’ll turn up and I’ll go along with some of these support services.”, in itself would not have been sufficient to assure public safety or to contribute to making our communities safer. But I do argue that a set of enhanced support services wrapped round these people is necessary to get to achieve the outcomes, the real purpose, which is to make our communities safer, to endeavour to ensure that these people do not reoffend, and to improve the likelihood of them reintegrating and ultimately becoming useful and productive members of our society.

I say the officials did a very, very good job of that. They noted, in passing, that the enhanced support service option mechanism scored very well in terms of cost-effectiveness. A little bit of money spent well will go a very long way to reducing the likelihood of these people ending up back in jail at a cost of $100,000 per year, simply to accommodate them in jail. That is putting aside the social cost of offending, the cost of prosecution, the court process, and the like.

I mentioned that I believe that the officials have done some good thinking here. I reference particularly paragraph 33 of the regulatory impact statement, where they talk about the option as being partially based or potentially based on a refugee resettlement model. I think that is a really interesting idea. I think that is a very constructive idea. The idea that these returning offenders will come along and simply plug into Work and Income, to the Ministry of Social Development, and to the various other existing services overlooks the fact that these people are a unique class of people. These are people who might feel very little connection to New Zealand. We have heard evidence already of individuals who left the country as infants, barely children, and now they are returning as adults, and unwillingly at that. They may not necessarily want to be part of New Zealand. They are a unique group of people.

I think this notion of treating these people more in the way that we treat refugees—for example, there is the notion of having an orientation programme, making it attractive, and giving these people some incentive to participate actively in reorientation. It would say “OK, guys and girls. You’re here. This is it. You’re back here for now. Let’s make the best of it. Let’s help you get your bearings.”, in what, to many of them, is actually a new community, a new culture, albeit not vastly dissimilar from where they have been, but certainly with some substantial significant differences. There is focusing on the information needed to help people live in New Zealand, people who have not lived here perhaps since they were infants and who have no memory of it, and there is the idea of completing physical and mental health checks to assess their settlement needs. We can impose, and we will come to this later, in a later part of this bill—it talks about the possibility of establishing, either under the standard conditions or the special conditions, conditions that one way or the other require people to go through a needs assessment. That is OK. Yes, we are demanding that they must, which can immediately create a level of opposition.

We know people who have the lifelong experience of disguising illiteracy, low levels of educational achievement, and alcohol or drug dependency. Those people get pretty good at hiding those realities. We could get people involved in a much more cooperative approach, something along the lines of this proposed refugee resettlement, where these people can become active participants in their own reintegration. I see nothing in this legislation that is going to encourage or incentivise or even, frankly, oblige these people to do that.

The point, as I say, has been made very clearly that these offenders will face very similar challenges to the ones that those refugees who are coming to this country are facing, who are coming, in a sense, unwillingly. They are very pleased, I dare say, to leave where they are coming from. Perhaps this was not their first choice. The fact is that there is a sense of volunteerism, if you like, which will be absent from these people who are being returned against their will. So I do think we have missed a considerable opportunity there to legislate to do the right thing by these people.

The mention of cost has been made. It is about $2,000 per person. That does not sit very well. The only significant—if you could call it that—resource that the Government has put in to date was $100,000-odd, which has been given to People at Risk Solutions in Auckland in order to assist it to at least meet these people and make some effort to settle them. The fact is that it has been doing that work at least since the early months of this year. In March and April, I know for sure, it was doing that, and that $100,000 has to last it until June next year. That is more than 12 months. That is spreading that $100,000 extremely thinly, given the numbers we are likely to see, even using this quite modest notion of $2,000 per person.

This is, as I say, and I will come back to the point—some of the provisions in this legislation are necessary, but they are simply not sufficient. For that reason we cannot offer our support to it.

There are two issues I want to raise in this call. First of all, the purpose of this legislation is in part for the New Zealand Police to gather information on returning criminals. We have been told in earlier stages in this debate that some of the offenders who have been returned or deported from Australia to New Zealand have come without particulars being known to the New Zealand authorities, and that is one of the reasons why we need to be able to stop those people—so we can get that information from them.

I would like to know from the Minister of Justice whether that is correct and whether, in respect of the intervening period from earlier in the year when increased numbers of people were being deported from Australia to New Zealand, there were any instances where people arrived in New Zealand and the New Zealand authorities on their arrival did not know the offences of which they had been convicted, particularly in serious cases. If that is the case, then that seems to me to be irresponsible on the part of the Australian authorities, and we in this House have got a right to know whether that is the case. If that was the case, it seems to me that there are only two possible explanations for it: either the Australian authorities were not willing to provide the information or, if they were willing, the New Zealand authorities did not seek it. So I would like to know whether there were any cases between the start of the year and now where people have been deported following serious offences and where the particulars of their offending were not known. I think that is a reasonable question to ask the Minister and I would ask that she respond to that point.

The second point I want to make is a point that has not yet been made in respect of the interpretation clause, clause 4. Clause 4 sets out the meaning of “determination notice” and “returning prisoner”. This is necessary because the legislation says that where the Commissioner of Police determines that the nature of the returning prisoner’s prior convictions and penalties passes a threshold, then that person is said to be a returning prisoner within the later provisions in Part 2, subpart 2 of the bill, and the definition is given effect to through clause 4 of the bill. I, in an earlier contribution—and I do not know whether the Minister was in the Chamber at the time—asked the question as to whether the effect of clause 28 on those definitions means that the jurisdiction of the court to consider whether indeed the Commissioner of Police has made a valid determination notice to catch people within the provisions of the Act as being a returning prisoner is ousted. My reason for that question arises from the words that are in clause 28(2). If a determination notice is made by the police, it seems that a court cannot discharge or vary the terms of a standard notice that has been imposed under this legislation and that the jurisdiction of the court is being ousted. I would like the Minister to comment on that.

In terms of the issue that I started with, which is the estimated 157 people who have been deported to New Zealand between May and September this year—which I think was the figure that was used by my colleague Phil Goff—I want to know whether on arrival the New Zealand authorities had instances where they did not have information. That goes to the question as to whether this legislation goes far enough, because my understanding is that the legislation is not of retrospective effect and that we will still have a lacuna in the New Zealand information if that information was not collected at the time and was not provided by the Australian authorities.

I would hope the advice that we have had in this Committee today on that point to date is wrong, because I would find it almost unbelievable that the Australian authorities would deport from Australia to New Zealand people who have lived there all of their lives; who are, from their point of view, Australians; who have no support networks back here; and on whom the New Zealand Government may have absolutely no records. If these people have been living in Australia for 30 years—effectively, all of their adult lives; often since they were very small children—the New Zealand authorities will have no records of their own in respect of these people because they have never been in New Zealand. They might have been born here, they could have left New Zealand as a baby, and there will be no records here of their offending while they were in Australia. There will be no records of any of their other interaction with governmental authorities because they have had none. Therefore, the New Zealand system is blind to their history and the risk that they pose, except to the extent that that information later comes to the New Zealand authorities.

Who holds that information? Actually, the organisations that hold that information in respect of the people who have been living in Australia are the Australian authorities. I would be very surprised if the Australian authorities had been deporting more people with serious offences between May and September without providing to the New Zealand authorities details of the offending, the sentences, and also other information if it had been requested by the New Zealand Government. If the Minister could answer that question, that would be appreciated.

Secondly, what requests were made for information in respect of that group of people from earlier this year until the passage of this legislation? If, in fact, people have been arriving without information, I would expect the Australians to provide that information voluntarily, but if they have not, I would also expect the New Zealand Government to be seeking it. I would have thought that if a similar request were made of New Zealand authorities in respect of people whom we were deporting to Australia, the New Zealand authorities would cooperate with Australia, and I would hope that that sort of cooperation would be reciprocated. Thank you.

I move, That the question be now put.

I want to just take a reasonably short call on Part 1 of the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill, in part to respond to a comment that the Minister of Justice made in her contribution from a few minutes ago and also in part to look closely at the writing, the drafting, of some of the clauses in this part, and one clause in particular. But, first, I want to address a comment made by the Minister, and I think it was in response to Phil Goff and others who raised questions around the timing of this legislation.

The Minister said that raising the issue of timing was somehow belittling this debate and belittling this issue. I say to the Minister that there is only one person who has belittled this issue, and that is the Prime Minister. The only person who has actually engaged in undignified action around this legislation is the Prime Minister, so if anybody is belittling this debate it is him.

I think the issue of timing is a fair one because the Minister was aware of this in February at the latest. That means that the Minister had February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, and half of November to get this legislation drafted and brought to the House. In fact, this legislation would have been better prepared if the Minister had actually moved more quickly and brought it to the House in a timely fashion so that it could have gone to a select committee, so that we could have had proper consideration of this legislation. So it is not in any way belittling to say that the Minister has had time to deal with this legislation and is now rushing it through because she knows that there is a plane-load of detainees heading back to New Zealand. It is exactly the type of issue that needs to be raised on a matter that is being considered by the House under urgency where we have not had the benefit of the select committee process to make sure that this legislation is drafted appropriately to make it fit for purpose.

I do want to look at just one matter of drafting, and it may not be the most significant. I know that some of my colleagues want to look at other matters of drafting. In the interpretation clause we have the meaning of “returning prisoner”. It says that “ ‘returning prisoner’ has the meaning given to it in section 16”. That is actually a perfectly normal thing to find in an interpretation clause. So we go to clause 16, which is entitled “Who is returning prisoner”. It states: “A ‘returning prisoner’ is a person who has been determined by the Commissioner to be a returning prisoner in accordance with the criteria set out in section 17.”

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): This is in Part 2.

This is to do with the interpretation, Mr Chairman—the interpretation clause, which is in Part 1. In Part 1, the interpretation clause, it says that that is set out in section 16. Clause 16 tells us nothing. You read the interpretation clause and you refer to clause 16, and the interpretation clause actually does not give us a meaning for “returning prisoner”. We have to go to clause 17 for that. Why is the wording in clause 16 not in the interpretation clause? That seems to be the most logical place to put it, and then clause 17, or maybe clause 16 in this case, could set out the criteria for determination that the commissioner has to use.

It appears to me to be one example of weak drafting in this legislation. It is the kind of weak drafting that you get when a bill is rushed, and the kind of weak drafting that could be sorted out at a select committee if the Minister, back in February, when she knew this was an issue, had actually moved with the speed that was necessary to bring the legislation to the House in a timely fashion and give Parliament and the public the opportunity to scrutinise it appropriately. As it is, we are pushing through legislation that does curtail some people’s rights, and we are doing that without public scrutiny. That is a very unfortunate situation to be in, and it is a situation that we are in because of the Minister’s lacklustre response to something that the Australians informed her about, at the latest, in February. There is some evidence that the Minister should have known about it before then.

So that is a simple question for the Minister. Why is that particular bit of the legislation drafted in that fashion? Why is the interpretation clause weak in that fashion? I know that other colleagues will be raising drafting matters in respect of other clauses as well.

I want to start off by asking the Minister of Justice again to clarify when she first knew that there was a problem and started working on it. She said in answer to a question from Jacinda Ardern in the House this afternoon, and again when she took the call, that nothing was being considered until February of this year. I have on my computer screen here Stuff news, dated 25 January 2015, and the former Minister—this Minister’s predecessor; somebody called Judith Collins—said that this was an issue that the Government had been aware of and was intending to make changes on, and it was looking at a monitoring system in order to protect the community. Is it not the truth, Minister, that the Government has been aware of this for years? In the last year the Government was aware that there was five times the number of deported people coming back to New Zealand. That is new—the quantum is new, but the issue is rather older than that.

Again I ask the Minister what there is in this bill that, to achieve the purpose set out in clause 1, could not have seen this bill introduced years ago, if not months ago. One of the problems I have—and it is a genuine problem—is that we know that the purpose of this bill is to try to ensure the safety of the community, but how do we know the bill will achieve that purpose? You know, Mr Chairman, that what would normally happen—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Oh.

Everybody in the Committee knows, Mr Chairman, that what would normally happen is that this bill would go to a select committee, and we would hear from people with specialist knowledge in this area. We would hear from the experts. We would hear from the people who have been dealing with offenders with these sorts of criminal records in the past, and we could have subjected this bill to particular scrutiny—if only it had been introduced months ago, or years ago, when the Government knew that this problem was pending. So I want to know why it is that we are rushing this bill through the House without public input, without expert input, and without proper consideration so that we would know we could achieve the purpose of it. Why has the Minister left this to the thirteenth hour?

I want to come back to the regulatory impact statement, because this gets to the heart of the purpose that clause 3 talks about. It says: “Returning offenders pose a risk to public safety …”. It goes back to 2013, which, again, raises questions about how long this Minister has been aware of it. It says that since 2013, 70 percent of returning offenders have been convicted of serious offences—30 percent of assaults; 20 percent of armed robbery or burglary; 15 percent of rape or sexual assault; 5 percent of murder and manslaughter. Then the regulatory impact statement goes on to say that over a third—35 percent, actually—of these returning offenders had reoffended within 12 months, and 48 percent, or nearly half, had reoffended within 2 years. So here we have the regulatory impact statement setting out that the purpose of this bill is to achieve safety. There is a real risk to safety. Some of these people have offended seriously. Nearly half of them will reoffend again within 2 years, and yet the Government sat on its chuff and did nothing.

I think the Committee is owed an explanation of why the Government did not act. Why are we debating this after 157 new offenders have come here since May? I want to know from the Minister what the offences are that those 157 have committed. Are they serious offenders? Are they likely to be recidivist offenders? What level of risk do they pose to the community? What has this Minister and this Prime Minister done to protect New Zealand? This Prime Minister got up on his hind legs and said that the Opposition was doing nothing to protect us against rapists and murderers. Actually, the Opposition does not have power. The Government has power, and for 12 months this Government, this Prime Minister, and that Minister have done precisely nothing.

I move, That the question be now put.

I have been sitting here listening to the debate about the purpose of this bill. I find it a bit rich, actually, that the Opposition is pointing to the past 1 year. We could go back decades—decades, actually—when successive Governments have done nothing about this. We have had people being deported out of Australia and back to New Zealand for decades.

The major impact on increasing that number happened in 2001, under the Labour Government. I do not want to say “Oh, it’s your fault, and it’s your fault.”, but actually a whole lot of impacts have happened on Australians—they consider themselves Australians, but they are Kiwis who live there—since that immigration law change. Yes, that has been ramped up since December last year when this new threshold came into force in Australia, sending a whole lot of people back across the Tasman. But for the 1 year I have been in Parliament, we have been talking about this since the time we walked into this Government. I know that the Māori Party has been raising this in the years it has been here, but these issues go back a long, long time, and I am grateful, actually, that we are here doing something about it because we do need to protect the citizens of this country.

One of the things—and there are many things—that I was very clear with the Minister about is that the Minister, under this piece of legislation, does not have the extraordinary powers that the immigration Minister in Australia has. He can deport people under the questionable character provisions, and seal that record. He does not have to share that record with the Australian court, or with the prosecutors, or even with the person they are deporting back to New Zealand. So they may actually have some serious concerns that we are not even going to know about because that Government does not even share them with its own people, let alone us. I find that abhorrent, and I am grateful that we are doing something about it and that the Minister of Justice has not, through this draft legislation—because, frankly, I would not agree to it otherwise—given herself extraordinary powers to further impact on the lives of these men and women who are coming back to us. We are picking up the pieces of their lives, and we know that the purpose of this bill is narrow so that we can deal with the immediate concern now. And it may have been, yes, a year since it was implemented in Australia, but it has been decades in this country that people have been deported back to us, and successive Governments have done nothing.

So I am grateful that we are doing something, and that, actually, we have taken up with the Government that those other supports are going to be put in place, and we have assurances that they are happening. We have examples of where that is already happening, and that is the question here, because we have tried for many years to ensure through programmes like the ones that are happening in prisons around the country now—Māori focus units and such—to ensure recidivism is reduced. We want to make sure that they come back into our society and we help them pick up the pieces of their lives that are further damaged by the Australian Government’s ignorance and their blatant disrespect for our country by imposing these laws on those Kiwis who are living there, and we are picking up the pieces of those things.

So I am over listening to those people talk about the length of time that it has taken, because they did nothing when they were the Government, and it is a bit rich to listen to that now. We are doing something now, and I support the Minister in making this happen. And, in fact, those extraordinary powers of the immigration Minister in Australia to seal a record—it could be something, but it could actually be nothing, and we do not even get to know that. That is the disrespect that they pay to us, and I am glad that we are going to deal with just the people who have committed those offences who, in New Zealand, would have conditions put around them to ensure the safety of our community.

So yes, although there are minor offences being caught up in this regime at the lower end of the threshold, we have not excused the fact and the point that there are actually serious offenders who are coming back to New Zealand, and we need to protect our country and our people and our society from the risk of reoffending. I want to get assurances, and we have sought those assurances from the Government, that other programmes will be put in place. But let us deal with the issue, and the issue right now is to ensure that those parole conditions can continue in New Zealand, because until this goes through, they can come back here and we have no say. We had no monitoring before. We had no ability to ensure that a paedophile was not living in a home with children, and not living—

💬 Jacinda Ardern: That’s actually not true. That’s not true.

Well, you had the opportunity, actually. You had the opportunity.

I move, That the question be now put.

Yes, we have had an extensive debate on these four clauses, so I am going to put the question.