Oranga Tamariki (Youth Justice Demerit Points) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Oranga Tamariki (Youth Justice Demerit Points) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Social Services and Community Committee to consider the bill.

Firstly, can I say that this bill is not about harsher penalties, it’s not about coming down hard on young offenders, and it’s not about being tough on crime or soft on crime. If anyone who reads this bill thoroughly and wants to understand it, it’s about giving purpose and structure to the current system. It’s about giving structure to what already exists. In fact, there’s nothing in this bill that wants to change any of the offences, any of the penalties, or any of the provisions or resources that the current youth justice system has and uses to deal with young offenders.

What this is about, primarily, is about giving structure, particularly to the huge part that police play in the youth justice system—which I’ll get into soon—but also giving interventions and early interventions to youth who pop up on the radar, not after the 20th time that they offend, not after the 10th time that they offend, but after the first time that they offend. Everybody in this House knows and understands—and this bill realises that and it backs up the fact—that there are multiple reasons why young people offend. They don’t just wake up one morning and decide they’re going to go and rob a dairy. When that happens, when those incidents occur and they pop up with serious offences and they get arrested and they get taken to Youth Court and they get taken to prison, it’s because that’s the 20th, 30th, 40th time that they offended and nothing has been done of substance to help them stop that. Likely, the first time that they did was when they were 10, 11, 12, or 13, when there were other influences in their lives that were causing them to go down that pathway—whether that be issues at home, issues at school, issues socially, or issues with drugs or alcohol.

What surprises me and amazes me is we’ve got a Youth Court that has, actually, great resources. They’ve got great programmes and great abilities to intervene in young people’s lives. But what we do in this country is we do everything that we can not to put them in Youth Court—everything that we can. It’s written in legislation for police not to prosecute. When people hear the term “prosecute”, they think, “Oh, punishment. So we mustn’t do that—we mustn’t demonise or criminalise young people.” That’s not what it’s about. It’s not what the youth justice system should be about. That’s not what this bill is about. In fact, what this bill does is it tries to turn it around on its head.

We need to intervene once in the lives of young people that offend. It’s not normal for young people to offend, even at the low level. Now, “intervene” doesn’t mean putting them in cuffs, put them in front of a judge, get berated, and put them into a prison cell; it means having a logical, common-sense, tiered system of intervention.

Right now, if a young person offends at the lower end of the scale, the police are directed to do nothing except pick them up and take them back home. What’s the problem with that? The problems start at home. So we have young people who are offending and offending and offending, and the police have the direction to take them back to the place that caused the offending in the first place. Then we get surprised when we have the reoffending rates of young people so high when they enter Youth Court, and even higher when they get to the certain serious level of offending, and they have to get put into youth justice residence. It may come as a surprise to people here, but when a young person steps one foot into Youth Court, they have a more than 60 percent chance of reoffending—not because they went to Youth Court but because they went to Youth Court so late in the day, because we failed to intervene when we should have. And then when they’re in Youth Court, only a very small, minuscule number actually get to, first of all, step in front of a judge. But then when the offending is serious enough, then they get to youth residence. A youth residence reoffending rate is 95 percent plus.

Then you start talking about the conveyor belt of crime, where we’ve got young people going from 10, 11, 12 who are offending, going through the Youth Court, going into youth justice, residents of the system, and ending up in adult court when they’re older because they are disengaged young people who hate the system, who hate authority, who flip the bird at the courts and the police. They don’t just wake up when they’re 17 or 18 and say, “Well, I’m an adult now, I better change.” They are so deep-seated in what they are doing that they end up in the adult court and they end up in adult prison. More than half of every single adult who is sentenced to prison in adult court has previously been through the youth justice system—more than half. And we’re sitting here and we pretend to accept that our youth justice system is working; the stats don’t show it.

Young people reoffending are increasing, the seriousness of crime for young people is increasing, and it could all be traced back to the fact that we have failed them when they were younger, when they first started to offend. We failed to give them the structure and the resources and the intervention. It’s not about arresting them, and it’s not about punishment; it’s about ensuring they’ve got everything wrapped around them when their parents and the adults around them have failed them. What happens is that we as a country and a society and as a House and a Parliament are failing them further, because we’re not putting any interventions, wraparound services, around them.

What this bill does is it gives structure to the police. Eighty percent of all young offenders don’t end up in Youth Court; they are dealt with by police, by a thing called “alternative action” or “diversion”. Diversion is up to the police officer, the police youth aid officer, it’s up to the area commander, and it can vary from either Auckland or Southland. Unfortunately, their direction right now is to not prosecute, not to intervene. This gives structure to it. It gives demerit points. Everyone understands what demerit points are and how they work. If a young person offends at the lower end, we need to intervene and find out why. We need to go around to their homes and find out why. We need to make sure they’ve got the support to stop them then, not try and stop them when they’ve offended 20 times and they go into Youth Court. This is just ensuring that the resources that the youth justice system has at its disposal, at the Youth Court level, can be used on the young people at the early stage.

The other detail in this bill is that it utilises the existing justice sector seriousness scale of offending. There’s a measurement in there, and I’m hoping that this bill gets enough support to get through to select committee so that it can be debated there and thoroughly gone through.

It’s just common sense that we look to tighten up and give every avenue we can to young people and young offenders to try and assist them to stop offending at an early stage. We don’t want them to go to Youth Court or to youth residence, because we all know, including New Zealand First, that that’s a bad place for them to be. It’s a bad place because at that point in time, currently, it’s too late for them and they end up in the system. If we want to truly lower the adult crime rate, lower the numbers of people in the gangs, we need to start early with the young people, get them right on track, and get some structure to the youth justice system. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. First of all, I would like to congratulate the member for bringing this bill, and I have good news for him: the National Party will be supporting this bill to the select committee stage. Any innovative idea and good idea brought to this Parliament will be supported by the National Party. I would also like to thank New Zealand First for supporting Brett Hudson’s bill, the member who is based in Ōhāriu, working very hard. He had a very good bill, which was supported by New Zealand First. So it is, I think, one all for both sides for innovative and good bills which are being supported in this House today.

Darroch Ball gave a very passionate speech, and I agree with him on many fronts—that youth are to be given a proper direction so that they can contribute to this country, and they are our future. I want to give an example that when youth are given a proper direction, they perform and deliver. The example is when the Christchurch earthquake happened, the youth came out and helped the people over there. There was a direction for them, and that is what we lack sometimes.

I believe that a lot of people say that youth are useless, but my belief is that youth are used less. We need to use them in a proper manner so that we can have better results, and this bill exactly gives some very good incentive to the justice system to monitor the youth for what they are doing.

Demerit points—we know, as we have seen in the driving licence, that when we cross a certain limit, we drive very consciously not to gain any further demerit points. On a similar basis, this bill will enable youth offenders to get the demerit points so they will be discouraged to get involved in any kind of crime or the justice system. National supports the intent of the bill to encourage youth offenders to take responsibility for their actions, which the demerit point system incentivises. This could have positive effects on the young offenders, who will be encouraged not to acquire demerit points.

We can be encouraged that youth offending is decreasing. National supports any attempt to continue this trend. However, the bill needs to be scrutinised at the select committee. That is why we believe that it is important that the select committee process should have a thorough look at this bill and improvise. The select committee always has an intention to improvise with any bill which is referred to the select committee, and I hope this happens in this case also.

The research is clear that young offenders need solutions and intervention into the cause of their offending. Punitive punishments have been proven to be unsuccessful in dealing with these young offenders. As the proposal of the bill mentions, going tough on youth is not a solution. We need to give them incentives and guide them that this is not the right path, and the demerit points will encourage them not to clock up to 100 points, where they will be referred to the District Court system. With these words from the National side, we will be supporting this bill to be referred to the select committee, and we’ll continue to consider this further. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I, too, will just begin by acknowledging the work that the member Darroch Ball has put in to this bill to get it to where it’s at today. As he has mentioned in his speech, this is a bill that aims to put in some more structured interventions to redirect those who have offended, youth who have offended, from reoffending, and it tries to do it in a few different ways—one, in terms of providing support to those who are deemed to have offended, but also to hold them a little bit more to account for what they’ve done.

I’m just going to go through the bill a little bit, but I’ll just say at the outset that Labour does support the bill to select committee, but there are a few, I guess, niggly bits, for want of a better term, that I would like to see investigated or examined at the select committee stage as well. However, the reason that we are supporting it is that, you know, if there is something that we can do better from a youth justice point of view, we obviously want to be able to do that, and this bill may help us decide whether the current system is delivering consequences or whether there’s a better way to do that.

Now, in terms of the way in which the bill aims to put in those consequences, it’s really about an enforcement officer who determines—there are a few different bands ranging from low offending right through to high offending. So an enforcement officer determines which band is applicable and then determines the youth justice demerit points that will be, I guess, awarded or given to that person in question, depending on where in the band they fall. However, there does seem to be some discrepancy in there in the sense that although it’s a tiered level of consequences, it does fall to the judgment of the person who determines which band and how many points specifically. But that’s not insurmountable; it’s just something that I wanted to point out.

The bit that I do support, I guess, is what then happens next. So a young person who has offended goes into a particular band, is given a certain number of points, and based on the points that they’re given, they’re referred to different programmes to help support them to change their behaviour. That’s the part that I find interesting. So there are a few different scenarios. Someone who has accumulated between 1 and 80 youth justice demerit points gets the option to participate in the Limited Service Volunteer (LSV) programme. That is a programme that, through the Social Services and Community Committee, we’ve actually gone out and visited as well. So that looks like it could be a good option for some young people.

For others who have accumulated, on the other end of the spectrum, between 81 and 99 youth justice demerit points, they get the option between two different avenues, I guess. One is the LSV programmes and the other the youth employment, training, and education programmes—again, from the point of view of not just being additionally punitive to these young people but actually looking at ways in which the system might be able to support them to change their behaviour and change the course or the trajectory of their lives, in fact. That could be pretty powerful.

Now, some of the bits that I mentioned earlier in terms of the process are what I would like to see examined also at select committee. So a notice needs to be provided as soon as possible, as soon as reasonably practicable, by the enforcement officer to the young person in question and the young person’s parent or guardian. So, basically, what the enforcement officer needs to tell them is what the demerit system hopes to achieve, what offence they’ve committed to receive the demerit points, how many points they’ve received, what actions will be taken as a consequence, what happens if they accumulate more points, what their rights of appeal are, and how they can clear their record. No issue with that.

However, the way in which that information is communicated to the young person I find potentially a little bit problematic, because if they don’t receive the notice—so as long as the notice was provided to the young person, the demerit points accrued are valid. Finally, there is no requirement for the officer to actually visit. There’s an option for them to do that and speak to the young person in question, but it’s not mandatory, and I find that a little bit problematic as well, because I would like to know that the person has actually received the notice and has been talked to about what some of the options are. I’d like to see that examined also at select committee to see if that’s the best way that we communicate or if there’s a better way to do so.

With that, though, I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I join with my colleague on this side of the House, Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi, in stating that the National Party supports this Oranga Tamariki (Youth Justice Demerit Points) Amendment Bill, at least to the select committee. No doubt that will be a matter for the 53rd Parliament.

We’ve discussed and debated already in this House a number of the aims of the bill. They seem worthy to us. Obviously, the devil in the detail will be something that will be available for examination more closely at a later point. But for this, the first reading, I think it’s worth noting the intention to provide a structured intervention regime. An intervention is literally a coming between, so, in this case, the member who’s sponsoring the bill is looking to come between an initial set of offending and what would otherwise be a later set of offending. Of course, the intent is to head it off at the pass by introducing a system where the relatively insignificant offending would be appointed to the possibility of later more significant offending, so that the path that a young person would be on would be diverted, essentially, such that they would not be engaged further in that kind of activity.

I think it’s always worthwhile, particularly at the early stages of discussing and debating a bill—I did find the problem that it attempts to solve. The general policy statement that the member has outlined actually goes into a bit of detail on that, and I think that’s a very worthwhile thing that we have seen by this bill, in the name, I think, of Jenny Marcroft, and her colleague Darroch Ball has spoken to that as well.

A number of percentages are worth noting—for example, that 60 percent of youth offenders reoffend, apparently; and then the number of reoffending occasions, three or more times, six or more times, at 40 percent and 14 percent, respectively. It is sobering reading indeed. So I think there’s a well-established case for the fact that something should be done to help, to try to solve the problem of persistent offending. But, of course, this will be only one of a number of ways that any Government should look to solve it.

So we’re happy enough with the idea that this go forward. There is, I suppose, the tension between the subjectivity of those making decisions, that the member has highlighted in the explanatory note as being problematic. Of course, on the other hand, we do like the idea, generally speaking, as a Parliament, of allowing discretion to decision makers. So that’s a fundamental tension that can and should, and, hopefully, will, be thrashed out at select committee and beyond.

The other observation I make before I conclude my remarks is that I’m just interested in the language that’s being used. The member has talked about the recycling through of complex and ambiguous systems. The cycling through of offenders—well, that’s sort of a circle metaphor. We sometimes talk about people’s lives spiralling out of control, and, of course, we also talk about a vicious circle where someone gets involved in a system in such a way that they can’t get off. So all of these, I think, go to show the difficulty of, sometimes, the social and criminal justice elements that we’re considering here, which is that the circle has no end and the danger of course is that people get into a system and don’t get off.

So to the extent that this may be helpful to identify those who are in a difficult place and can, hopefully, be found a better place, we do support it, at least, as I say, to select committee, and we’ll look forward to seeing what further can be said about it as we go forward.

Are the Greens going to take a call?

💬 Golriz Ghahraman: Yes, we are, sorry.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): I call Golriz Ghahraman.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I was expecting to be speaking at slot seven. Standing to speak on this bill takes me back to my work both in the criminal justice system and in child rights. It is in the youth justice system—and most New Zealanders wouldn’t know this—where our international human rights record really falls. Our youth justice system commits our most persistent and clear breaches of international human rights law, in that we continue to prosecute children as young as 10 as adults in our adult criminal justice system. We exclude children at 10, and 13, 14, and beyond that regularly from our otherwise model youth justice system, based on ad hoc standards. We continue to persist in detaining children in age-mixed facilities with older defendants and convicted criminals.

None of that is conducive to bringing down the rates of offending by young people. It also ignores all of the evidence about what’s best for young people, what will help them to thrive, what will help them to come out of a situation where offending has occurred. We know that when young people do commit offences, overwhelmingly, I can say, it goes along with either some very recent trauma in their life or a longstanding mental health issue or longstanding abuse or neglect in their background. As a lawyer, more often than not, when young people are coming into conflict with the law and you’re dealing with them and you look at their pre-sentence reports and their psych reports, you will see all of the most harrowing things that we think of when we think of the State coming into a family’s affairs, and they’ve often been removed from their homes multiple times. They have had multiple foster care placements. They’ve had multiple notifications to Child, Youth and Family and Oranga Tamariki for serious abuse—the kinds of things that someone from the community would get involved with the family and report them for. It is heartbreaking, and the criminal justice system is very much the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff not only for adult offenders but, most starkly, for young people.

International best practice, based on evidence, says that what we should be doing wherever possible is diverting children away from criminal justice processes, from punitive processes, because that process in and of itself will have a lasting effect, and will mark that child as different. It will create indicators that will almost definitely result in them reoffending, dropping out of school, seeing themselves as less than, as different, as bad—all of the things that we don’t want to do to the young people at that first moment when we can actually intervene and support them.

We know that some 90 percent of young people who come into conflict with our criminal law are then diagnosed with what is described as a serious learning disability. So we’ve failed them through not having inclusive enough education, something as simple as that, as a fundamental human right. We failed because we know that young people now live in the midst of a persistent housing crisis. They’ve moved so much that they’ve become disconnected from their communities and their schooling, and from healthcare. And we know that mental healthcare is not accessible here in Aotearoa yet.

So this is a Government that will focus on all of those things—on providing young people with their rights, with their basic rights, which will mean that they will thrive, that they won’t continue to offend. And what we should be seeing when we do see a child come into conflict with the law is that there is trauma there, and our intervention should be based on the evidence. If the evidence has told us that criminalising that child and reacting to them in a punitive way will make it worse, we’ll almost always—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I just want to start by saying it’s a novelty to speak on a bill. I haven’t done it for a few years in this way, and I’ve got to make sure I don’t enjoy it too much, actually. Can I just acknowledge a couple of people—firstly, Darroch Ball, for bringing forward, I think, a thoughtful bill, and I also acknowledge Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi, who is our lead spokesperson in this area with responsibilities for National in the area of youth justice. I’m sure he’s already said we support this at first reading.

That’s not a guarantee of where we will go, but I do want to say—in a sense what I’ve just already said in acknowledging Darroch Ball—I think this is an interesting idea. I think it’s thoughtful, and thoughtful and New Zealand First don’t always go hand in hand, but I think they do on this bill. I think the idea of a demerits points system—I suppose what New Zealanders will think of when they think of traffic offending; of course, I’ve never got demerits myself, but some members in this House will now know the feeling and how that works and ratchets it up for recidivism and for more serious offending—I’d just say it’s interesting and is thoughtful.

I also like and think what is thoughtful about this bill is what I also understand, from my perusal of it, was on the other side, that notion that there are things that you can do to wipe those points. That, I think, is a good thing; it’s cause and effect. So, for example, having been out and seen the Limited Service Volunteers programme out in Whenuapai, I think it was, and what is happening out there—what an excellent programme. The notion that a young person can do that and get credit for that and then have those points worked—and there are other things I know they can do that are in this bill. That is, in principle, at least, I think, right.

I want to say this bill appeals to, I suppose, National Party sensibilities and values. And I say that because, you know, there are basic notions that we believe in strongly. And they are accountability for your actions, they’re incentives and disincentives. That works better than just, sort of, you know, a less nimble, less cause and effect way of thinking.

Can I address the fact that, of course, this is in the youth arena, and there are some verities that go with youth offending and sentencing that I think have become almost religious amongst lawyers—that, you know, there can’t be penalties and we have to treat things so differently and da-da-da-da. And look, I go along with that at a level. But, as someone on the other side of the House likes to say, sometimes these things are shibboleths. You know, they’re there without actual purpose, and we can’t just treat them religiously like they’re absolutes, and that’s it, and we’re never going to question it. So I, personally, go along with the idea that, yep, in youth justice there should be lesser sentencing, we should treat young people and children differently. But you know what? Common sense and right tells me that for recidivist offending and for serious adult crimes, that requires consequences, actually. If you’re going to do serious adult crime, and you’re going to repeatedly do even petty crime, there are consequences that should follow for it. Otherwise, we, as a society, are creating a breeding ground for criminals amongst our young. And that’s not fair to them and to their future, because you’re not giving them a sense of consequence from their actions over time, and it’s also not fair to society.

Look, in my brief perusal of this bill, I think there are some serious questions to be asked in the select committee process. These are simply the ones that, as I say, have occurred to me briefly; there may be others. And I suppose they revolve around this point: this bill may be, in my view, right in principle, but have we got it right in terms of the outcomes in it? Have we got the weightings right in those sections or clauses 210C and 210D, I think they are, in terms of are we too soft on the points or are we too punitive? We’ve got to think that through and make sure we get that right if we’re, as a Parliament, to pass this. And have we got the punishments and the way they ratchet up and the remedial actions right? Are there other ones we should include? Are there some we should get rid of? I think those quite practical questions are ones we’re going to have to think through at committee stage. But at this stage, we support this, I think, thoughtful bill to the House.

Kia ora, e Te Mana Whakawā. It’s an absolute privilege to stand here to speak on the Oranga Tamariki (Youth Justice Demerit Points) Amendment Bill. I just want to take this opportunity to thank the member Darroch Ball for this bill and for his idea in terms of contributing to reducing youth offending.

I’m not sure whether the House knew that I first started as a social worker, as a youth justice social worker in Ōtāhuhu in Auckland, and through that, I became a youth justice manager. Through my insights, I do bring insights into youth justice.

I want to acknowledge that throughout all of this, we may refer to young people as youth offenders, but at the end of the day, they are young people from the age of 14 to under 18, and their voices need to be heard. The member spoke about the 80 percent of young people who offend once and they don’t come through the system, so, really, this is for the 20 percent, and I want to acknowledge the member for bringing that into the conversation today.

I want to talk about the purpose because it’s important, if there’s a bill in the House, that we know what the purpose is. If you could allow me, Mr Speaker, to read what the purpose is, new section 210A in clause 8 states that “The purpose of the youth justice demerit points system is to provide for a consistent system of intervention for young persons who have accepted full responsibility for committing an offence or who are charged with committing an offence, in order to—(a) identify, deter, and penalise repeat offending by young persons; and (b) increase accountability and transparency within the youth justice system.”

I would like the select committee to look at the strategy in terms of the evidence. What does the evidence tell us?

I want us to go to new section 210C in clause 8, because in that is the journey of a young person through the court system, beginning with a warning from the police officer and going to a record in the court. So what I know is that a young person is arrested or warned by a police officer, then the police officer refers the young person to a youth aid officer, the youth aid officer speaks to a youth justice coordinator, the youth justice coordinator speaks to a youth justice social worker, and then it goes to the court, where the young person is appointed a youth advocate. If we look at new section 210C(2)(a), it’s the police—so the police decide whether to warn this young person or not, but I’m not sure what advocacy the young person has in that journey.

In terms of subsection (2)(b), it’s the police who refer the matter to the youth aid officer, so the youth aid officer then decides whether it’s the intention to charge a young person by taking alternative action. If that doesn’t happen, then the youth aid officer refers to a coordinator for a youth justice intention to convene a family group conference. So I’ve talked about paragraphs (a) and (b). That involves the police and also involves the police in terms of the youth aid officer looking to alternative actions, and then, in the third section, in paragraph (c), it looks to the youth justice coordinator. Then, in subsection (2)(d), it refers to the youth justice demerit points and it refers to a young person being brought into court, and that’s the only time a young person gets a youth advocate to speak on their behalf.

The question I’d like to seek the select committee to look at is: where is the voice of the young people in this bill? They are experiencing the youth justice system if they continue, and I’m talking about the 20 percent that the member referred to. If they continue on this track, they will end up with a record. But what I’d like the select committee to ask is about the advocacy for young people: how well are they informed from the point in paragraph (a), when the police officer looks at the demerit points from “between 1 and 40 youth justice demerit points”, right down to paragraph (e), where, if it is over 100 points, they are referred to the District Court. It is the beginning of a record for a young person in court, and it must be taken seriously.

We do support this bill in its first reading, and I commend the member for bringing it forward in terms of the purpose, which is to reduce offending. But I do ask that we look at this with caring eyes in terms of not only deterring young people from reoffending but also looking after their record. Have we asked the right questions? Do they get the right advocacy before they reach the stage that they are before the District Court on a—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to take a short call on the Oranga Tamariki (Youth Justice Demerit Points) Amendment Bill, in the name of New Zealand First member Darroch Ball. It’s a pleasure to be supporting this piece of legislation to select committee so that it can be scrutinised, so that the public can make submissions, and so that the people are able to have their say on this important piece of legislation.

One of the big issues, I think, in our justice system that I get often asked about as a member of Parliament is around youth offending. It is one of the complex and complicated issues where the justice system seeks to balance the rights and the futures of the young people against the crime that they do commit. There is a debate to be had, in my opinion, around whether the law currently sits in a way that gets that balance right. I think this bill does in some ways seek to address that debate by putting in place a system whereby young people who offend are given demerit points in a transparent and open way, where their offending is measured in a way which then can be looked at by the courts, looked at by the justice system, and so that it can then be addressed. If it continues and persists—and one of the shocking figures that I see in the explanatory note is that 60 percent of youth offenders reoffend—then it can be taken to court.

One of the key issues that this bill does is it seeks to put in place essentially a carrot and a stick. It has consequences if the offending continues but also provides opportunities for young people to prove that they are changing their behaviour by going on a course, by the limited service scheme—to be able to change their behaviour and to be able to prove and demonstrate that they are seeking to make amends for their offending. So this bill, I think, is good framework. There will be a number of questions, which I and I know other members of this House will have, over how this will work, how it will be set up, and how it will be managed.

I look forward to hearing submissions from the public, from those who are involved in the youth justice system, but also those who are victims of crime who have been affected by youth offenders and the experience that they’ve had with the system. So I commend this bill to the House, and I look forward to the select committee process.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. We are supporting this bill through to its first reading. Why? Because we understand that youth offending is actually a very serious issue in New Zealand, and we’re committed to addressing it from various angles. We want to make sure that we’re engaging our at-risk families, our at-risk youth, making sure that our Māori organisations are wrapping around and supporting where possible; that we’ve got kaupapa Māori service providers which are able to swing in and help build better pathways to a better future for our rangatahi. Improving access to healthcare, improving access to mental health support, training, being able to get an education, and actually taking away some of the financial barriers all create part of a package that this Government is dedicated to to make sure that we’re turning around the fortunes of our young people out there all across New Zealand.

A Ministry of Justice report released in August 2019 found that the number of child offenders aged from 10 to 13 had more than halved from just over 5,000 children in 2010 to just over 2,300 children just last year. The number of youth offenders aged 14 to 16 is also down: more than 13,800 in 2010 to just over 5,600 last year. That report also stated that Māori youth offending rates had improved. It said that the proportion of young Māori offenders who appeared in the Youth Court decreased from 46 percent in 2017 to 36 percent in 2018. So the more that we can wrap around, the more that we can do to be able to help turn around outcomes for our young people—that has to be welcomed, which is why we are supporting this bill, the Oranga Tamariki (Youth Justice Demerit Points) Amendment Bill, to its select committee.

The intention of the bill is to provide for a consistent system of intervention for young people who have accepted full responsibility for committing an offence, or who are charged with committing an offence, in order to identify, deter, and penalise repeat offending by young persons and increase the accountability and transparency within the youth justice system.

I want to thank the member Darroch Ball for bringing this to the House, but just raise one thing as something that should be discussed in the select committee when we do put it out there for submissions, which is that we have been made very aware of the racial bias that sits within our justice system. We need to make sure that as we are dealing with our youth offenders, as we are hearing the various submissions that are going to be coming in from around the country—this bill doesn’t necessarily deal with that. So I would still like to put a call out there to all of those people across Aotearoa who are thinking about submitting to actually submit and come forward with various ways that we can help to address that racial bias within our justice system. But it doesn’t take away from some of the good stuff in this bill.

One of the implications in this bill is also that police need extra guidelines to effectively manage youth offenders or at-risk youth; that their training and judgment are somewhat inadequate. We just need to push back on that, because I believe that our police have our best interests at heart; that they need to exercise their expertise in their roles without that level of parliamentary intervention.

So I’m hoping that all of these various issues are going to come through in the submission hearings. For that reason, again, as I said before, we’re supporting this through to the select committee. So I commend it to the House.

I want to join with my National colleagues indicating National’s support for this Oranga Tamariki (Youth Justice Demerit Points) Amendment Bill. I want to give a little bit of context in the sense that I’ve got a real concern that the overall direction of justice policy under this Government is about reducing accountability—going soft—that will ultimately see more offenders and a poor approach to the management of justice issues.

One of the things that really worries me in my home area is that in the brief three years of this Government, the number of Nelson people completing and attending their community sentences has dropped from 76 percent to just 18 percent—that is, just 18 percent of people committed to community sentences are actually turning up and doing that work, and that’s before COVID, in which my colleague Simeon Brown has exposed the way in which the Government is just writing off huge numbers of sentences for people that have committed offences.

Now, National is interested in a demerit approach for youth offenders. National’s not a party that has a “lock ‘em up, throw away the key” sort of mentality. We do believe in accountability. We do believe that where people do the crime, they do the time, but we are also very aware of how important it is in the youth justice area to take a smart and sophisticated approach to youth justice issues. I think all of us who represent constituencies in this Parliament are aware that across the group of youth offenders, you have got some that go off the rails a bit, commit a single offence, and with a smart intervention by our youth police liaison officers, you can get them back on to the road reasonably quickly. But where I think there is a real concern is where you have these hardened youth offenders that time and time again get caught up in the merry-go-round of the youth justice system without action, and there does need to be some accountability.

The issue that I will be really interested in at the Justice Committee in dealing with this youth demerit points bill is whether a legislative demerit point system is actually going to result in better outcomes for young people. Quite often in the youth justice area, you’ve clearly got a whole mix of different youth experiences and the right approach to getting those young people back on to the straight and narrow. Now, the real question for both Parliament and the select committee will be whether a demerit point system will actually improve it. I’ve seen and attended Youth Court hearings and actually have quite a high level of confidence in our judges. The real question for Parliament is, by passing this law and having both our judges and our police that work with youth offenders, are we going to put them into a points system, a regimented sort of mechanical system for dealing with their offending, that actually makes things worse rather than better, rather than having the flexibility for them to be able to apply their professional judgment about what the right thing is to do with a particular young person?

So I’m open-minded about it. I certainly think the bill ticks the box, from National’s point of view, of having a better approach for those youth offenders that are committing multiple offences. We’ll keep an open mind in the select committee. The bit that we’re clear about is that we want smart interventions with young people, and we will go into the select committee process around this idea of demerit points with an open mind. Demerit points can work pretty easily, with a pretty straightforward “You’re 10 kilometres over the speed limit, you’re 20 kilometres over the speed limits.”, in an area like transport offending. In the area of youth offending, it’s a lot more complicated. Open-minded—let’s send this bill to the select committee, hear the submissions, and see if it can make a constructive improvement in the way in which our country deals with youth offenders.

Firstly, I just want to thank the House for seeing this bill through to select committee, but also seeing the bill—from what I’ve heard from the comments—for what it is, which is not a punitive measure, or doesn’t want to bring any punitive measures, but puts around structure and support and early intervention. That’s precisely the intent, and I think that—it’s my belief anyway—that’s what’s missing in the early stages of the youth justice system, and I think this bill will go a long way to do that.

I take the points from both sides of the House that because not only is this bill a multi-layered, complex bill but the whole youth justice system is complicated—why youth offend in the first place, what’s the best way of dealing with individual youth; it would vary. So I think that select committee is the best place for it to be to hear from all the stakeholders involved, including not only the victims of crime but those who have been youth offenders themselves and how the system dealt with them, how they felt that the system worked for them or failed for them, and how we can make it better because, ultimately, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing in this place.

I think that one of the members from the Labour Party mentioned some of the stats, and I think that we’ve got to be very careful about what stats we use, and not only that, but look a bit deeper than the surface of what those stats are actually saying. I’ll give you a prime example: The youth crime rate has for a long time been measured not by how many offences, how many offenders, or how many victims there are of youth crime, but by how many young people end up in Youth Court. So we’ve just been discussing for a long time the fact that 80 percent of young people don’t end up in Youth Court, and they can offend 20, 30, 40 times before they get to Youth Court and get prosecuted, and then they’re counted once. So we’ve got to be careful about seeing how many people who have ended up in Youth Court and see the number go down or up, see how that’s working, and whether it’s not working or working.

I’d just like to point out a couple of other reports from 2019. In the Youth Justice Indicators Summary Report, it showed that 70 percent of all 16-year-old offenders end up in adult court within two years. That’s more than two-thirds of all 16-year-olds who go through the Youth Court are processed through the adult court when they are older. It’s stated that youth who are committing serious crime has also increased from 2010. In 2017, over that 12 months, it has increased by 10 percent on the year before. Even on youth in remand—and I take the comments from Dr Nick Smith about those on bail and breaching bail—Oranga Tamariki found, and this was last year, that the vast majority of all custodial remands actually occurred in cases where youth were already on bail. That means that the youth was given bail but then either reoffended or breached their bail conditions.

Between the period 2011-2016, almost half of all youth on bail reoffended, and those with three or more bail breaches doubled from 20 to 40 percent. Of those in custody, 94 percent of them either breached bail or reoffended whilst on bail. So it’s a mixed bag, and I think that we need to be very careful about looking at the stats and what stats we use, and—again—what’s behind those stats. That’s why I think it’s a really good thing that this bill will be going through to select committee and this House will be given the opportunity to hear from the experts and look deeper into the statistics on how our youth justice system is or isn’t working, and how we can make it better. Thank you, Mr Speaker. I commend this bill to the House.