Three Strikes Legislation Repeal Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Justice: I present a legislative statement on the Three Strikes Legislation Repeal Bill.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Three Strikes Legislation Repeal Bill be now read a second time.

The three-strikes law is unique in New Zealand because it prevents judges from fully considering the context of offending and the individual circumstances of offenders at sentencing. This law should be repealed because the courts already have equivalent sentencing options available to protect the public from people who commit serious offences—from limitations on parole eligibility through to the possibility of life imprisonment without parole.

Given the distorting effect the three-strikes law has had on sentences, strong evidence of its effectiveness would be needed to justify its ongoing existence. Instead, there is little evidence the three-strikes law has worked as intended to deter or prevent any kind of serious crime. There is, however, clear evidence of the disproportionate impact the law has had, including requiring judges to impose sentences so extremely excessive they breached the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

Further, we know the three-strikes regime exacerbates the overrepresentation of Māori in the prison population. Māori are almost nine times more likely to receive a first strike than those of European or other ethnicity, and over 18 times more likely to receive a second strike.

For these reasons, it is the Government’s view that the discretion should be returned to the judiciary, who are best placed to respond appropriately to serious and repeat offending. When approaching the repeal, one of the Government’s main concerns has been minimising any effect of the repeal on victims. We engaged with the Chief Victims Advisor during the development of the repeal legislation to ensure that any potential impacts were understood early and could be effectively managed. As a result, we developed the repeal legislation in a way that will not impact victims of strike offenders.

I want to be clear that no victims of those currently imprisoned for a strike offence will be impacted by the repeal. We are not proposing to provide for resentencing or early parole eligibility for these offenders. We heard from victims’ advocacy groups and from victims themselves that to do so would risk causing additional stress and hurt, and that is not our intention with this bill.

What this bill does is acknowledge that the three-strikes regime does not achieve the goals it set out to achieve and it does not keep victims safer. Victims’ safety was never a goal of the three-strikes law when it was introduced. We know from international evidence that these kinds of laws can instead have a negative impact on victims. This is because they discourage offenders from pleading guilty, meaning more victims have to go to court and go to trial than otherwise might.

The excesses of the three-strikes law do not support victims and do not contribute to a criminal justice system that focuses on rehabilitating offenders. That is why this Government has committed to repealing this law. The Three Strikes Legislation Repeal Bill was introduced on 17 November last year and referred to the Justice Committee. That committee recommends, by majority, that it be passed with minor changes that I support in full. I thank all members of the select committee for their thorough consideration of this bill.

Submissions were received from a wide range of submitters, including those with first-hand experiences of the three-strikes regime. Submitters included legal practitioners, victims of crime, criminal justice advocacy groups, and strike offenders themselves. Many of those who made submissions to the committee made some very important points, and I thank everyone who took the time to make a submission.

As part of its examination of the bill, I asked the committee to consider whether sentences imposed under the three-strikes regime should be reviewed in some way. Taking into account feedback from submitters, the Justice Committee has not recommended any provisions be included in the bill that would provide for the reconsideration of any sentences handed out under the three-strikes law. The committee has reported such measures would be complex to administer and would have significant effects on the victims of these offenders. I want to reiterate that the Government has accepted this position and will not be introducing any measures that would allow for the resentencing of strike offenders. I thank the committee for their careful consideration of this issue and for reflecting the concerns of submitters in their decision.

In their report on the bill, the committee noted that while compensation arising from the repeal of the three-strikes regime is precluded, the relevant provision should be more clearly worded to avoid interference with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. This is a necessary clarification. As we have seen in the short amount of time since the bill was drafted and introduced, the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal have found sentences imposed under the regime to be in breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. This Government does not and would never direct the judiciary in their consideration of how these breaches should be responded to, and the amended clause makes this clearer.

I do also want to acknowledge the submitters who did not support this bill. I understand there are those who feel strongly the three-strikes law should stay in effect, and I appreciate those who have shared these views with myself and the committee.

The courts stand firm on the evidence that this law has been ineffectual. It was the price the previous National Government had to pay for support from ACT, which they did not agree with at the outset; they should have trusted that instinct.

Finally, I acknowledge that this bill is likely to inspire debate in the House and in public about the way we approach criminal justice and how we treat offenders. I want to reiterate that when the three-strikes law is repealed, judges will have the same range of sentencing options at their disposal. New Zealand’s most serious offenders will continue to receive appropriate sentences of imprisonment and will only be released on parole subject to the oversight of the parole board—when they no longer pose any undue risk to the public.

I want to be clear this is about taking a smarter approach to criminal justice policy. It’s about ensuring we have appropriate tools to hold offenders accountable and use evidence to build a justice system that ensures less crime, less offending, and fewer victims of crime who are better supported.

I commend this bill to the House.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to.

I rise to stand against this Three Strikes Legislation Repeal Bill, brought in by a Government that is out of touch, soft on crime, and tone-deaf to the realities of what people are experiencing on the doorsteps and on the streets and in our communities in terms of a rising crime situation. This Minister and this Government are out of touch when it comes to the reality of what’s going on in our communities.

One of the greatest shocks of my political time was becoming a new Minister back in 2014 and rocking up with my many priorities that I was going to do as Minister of Commerce and discovering that the officials looked at me and said, “Well, of course you might want to do your 10 things, but we can only do five bills at once and four of them are compulsory, and if you want to do another one, you’ve got to drop three others.” The ultimate consequence of it is that a Minister learns very early on that they need to prioritise how they’re going to use their ministry and the limited resources that they have to focus on what really matters.

Then we look at this Government’s priorities in justice, and what is their priority? Their priority, looking at all the situations that we see in justice like the rising crime, the ram raids going on left, right, and centre, people getting shot in their communities, drive-by shootings everywhere, an increase of 21 percent in violent crime and more than 40 percent in gang membership in this country—they look at all that and they conclude, “What is our priority in justice? Well, actually, we think we’re too tough on the most serious offenders.” That’s the conclusion that they’ve drawn—that we should focus on repealing the three-strikes legislation because, overall, we’re too tough on the worst violent offenders in this country, and our priority when it comes to justice is making life easier for them.

Well, how tone-deaf can you be? That’s what this Government is when it comes to—they’re hanging their heads in shame over there because they know, particularly the many of them in slightly marginal seats, that they won’t be back in 18 months’ time because they are not listening to what the community wants when it comes to law and order, and that is that. Rather than what the Minister rather lamely referred to as a smarter approach, they don’t want to see a softer approach that they have seen from this Government.

I heard, again, the Minister saying that the evidence was that this bill, the three-strikes legislation that was introduced a decade ago, has been “ineffectual”. There is no such evidence. That was nonsense. He should really come back into the House and apologise for saying something which is completely unjustified. The Ministry of Justice brief on this bill was that “There is no substantial international or New Zealand evidence on the effect of three strikes laws on crime.” There is no evidence—no evidence. “The existing evidence is”—I continue with the quotation—“mixed and more robust research is needed to understand the true effects of these laws.” Well, that doesn’t strike me as a strong, sound basis for repeal, does it? It certainly doesn’t justify all the nonsense that we’ve heard on the other side of the House saying, “Oh, these haven’t worked. This bill hasn’t worked; therefore, we need to throw it out.” There is no evidence—that’s what the Ministry of Justice says.

Well, it’s appalling that in the last 4½ years of being determined to remove it, they haven’t looked for any evidence. They haven’t tried because they don’t want to know, they don’t want to see, and they don’t want to understand what New Zealanders are seeing on their streets, which is a rising tide of violence that needs to be dealt with effectively.

Rather than a Government coming in and having all sorts of other priorities in the justice sector other than keeping New Zealanders safe, they are not drawing the conclusion that this Government has drawn that, on balance, when you look at the whole justice sector, our main problem is that we’re too tough on the criminals. That is a bizarre conclusion to be drawing. So when we look at the victims of the crime—well, we don’t hear anything from them in this bill and in this focus. We heard from them in the select committee process. We heard from people like Sunny Kaushal coming in and talking about the terrible effect that repeat violent crime has had in the dairy sector—the people lying in bed at night at 3 o’clock wondering if their dairy or if their shop is going to be the one that is smashed over tonight, or is it going to be tomorrow night. We hear of the families who have lost loved ones to violent crime incidents, and from repeat offenders, on many occasions. They are asking themselves, “What about us? What about our family?”

The main goal of three-strikes legislation is to remove the most dangerous offenders from circulation for longer. That is what keeps our community safe. We’re not talking about large numbers of nice people. When we look at the figures, they tell the story. There’s only been, after the 10 years or so that it has been introduced, just under 13,000 people on the first-strike offence—13,000 people. You know, maybe if it was totally ineffectual, as the Minister claimed, as a deterrent and as a piece of legislation we might have seen another 13,000 people on the second strike, but we don’t. What we see is 640 people on the second strike across the country, and then, if it was totally ineffectual at that point, maybe we would see 640 people on a third strike. But, no, we see 21 of New Zealand’s worst offenders on a third strike.

So all this focus of ministerial effort in the House and all the grandstanding by this Government for this legislation is over a piece of legislation that has managed to keep the 21 worst repeat serious offenders in this country in jail and out of circulation for longer.

💬 Hon Andrew Little: So why is there a rising tide of crime?

And then—The Muppet Show continues over there. We have some people pointing out some flaws in the way that the legislation has worked, and there probably are some flaws in the way the legislation has worked. Now, there are examples—very few examples—such as the lack of rehabilitation programmes available for prisoners who are not eligible for parole, but that is something that could be reviewed or changed in the legislation. The obvious point would be to say, “OK, 10 years on, there are a couple of kinks in the system. Let’s deal with those.”, because the fundamental element of the bill is about keeping New Zealanders safe. Let’s keep that and deal with a couple of the issues that have come up in the course of the inquiry that we’ve had.

But that was not the approach that this Government has taken. What’s happened is that they made a promise during the election campaign that they’re going to throw it out, because this was, again, the priority for Young Labour and whoever else was pushing the Labour Party’s agenda—it might have been Mr Little. Who knows? He’s moved on to much more effective areas in health where he’s got that all under control after he made no progress in justice for a long time, but there you go.

But they promised to do this, and regardless of whether it makes any sense, they have spent the rest of the time dreaming up a justification for it where it doesn’t exist, and, like I say, when a Minister of the Crown stands up in this House and says, “Oh, the three-strikes laws were ineffectual.”, he is wrong. There is no evidence at all that he can point to to show that this legislation has been ineffectual.

The only point I’d make is when we look out there, for those of us who go outside and see what is going on in our communities, who see the rise of violent crime in our communities, who read every night over the last few weeks—every night—that another house has been shot at and it’s only a matter of time before innocent people are going to be killed—only a matter of time. They see what’s going on, they see the ram raids, they see the 11-year-olds stealing cars and smashing them into buildings, and they look at the challenges that we face as a country—

💬 Hon Andrew Little: It really is working—yeah!

Oh, here we go. Here we have another argument from the great legal scholar Mr Little, which is to say, “We haven’t got nirvana in this country. Therefore, the three-strikes legislation hasn’t worked. Therefore, we should throw it out.” Well, I suppose that if we follow that logic, we might as well just throw out the prisons entirely. It’s clearly not working. Let’s give it up, and we won’t try any more because it doesn’t work. Well, what a nonsense kind of argument it is that we’re seeing from the Minister there.

So the only point I’d make is this Government is tone-deaf when it comes to what is going on in our community, and if it really thinks that the big issue in justice, right here, right now, is that we’re too tough on the worst criminals, then they should go home and find something better to do. Mr Speaker, thank you very much. We oppose this bill, and we will continue to oppose it.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, if there was ever a “Muppet Show”, that was it—that was it indeed—because the three-strikes legislation does need to be repealed. It’s important that that happens, and I’ll give you three good reasons why that should happen.

First of all, I’d like to acknowledge all of those people who submitted on the bill, whether they were for or against. I would like to acknowledge all of those organisations who gave quite detailed information, and I’d like to speak to some of that information today.

The first point I’d like to make as to why we don’t need this legislation any more is that some of that really important advice we got from officials and through organisations was on the theory of deterrence, and this is really the heart of what we’re debating today: whether the idea of deterrence works. It’s a theory that punishment can effectively shape human behaviour, and the threat of punishment will somehow outweigh any potential gains that crime might glean. This assumes that all human behaviour is the product of conscious and rational decision-making, and what it fails to do—for those who are streetwise and tell us about what happens in day to day—is it fails to reflect the actual nature of serious offending in New Zealand. In the seconds before someone commits a crime in our country, they do not scan the most recent amendments to the Crimes Act. They do not weigh up whether the impending sentence is in fact worth it or not. It is done on impulse, it is done in an instant, and it is more often than not done under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Now, let me be very clear. I want to make it incredibly clear on the record that in no way at all should our society tolerate serious criminal acts, but let’s not fool ourselves that bigger sentences make one scrap of difference in the rate of offending or in making our victims safer. There is no—absolutely no—consistent pattern to changing crime rates before and after the three-strikes regime was introduced, and Mr Goldsmith admitted that himself in his first speech.

To be very fair, the one piece of information we received was that there was a 1.4 percent decrease between a first and a second strike. That’s as close as we can get over the entire period of this legislation being implemented of any marginal difference. The Ministry of Justice evidence brief in 2018 recorded crime rates for three highest-volume offences—serious assault, sexual assault, and robbery offences—from 1996 to 2014, and, based on those trends, the recorded crime rates at that time, it was concluded that there were few changes that could easily be attributed to the three-strikes law. Quite simply, this three-strikes regime has not reduced offending as ACT and National had promised it would when it was introduced.

The No. 2 reason why we don’t support this bill is it stops the judiciary from doing their job. It stops a judge from actually looking at the circumstances before them at that time and weighing that up. Under three strikes, judges must sentence offenders to maximum sentences on a second- or third-strike offence, regardless of any relevant context, and the manifestly unjust component has been used in many of those instances to try and change it. It is an anomaly in New Zealand law, because it severely limits judicial discretion in sentencing to be able to impose a sentence and consider issues like the seriousness of the offending, like the other people involved, and like the mental health of the person who’s standing on trial. In fact, the Supreme Court themselves found that this legislation has, in fact, breached our own New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

The fact is that this has resulted in absurd outcomes and hasn’t made our communities any safer. In one case, a person was jailed for 10 years for an offence which the sentencing judge would have ordinarily imposed an 18-month sentence in prison. Courts, in fact, can already impose sentences equivalent to those under the three-strikes regime, where appropriate, such as preventive detention for repeat serious offenders, such as public protection for extended supervision orders, and such as minimum periods of imprisonment and maximum penalties up to life imprisonment.

My third point is that this piece of legislation has damaged Māori communities. Māori have been disproportionately represented in the three-strikes regime. The sad statistic, which everybody in this House should know, is that of those 23 offenders who have received a third strike, 81 percent of them were Māori.

I would like to wrap up by saying that this Government knows that to reduce offending we need to focus on the root causes of crime, and this means getting smart on crime. If National was in Government, we would have a mega-prison at Waikeria, we would be in the dark ages, and we would continue just to lock people up. But instead of doing that, what this Government does is we have stepped in and built Māori pathways, which has just started the institutional change that our criminal justice system so desperately needs.

We have put in alcohol and drug addiction, and mental health treatments into prison where no treatment was ever offered previously. We have provided alcohol and drug treatment courts, which have got evidence-based best practice to get people out of offending and out of recidivism. We have introduced Te Pae Oranga panels across New Zealand that reduce the crime by addressing the first underlying drivers of crime when they first present to the justice system—huge success rate and huge rate of not reoffending—and rangatahi and Pasifika courts all across to make sure that we re-engage young people with their culture in order to provide a better platform for the delivery of effective interventions.

There is more to this problem than just locking people up, and I am incredibly proud to be part of a Government that is focused on reducing crime in a real and lasting way, and not going for quick shock-value political points. I commend this bill to the House.

You know that this bill is a complete and utter waste of this House’s time and should never be here, when you have the Minister that speaks to it that can’t even get a 10-minute speech out of it. Then you’ve got the select committee chair that can barely get to five minutes and actually talk to the bill. Do you know why that is? It’s because there is no reason, there is no evidence, there is no advice that’s come from Justice or from anyone else to say that this Act isn’t effective and it’s doing the job that it was intended to do.

By the way, the Ministers on that side hate being referred to as a soft-on-crime Government. If you want no better example of a soft-on-crime Government, you just think about this—and any of the Kiwis that are listening tonight to this debate, just think about this. Government’s priority at a time in our country when we’ve had a 40 percent increase in gang numbers, when we’ve had a 21 percent increase in violent crime, when we’ve had a 31 percent in violent retail crime, when the Police need the powers that should be contained inside a firearms prohibition order piece of legislation, do you know what they prioritised? Do you know what’s leading in the House? It’s the repeal of the three-strikes legislation. So don’t come to this House and don’t cry crocodile tears out there to the media when you keep getting referred to as a “soft-on-crime Government”, when you have prioritised legislation that weakens sentencing for violent offending, over legislation that would’ve given the Police the powers that they need to take guns out of the hands of gangs. That’s why you get labelled a soft-on-crime Government. You’ve got your priorities wrong.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Can I just warn the members, just be careful about the personal pronouns. You are bringing the Speaker into the debate. Refer to the Government, if you like.

Sorry, Mr Speaker. Very quickly, this is not the first time they’ve had a go at this; they had a go at this when I was the justice spokesperson and we stood in this House and we debated it and we managed to defeat them and stop the legislation from being repealed, because, at that point, they didn’t have a majority. I’ll tell you what: if there’s ever an example why a majority creates absolute power, and absolute power is not a good thing, it’s the example of the repeal of this bill.

I noticed that the Hon Andrew Little became quite animated in response to my friend and colleague Paul Goldsmith’s speech. As much as I like Andrew on a personal level, I can tell you that he fronted up to this House, as the Minister of Justice, and the excuse that they used then to repeal the three-strikes legislation bill is that they used the terrible example of a female Corrections officer being pinched on the bottom. That’s how they characterised a sexual assault on a female Corrections officer. The offender, they were able to get sentenced under the three-strikes legislation. I stood in this House and I confronted the Minister about it, and I notice that his head’s down now and he’s not wanting to comment on it; there doesn’t appear to be a lot of noise coming from the other side of the House. That’s because it was a disgrace that Labour brought to this House and characterised a sexual assault on a female Corrections officer as “a pinch on the bottom”. I can tell you now that the emails I received from female Corrections officers after that happened, you would’ve been embarrassed, ashamed, and you would have stood and actually made an apology, which, by the way, none of the female Labour MPs during that period of time would actually stand and take a stand on that.

💬 Ginny Andersen: What’s this got to do with the bill?

This has got every—who just said that? Oh, so I’m talking about a really important issue, and an issue that we should actually address in this House, and the female chair is laughing now—the female chair of the Justice Committee says, “What’s this got to do with the three-strikes bill?” Do you not know the history? Do you not know your party’s history and what you’ve actually tried to do with this bill? Do you not know the examples that you’ve used, and do you stand by them, do you think that’s a good example? A female Corrections officer was sexually assaulted, was held up in the corner in the prison, in her workplace, and your party decided to characterise it as a “pinch on the bottom”—do you agree with that? Do you think that’s a good use of an example to repeal three strikes?

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Yep, I gave the member a warning about using the personal pronoun “you”; by using that, you are bringing the Speaker into the debate. There are many ways and other alternative words that the member can choose to use and still have the same effect.

Sorry, Mr Speaker; I tend to get a bit passionate about that issue. So let’s go back to it. The member Ginny Andersen, the chair of the Justice Committee, she’s laughing and she’s joking about this matter. So I will put to Ginny Andersen: does she think that it was appropriate to bring an example into this House of a sexual assault on a female Corrections officer, in her workplace, and have it characterised by her party as “a pinch on the bottom”? She had a lot to say—she had a lot to say a few minutes ago. There was laughter and banter; now she has her head down and she won’t address me, because do you know what? Ginny Andersen won’t actually answer that question, because she knows that it was wrong, and, at the time, none of her colleagues stood up and actually stood up for that female Corrections officer. None of them said that that was wrong—

💬 Kieran McAnulty: Will the member yield?

Absolutely I yield.

💬 Ginny Andersen: I think I’d like to respond to that. I take accusations of sexual abuse or sexual misconduct in the workplace incredibly seriously. I take offence that that member has indicated that I do not care about such issues of huge importance, and I object to that language being used in the House.

Mr Speaker, can I carry on?

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes.

So let me clarify for the member: everything that I’ve said is exactly what’s happened. So if the member wants to stand and if she wants to dispute anything that I’ve said, then she’s welcome to do that. I’m glad that the member takes sexual assault on a woman in the workplace seriously; it’s just a shame that she didn’t stand when the Minister brought that issue to this House, and get up and say that.

💬 Hon Member: And that there was mocking behaviour during the debate.

Yeah, and that’s a very good point. The reason why I asked the member to respond is because there was mocking behaviour—there was mocking behaviour when I raised that issue, as if it wasn’t serious, as if it was trivialised, as if they thought it was funny—and it’s not.

Getting back to the three-strikes legislation bill, that got voted down that time round—

💬 Hon Andrew Little: No, it didn’t; it’s never been to the House.

—and it should have been voted down. Well, it has absolutely—

💬 Hon Andrew Little: No it has not.

Absolutely it’s been to the House.

💬 Hon Andrew Little: The member has got it wrong. The member is just plain wrong.

The Minister is now saying that there was no debate in the House about the repeal of the three-strikes legislation, so I’m very happy to be corrected on that.

When the Minister came to the House today and delivered his speech on the reason why they’re repealing the three-strikes legislation, he said it was to stop offenders because to have strong sentencing, as is contained in the three-strikes legislation, may be a deterrent for offenders to stop pleading guilty. We received no evidence, on the select committee, at all, to say that there was anything to show that the three-strikes legislation, or legislation like it, stopped offenders from pleading guilty. I think that is misleading the House, and I would expect the Minister to come down and correct that statement, or point us in the direction of where that evidence was received on the committee.

The heart of the matter is that, for some reason, the Labour Party feel deeply offended that the judge has been given some clear direction because of the way that most people in New Zealand feel that, actually, there should be some clear consequences and there should be some very, very clear sentencing around recidivist violent repeat offenders, which is what this bill deals with. But, instead, they go, “No; we know better.”

The interesting thing around the submissions that were received in the select committee was this: the victims advocate groups and the victims themselves—and you don’t hear victims talked about much these days, do you? But, actually, victims should be at the centre of our criminal justice system. They all got up and spoke in support of the three-strikes legislation. They made very strong submissions in support of the three-strikes legislation, the victims themselves. The groups that spoke against it? Guess what! Lawyers—lawyers that go on to become judges and get a bit offended and a bit sensitive by the fact that they don’t retain the full say, the full ability, to actually decide on the sentence.

Do you know what? If you surveyed New Zealand—especially at the moment with the incredible amount of violent crime that we’re experiencing in the country; completely unprecedented and outrageous for a peaceful country like New Zealand to be experiencing—they would say that they’re not confident in the sentences that are being handed down. They’d say that they’re not confident in the way the judicial system is supporting our police. They’d say that the youth justice system doesn’t seem to be responding strongly enough to the tsunami of juvenile and youth offending, and, actually, they’d like to have some confidence that there’s some legislation there that will mean that there are some strong sentences laid down and there are some serious consequences for repeat recidivist violent offenders, especially.

But what do these guys do? What do the soft-on-crime Government do? They prioritise the repeal of the three-strikes legislation; the only legislation that, at a time when we’re experiencing massive crime, violence, and lawlessness in our country, they’re saying, “You know what? Let’s take away that tough piece of legislation because we don’t like it.”

💬 Nicole McKee: “We want to cuddle them.”

“We want to cuddle them.”—exactly. Absolutely.

So I’m embarrassed that this House is dealing with this bill. I’ll continue to get up and make impassioned speeches when I have the opportunity, because I think this is wrong. By the way, I come back to the fact the firearms—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Impassioned speeches are wonderful, but incorrect ones are just incorrect. As one of the women in this House—and I don’t just mean Labour women—who has spent decades advocating against sexual violence and against sexual harassment for ourselves, for our friends, for our colleagues, and for our clients, and now who do so frequently in the House, I did take offence. But I am going to use my time to speak on the bill, and where I want to start is actually our commonalities, because, as a member of the Justice Committee, what I know, what I have felt in those rooms at its best times is that we are all there for similar reasons. We all want safe communities, and we all feel outraged when we hear accounts of people who’ve had to suffer as victims or as survivors.

But there is a difference between that side of the House and this side of the House in terms of how we respond to issues of justice. Where that side reacts, we respond, and I think you can hear the verbiage of reaction from that side of the House today. It’s cut and pasted a fair amount. It’s sounds like “soft on crime”, and if any of you were keeping a tally, we certainly got up there with Mark Mitchell, the last speaker. It’s things like “They say that we’re being too tough on criminals.”—that is the verbiage of reaction. Reaction is irresponsible. It does not bring us safer communities.

Reacting loudly is still just reacting, and it’s a very one-dimensional approach that the Opposition are bringing to this discussion, which isn’t surprising, because they’ve actually removed reference to a number of the principles of justice which we ought to turn our minds to. That is what a responsive approach in the justice space brings. A responsive approach in the justice space is about turning our minds to the principles of justice in a democratic society, which includes rehabilitation and accountability, keeping communities safe, and the experience of victims, the context of the offender, and—importantly—it includes the proportionality of the penalty to the crime and ensuring that the decision makers who are closest to the facts of the case retain reasonable discretion. The three-strikes law, when it was embedded, took a sledgehammer to those last two principles.

So is it ever OK to entirely remove core sentencing principles? No, it’s absolutely horrific. Some people might say: well, perhaps you can do it if you justify it, but that hasn’t been done here. In fact, if you look at the minority views on this bill, there is no mention of some of these principles and why they’re justifiably removed. In terms of judicial discretion, the National Party minority view argues that judges can still choose whether or not to apply three strikes if it would be manifestly unjust to do so. They are ignoring the submissions of those who work the closest to the ground, who told us that this threshold was far too high. It doesn’t amount to proper discretion. So they’ve turned their heads away from the principles.

The second piece that this side of the House looks at in the justice space is what does the evidence say. Now, in 2010, if you hypothesise that applying a new three-strikes framework will dramatically reduce criminal offending and that, years after that, we don’t have data that demonstrates that, that’s not a case to keep it going. That’s the case that it doesn’t work, and if you ever had to worry about a statement by the Opposition, read their minority view here. It, essentially, says, along with the statements made when this law was brought in: “We’ll put in the justice system a three-strikes system that takes a sledgehammer to two core principles of our justice system. There’s now evidence that shows it’s not really working, but we don’t think that there are grounds to repeal it.” Wow, I think we all need to be worried about the analysis here.

Now, I do also want to touch very briefly on what’s happening internationally, and we received several robust submissions that seem to have been disregarded by the Opposition. The Auckland District Law Society talks about what’s happening overseas and they say, in summary, that “These overseas examples further demonstrate that three-strikes laws (or their equivalents) do not work, are unjust, are against human rights principles, and unnecessarily contribute to high incarceration rates and disproportionate representation of indigenous peoples in the penal system.” They reference Australia, the United Kingdom, the US, and the EU, all who show examples that it doesn’t work and the system is seen to be unjust.

Very briefly: in the select committee process, we had robust submissions. We considered in detail submissions both from victims—as we always should—as well as from academics and from practitioners. The changes made at select committee were, very briefly, focused on the compensation provisions and we received an excellent submission from the Wellington Human Rights Lawyers Association on that point, which was more really a clarification of the compensation section as opposed to changing it dramatically. Few changes, but really robust discussions were had in that process.

I just go back to where I began, which is the value of community safety and a value that I genuinely believe across this House that we share. I am often really disheartened that discussions about justice and crime go into this automatically divisive space. They do not need to be there. You do not need to react. You can apply the principles of justice. You can look at the evidence. You can work through a rational, logical argument in terms of addressing this important issue for New Zealand.

This side of the House is doing that not only through repealing this bill but through the totality of the policy and legislation we’re putting in place around that. That includes the $94 million announced in the Budget to go towards addressing gangs and organised crime. It includes putting the most police on the beat. It includes the $6 million announced by Poto Williams in terms of responding to the ram raids that have been happening. It also includes the investments in alcohol and drug courts. It includes the investment in mental health and addressing truancy.

This is a Government committed to community safety. We are about responding. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m grateful for following my friend Vanushi Walters in this debate—rather than some of the most emotive and, as she stated, offensive speeches from the Opposition—as someone who’s also worked in the justice system and is deeply committed to preventing the kinds of harm that we’ve been accused of supporting or caring little about.

I worked in the criminal justice system, at that front line, for about a decade before coming into this House, and I can tell you the reaction at front lines from lawyers, from judges, from probation officers, from all the people that the original three-strikes Act rendered impotent and silent when that law came into effect. It ranged somewhere between embarrassment for the lawmakers who had followed no evidence, who had adopted something so regressive, so perverse, without the knowledge that people felt should have gone into lawmaking, to something like indignation because we were being undermined in that way. This law, when it came into effect, did breach the separation of powers that Westminster systems like ours normally uphold. We as Parliament make law, and the courts interpret and apply them in individual cases. It instead tells the courts and the public who come into contact with the courts that that discretion is gone, that there is no discretion to take account of.

Let’s look at the principles and purposes of sentencing in the Sentencing Act that this bill washed away. They are things like the circumstances of the offence, the circumstances of the offender, the victims’ views, the purpose of sentencing that goes to keeping the community safe in that particular case, what accountability looks like in each case, what deterrents might look like in each case, and, most importantly, because our justice system is geared towards keeping communities safe, what rehabilitation and successful reintegration of a prisoner back into the community requires in each case. The three-strikes law said that none of those principles and purposes of sentencing matter as much as parliamentarians looking tough on crime. Washing away the courts’ discretion said that to the courts and to the public.

Who are the people who would ordinarily be making those decisions? They’re judges, who we have appointed to our criminal courts after a lifetime of service in the justice system—legal experts, if you would. They’ve seen the prison system, they’ve seen the justice system, they’ve often worked on both sides, and they’ve risen to the bench. We’ve got prosecutors, we’ve got defence lawyers—and I’d remind us all that actually having a right to a defence is a fundamental New Zealand Bill of Rights Act right. So, if your defence lawyer doesn’t get to influence the outcome of your case, you’re also taking away that aspect of due process. We’ve got probation officers, who write pre-sentence reports after having interviewed the offender and others involved in the case. We’ve got mental health experts, who write pre-sentence mental health reports, where it’s appropriate. All of those people, who deal with hundreds of cases per week, if not per day, were being told by that past Government who enacted the three-strikes Act that none of their expertise or their work matters.

So today we’re restoring the right of sentencing based on those principles and purposes of the Sentencing Act but also of our system of justice, because, if we do say that we’re trying to keep communities safe, we have to go with the evidence, not what makes us feel good, not what makes us sound tough, but what we know works. Now, rehabilitation has to be a part of that. It absolutely has to be a part of that, because we know that most people that go into our justice system will get released at some point. How can we say that rehabilitation and successful reintegration of those who go into our overcrowded, prejudiced prison system isn’t going to be a part of the sentencing process? That’s irresponsible.

What does it look like when someone offends a couple of times but might not be suitable for something like a maximum sentence? Because I think the public get sold these types of laws as if they are dealing with a premeditated case of someone just callously going through the community committing crimes. What this law, in fact, did is say, for example, if you’ve committed a couple of this type of offending when you’re 17 or 18 and then gone on to have a life without crime—lived a life for another couple of decades, three decades—something else happens, maybe a huge change in circumstances, a relationship break-up, a bankruptcy, and you offend again, the court can’t take into account the way that your recidivism took place.

What are some of these crimes? Because we’ve got that emotive language of “You don’t care about sex crimes. You don’t care about violence.” Something like aggravated robbery can be committed by two 17-year-olds going up to another person and saying, “Give us your shoes.” Now, that’s terrible; we don’t want the community to be terrorised in that way. If they did it three times in one day, and we don’t know what the circumstances are—what we do know is that under-19-year-olds in our criminal justice system have overwhelmingly experienced a trauma-like abuse very close to the time that they start offending; leaving that to one side. If something like that happens two or three times in one day and you’ve got someone being sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment, who does that help? I think New Zealanders would be horrified to find that kind of American-style so-called justice was imposed in New Zealand by the National and ACT parties in Government. The millions upon millions of dollars being thrown away instead of investing in the types of things that we know keep our communities crime free—like the mental health care system, like addiction treatment, like housing and jobs, like the national action plan that the Hon Marama Davidson just announced as the Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence, an action plan that they didn’t put in place, having declared themselves the only party to care about sexual offending—that seems wild. Domestic and sexual violence has been at epidemic levels in New Zealand for quite some time, and they didn’t have an action plan, but we do.

So this law change is good. It’s the bare minimum that the Government can do to return our justice system to a place where rehabilitation and reintegration of prisoners back into the community safely is at the centre of our justice system, but there is a lot more that we do need to do. We do need to invest, like our Scandinavian, like-minded nations do, in alternatives to prison. What does community-based rehabilitation look like? What does having a rehabilitation system that’s standardised across our justice system look like? Because we don’t have that either yet. Investing in mental health, investing in rehabilitation, investing in housing and jobs, and all of those things that keep communities stable, with a Te Tiriti - based approach, is the way we should be going, starting with this bill. I do commend this to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I stand on behalf of the ACT Party and oppose this Three Strikes Legislation Repeal Bill. I’d like to start by noting that, at a time when crime is really getting out of control, Labour is showing New Zealand communities and families just how soft on crime they really are, how out of touch with reality and the mood of our country when it comes to serious violent crime, just how out of touch they are when they attempt to cut all the consequences of really bad behaviour out of the criminals, and just how out of touch they are at a time when parents are putting their kids down to sleep at night in the front rooms of their homes and they’re scared to do so.

This Labour Government has repeatedly turned its back on the victims of heinous crimes, and ACT will not turn their backs—either on the victims or on the criminals. We meant it, back in 2010, when we implemented the three-strikes law with the National Government’s backing, and we still mean it now. ACT puts our communities first, the people first, and makes their safety paramount. How can we achieve thriving communities if the worst of the worst of New Zealand’s criminals are slapped on the hand and given a bus ticket straight out of prison and back to be a neighbour near your family? We want thriving communities, not scared ones. But this bill will mean that there are no dire consequences for really serious violent behaviour. The Labour Government, along with the Greens, truly believe this approach is best for our local communities.

And what has the Government’s approach shown us? Well, the left side of town, the Labour and Greens, think it’s more important to have a chat and a cuddle with these bad boys—and they are all bad boys, there’s no girls on the third strike—and then send them on their way, hoping they don’t commit any other serious violent crime. Even the Human Rights Commission, in their submission to the Justice Committee, did not mention victims once. And when I asked them why, they got all uppity with me for doing so. There is no thought at all for the victims, because if there was, Labour would make sure that there are serious consequences to the serious crimes that are being committed. After all, you don’t get a strike for committing petty theft, Golriz Ghahraman.

Out of all of the charges that you could have laid against you, there are only 40 qualifying offences for a strike—and they are regarded as being serious violent offences. The offender is not hit with a full sentence straight away, they’re given a warning—that’s their first strike. They are released after serving the full sentence imposed on them in their second strike. And if they do get to the third strike, it is the maximum penalty for that offence with no parole.

Do not give me the excuse that they don’t know or they don’t understand—that’s simply saying that they can’t help but be serious violent criminals and our society should be accepting of it. Labour is telling our communities that it’s OK to have harm wreaked upon them because the violent offender was misunderstood and we should all be understanding. Don’t give me the reasoning that it’s a racist act because Māori are disproportionately affected. That would occur because those people who identify as being Māori are the ones that are committing the crimes—these serious violent crimes.

And this also tells me that the victims of these crimes are mostly also Māori. But we don’t talk about victims in the Labour Government now, do we? There are 21 people who are currently serving a third strike. And the Greens want these 21 people to have their sentences re-examined and possibly shortened. The Greens say because it’s only 21 people, it’s not that many. That actually says that because there are only 21 perpetrators, then there aren’t that many victims—and so that’s OK. Someone’s mother, daughter, sister, grandparent, or other family member who is a victim of these 21 third-strikers, or the 640 second strikes—they don’t matter and the criminal getting a lesser sentence actually matters more. Well, the ACT Party will not be supporting that Supplementary Order Paper.

And let’s put some data around three strikes, shall we? The person with the least number of accumulated convictions has eight, and six of them are for sexual assault. The person with the highest number of accumulated convictions has 156 of them. Of the 21 people serving a third strike, they average 75 convictions each between them. These serious offences actually only make up 1 percent of the total convictions; that is, three strikes are used on the worst of the worst criminals, like the man who punched and kicked and hit his victim with a piece of wood for his first strike. Then he stalked and sexually assaulted a 17 year-old girl for his second strike. And his third strike came after he stabbed someone in the leg.

Or what about the story of the aggravated robbery of a man dragged from his car before it was stolen, giving that offender his first strike? The second strike came when he assaulted a person refusing to hand over his money and his phone. The third strike came when a person, also the victim of aggravated assault, had their head stomped on by this criminal. And because of three strikes, this offender—who had, by the way, 105 convictions—got the maximum five years instead of 18 months. ACT says there is no excuse for repetitive violent crime and our communities should not have to tolerate it.

To see if there is a deterrent effect, the Act actually needs to be in place for at least 20 years. Offenders actually have to serve time, get out, commit another serious offence—not a petty offence—and be incarcerated again, serving a full sentence before being released again. And because we are talking of serious offences, this means that on the second strike the full sentence requirement is probably going to be for some lengthy period, such as five years for the head stomper that I just told you about.

Already the statistics are showing a minor deterrent effect. If 20 years were attributed to this regime, ACT believes that three-strikes legislation would show its usefulness and the need to keep our society safe from violent recidivist offenders, and it would be justified. ACT’s decision to implement this law, back in 2010, showed New Zealand we intend to be tough on crime. Twelve years on, and we still have that intention.

Three strikes has sent a strong signal about keeping New Zealanders safe from recidivist offending. The Labour Government, however—they’ve sent a message that the offenders are more important than the victims and that society should sit back and let this sort of crime happen to them. And they wonder why police aren’t getting reports of all the gun crime that’s actually happening in South Auckland, as an example—apathy, they say. ACT says it’s community knowledge that the police and the Government won’t actually do anything about it, so why should the community fear retribution for speaking out.

Labour’s stance on law and order, and the commitment to tackling crime, is like farting at thunder. Our communities should be thriving under a Government that puts them first. ACT’s ideas and policies on law and order will never stop because we, the representatives of the people, have their interests at heart.

The three-strikes regime should stay and the clear message should be sent to criminals that if you can’t respect another’s personal rights and freedoms, if you want to continue to commit serious offences against others—not once, not twice, but three times—then you lose your freedom for the full sentence available, so you stop wreaking havoc. Healthy, thriving communities cannot exist with out-of-control violence in our society. ACT does not support the repeal of the three-strikes legislation, and insists that our communities most certainly need three strikes to keep them safe. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Members, this debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 7 June, 2022. Tōfā soifua, manuia le po.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 5.02 p.m.