Three Strikes Legislation Repeal Bill

Mr Speaker, tēnā koe. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this bill. Let me start by saying that if we want an effective justice system which treats everyone—and when I say “everyone”, I mean victims, Māori, offenders, and families—fairly and with respect, we need to be led by the evidence. A defence of the three-strikes law requires a sort of wilful disinterest in that evidence and how an effective sentencing regime should work, disinterest in the harsh penalties for serious offences that are more effective than the three-strikes regime, and a tolerance for outcomes which are not fair. I use that word “wilful disinterest” because three strikes has not reduced serious offending and victimisation. It does not do what its proponents wanted it to do and still say it does, despite the evidence which is there to be seen.

Three strikes gives us sentences which are plainly disproportionate, and, when it was enacted, its proponents knew that would happen. It gives us sentences for some offenders that without the rule, no judge or even reasonable person on the street would hand out. I see the repeal of three strikes as a sensible change which stands on its own in the wider debate, where claims are drowning out the evidence about its efficacy, because there is urgent need for consensus on justice issues, and we need to agree to be guided by the evidence as we design our justice system.

The Hon Paul Goldsmith made his contribution to this debate about the way that this repeal of three strikes would affect Labour MPs in marginal seats. That is a worrying insight into the way that justice policy can be used as a gimmick by politicians. It’s worrying because we cannot make policy that looks tough in a tweet or in a TV soundbite but does not reduce crime. People deserve better than that.

Programmes that are proven to reduce reoffending are worth more discussion in this House, and they don’t get the same kind of air time. It’s things like independent reviews which have shown to be effective in stopping serious crime, or the programmes like the alcohol and other drug treatment courts or the AODT courts. Those provide an evidence-based best-practice treatment pathway that includes intensive monitoring, case management, drug testing, and mentoring. And when we assess them at a population-wide level of all of the people who have gone through those programmes or an individual level about the way that the cycle of offending has impacted this particular person’s life—on both of those measures, programmes like that are shown to reduce offending, to reduce crime overall, and to, therefore, reduce harm on the communities who suffer the effects of that crime.

I said a defence of three strikes would require wilful blindness about effective sentencing. So let’s talk about how three strikes actually works. If you’re sentenced for one of the three-strikes offences, your first strike, you get a warning only on top of a normal sentence for your actions. But if you’re then sentenced for another three-strikes offence, that’s your second strike, you get a final warning and you serve any jail time for your actions in full. That means you get a normal sentence but no option for parole. In the third strike sentence, you must be given the maximum sentence for your offending and serve it in full. So whatever you’ve done, you serve the maximum sentence, no matter whether that is completely out of step with any other offenders serving that time for a very similar offence to your own or in very different circumstances to your own.

So if you have a third strike, irrespective of the nature of offending or anything else, that creates this potentially absurd consequence of such a rigid rule, and that was clear from day one when this legislation was passed. It’s not something that we’ve learnt over time, because sentencing should take into account things like deterrence, whether offenders who are punished are less likely to re-offend and their punishment will deter others. Things like incapacitation—punishment can make it difficult or impossible for offenders to re-offend. That’s an important part of the way that we sentence our offenders.

It should take into account rehabilitation. If crime occurs because of a defect—say psychological, moral, or social—it can be corrected or prevented in future crime. And this is a particularly important part of the system, which three strikes seems to actively act against, because once you are on those three-strike offences, you lose the ability to participate in those programmes which give you a better grounding outside of prison and which enable you to take on a fulfilling and hopeful life, which inevitably leads to less offending from that person in the future. And the underlying logic of three-strikes legislation is that a failure in deterrence can be compensated by increases in incapacitation. There’s no evidence that that is the case in the way that it’s playing out here in New Zealand or in the United States, where this legislation was borrowed from.

I said that a defence of three strikes requires us to ignore the harsh penalties to serious offenders that are more effective. Other sentencing options in orders already exist in New Zealand law that provide judges the tools to impose the same restrictions as provided by the three-strikes law—in appropriate cases. We have preventative detention for repeat serious offenders, public-protection and extended-supervision orders, minimum periods of imprisonment, and imposing maximum penalties up to life imprisonment. All of these things are tools in the tool kit which judges can use to punish serious offenders and to keep people safe. None of these things is improved by the three-strikes law.

So this question about whether three strikes is actually more effective than these—well, the answer is no. Three strikes is imported law from a failed US system. It was enacted in 2010 and modelled upon California’s 1994 three-strikes law. That Californian law was draconian, and it has been criticised since its enactment as the toughest law in America. It is not serving that population. It is not serving the ideology of that population, where people are becoming more and more polarised around how we should treat offending, given that on one side you have the need for rehabilitation, and on one side you have the need for deterrence. Penalties like three strikes require us to be more and more polarised over time. They don’t serve the people of America, and they certainly don’t serve us.

So what is a New Zealand response to crime? Well, it’s one that reduces offending. The causes of crime need to be addressed: for example, taking into account programmes like Te Pae Oranga panels, like Hōkai Rangi—the initiatives which are shown to get people out of the system, out of offending. Rangatahi and Pacific courts offer young people who have admitted to their offending or have charges that they are facing the choice of having their family group conference plans monitored in the right kind of setting. These things are early interventions in an offending cycle that make a difference to the way that people interact with the justice system and make a difference for the offender’s victims in that they are empowered to participate in the system. Te Ao Mārama, this is a programme that incorporates best practices developed in the District Courts’ solution-focused specialist courts into mainstream criminal jurisdictions, and that’s to realise the shared vision for the court by improving access to justice as well as enhancing procedural and substantive fairness for all people who are affected by the business of the court. Those things are shown to make a difference. Those things are things that we can all agree around this House are things we should be having more conversations about and are things that we can come to the table and work on where the evidence is showing us that there are gains to be made in our justice system.

It was difficult to sit through the earlier debate about three strikes because I know that everybody around this House does want a justice system that is more effective, that protects people, that protects victims of crime, and that also reduces offending. I think the way that we do that is by opening ourselves up to having conversations around what works and is by avoiding the debates where we are pulled into polar opposites where one side or the other has to have a win on who’s tougher. The answer here is that we have to look for those areas of shared interest in our justice system that allow us to take a more evidence-led approach to justice issues, and I look forward to doing that with members all around this House. That’s why I commend this bill.

I call Harete Hipango—five minutes.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is a five-minute call. I stand not as a member having presided on the Justice Committee but certainly as a member of the National Party that’s listened to the debate in the House. It’s a given that this three-strikes bill is not going to be struck out. It has the numbers from the Labour Government. It’s going to pass into law. The issue is for New Zealanders at this present time, in the climate that we have, not only is there a cost of living crisis, we have a cost of crime crisis in our country and timing is critical. Is this really the time that the Government should be striking hot on this bill to strike out and to repeal the three-strikes legislation Act?

I put it to the House, and I put to New Zealand—it’s not. If anything, at best, rather than repealing this law, there should have been an amendment to the law. How many shootings have we had in the last couple of days? How many shootings have we had in the last week? What is this Government doing to be staunch and firm and fair on that? I’ve tired of hearing the debate around soft and tough on crime. My stance is that we need to be smart on crime—not complicit, not complacent. I put it to the House that the repealing of this legislation at this time, where we have a crisis of crime in our country and our country is struggling with the cost of living—why is the Government repealing this law?

I sat and I’ve listened to the debate last week and I have to say that I was perplexed. There were members on the Government benches—members who are in leadership positions—who, behind the camera, were mocking and belittling the substance of a debate. And that debate was about, really, should this bill be repealed at this time when we have a crisis of crime in our country? I was also perplexed that it’s all very well to have this presentation in front of the cameras and make a grand stand on things when behind the cameras—these are different situations and scenarios playing out.

I was also perplexed to hear members from the Government benches saying that there was no sense of discretion that the judges had. I’m going to just remind people what the law says. The law specifically states that when it comes to the three strikes, there is discretion. That discretion is where the court may deem the imposition of a first, a second, and a third strike to be manifestly unjust in terms of a mandatory sentence being imposed. So let’s correct the record on that.

Also, in terms of qualifying offences—that’s under the Sentencing and Parole Reform Act 2010—there are 40 qualifying offences, and they are the most serious criminal activity. So let’s be clear on this: we’ve got this gun spree, gun shooting-up that’s going around the country, and spree on crime. Five of those 40 qualifying offences are specifically firearms-related offences. What message is being sent to those offenders who are on a rampage with their weapons, with their firearms, going around shooting up around the country? This three-strikes legislation repeal is completely striking out a deterrent force and approach by the courts and the law to be firm, not complacent, and not complicit.

I’m not reading notes, as the previous speaker did. I’ve got a number of notes that I have to refer here—none of which I can see because I need a new prescription with my lenses. But in saying that—not having been on the Justice Committee—the National Party is opposing the repeal of this on the basis that to do so at this time is not the right time to do so. The evidence from the Ministry of Justice is saying that “There’s no substantial international or New Zealand evidence on the effect of three strikes laws on crime. The existing evidence is mixed and more robust research is needed to understand the true effects of these laws.” On that basis, the National Party opposes this repeal bill.

It’s a pleasure to stand up and take a call in support of the repeal of this really quite detrimental, dangerous, and unworthy piece of legislation, one that my colleagues in the criminal court and the judiciary have long, long despised and wanted rid of. I guess I would answer my colleague across the House—Ms Hipango—by saying: when is the right time to do the right thing? Every time.

💬 Harete Hipango: Right now.

Right now is the right time to do the right thing—which, of course, is always the left thing.

Having spent most of my adult life working to help vulnerable victims, particularly of sex crimes, to get access to justice, I do understand the desire to find a silver bullet to the problem of crime. But there’s a saying in the courts: hard cases make bad law—meaning the facts of a terrible case can make us reach for simplistic solutions that feel good in the moment and go on to leave a trail of havoc when the next case isn’t as hard or as straightforward. Now, sure, it feels good to lock ’em up and throw away the key on a terrible offender, except that some of them turn out to be sad people like Mr Fitzgerald in the Court of Appeal case with serious mental health problems, who offend compulsively, and whose crimes consist of still distressing but ultimately low-level offending—not good, not OK, but not worth seven years in jail. And that is exactly what has happened here, and exactly why we are repealing this bit of feel-good, no-good, ineffective legislation.

And it is ineffective, to the point that no one researching any of the many countries and states who have had these things—so not just New Zealand—has been able to come to a conclusive answer demonstrating this piece of legislation does anything much. We’ve got stats going up and stats coming down. Over the debate in the last few weeks, a number of combatants on the other side have tried to cherry-pick a study out of the muddle. To cherry-pick one study one way or another is bad science. The overall picture is what we need, and the overall picture is, at best, inconclusive, or, to give it the technical term, “meh”. Now, I may be going out on a limb here, but it seems to me that “meh” is not a good enough reason to continue with a law that, as our highest courts have said in the strongest possible terms, is a continual danger to the human rights of defendants—namely, the right to protection from cruel or disproportionately severe punishment.

Meanwhile, all the time, the court has had the ability to do everything the Opposition might want in terms of throwing the book at serious offenders. They have all the power in the world to impose maximum sentences, or deterrent sentences, or any combination of sentences. The difference is that when a judge does it in anything else than a three-strikes situation they are enabled to do it with a full grasp of the circumstances of the case, in a system where proportionality is the watchword. When it’s a three-strikes offence, all sense of proportion, or, indeed, rationality, is out the window in favour of the good old knee-jerk reaction.

And the really awful bit is that this appeal would have been unnecessary had the ACT-National coalition who produced this unholy mess listened to the experts in the first place. If you turn back to the original advice given to the ACT-National alliance, it was full of warning as to what would happen—which is to say, nothing good. Because, really, all these studies of the three-strikes laws do is demonstrate what multiple other studies have proven before: that the big idea of deterrence doesn’t work. It only works when the people you are trying to deter are making rational, calculated decisions, and people in these serious violence offences aren’t calculating anything. They act on the spur of the moment, fuelled by rage, revenge, and uncontrolled emotion. Deterrence only works for one sort of person: people who plan their crimes. Just a thought for those across the House, but possibly it’s the white-collar criminals who you ought to be targeting with this sort of stuff.

Deterrence doesn’t work. We’d like it to. It would make a lot of people happy if it did. It would make crime so much easier to eradicate. But we can’t all live in an ACT-National fantasy. We can, and I do, commend this bill to the House.

I understand the next call is going to be a split call also, and I call Glen Bennett—five minutes.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. Thank you for allowing me to take a call on the Three Strikes Legislation Repeal Bill. I want to acknowledge the Hon Kris Faafoi, the Minister of Justice, who brought this piece of legislation to the House. When he spoke on this last week, he acknowledged that the bill would likely cause and inspire debate both in the House and in the public, and, boy, has it. It’s saddened me, because I’m not sure if it’s been debate or if it’s been mud-slinging or if it’s just been crass rhetoric that’s been thrown around, but this piece of legislation is actually amending something that should never have been there in the first place. This piece of legislation is, I was going to say, an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, but it’s not even that; it’s worse than that. For us, on this side of the House, as the Labour Party, we’re about not going to the top of the cliff but going beyond the cliff, to right before you even get to the cliff side, to deal with offenders. It’s things like restorative justice, it’s things like family group conferences, and it’s things like social workers in schools that actually is around addressing the issues, not just “Lock ’em up and throw away the key.” Because what does that do? That just creates more engrained people who are learning the ways that aren’t right.

For myself, I come from a place of restorative justice and spent many years working in this field with both victims and offenders of crime, with communities affected by crime and impacted by crime. It’s always interesting, because we often got criticised in restorative justice because it was just a slap over the wrist, or a once over lightly, or a kumbaya and a cup of tea afterwards, but it was far deeper than that. Many times I sat in restorative justice conferences with gang members—with seriously freaky people, to be honest, who I wouldn’t want to cross in a light alley, let alone a dark alley—but the difference in the restorative justice process was seeing the fear and the trepidation on the offender’s face when they walked into the room, because it was so different to a courthouse; it was so different to standing here and seeing the judge at the other end of the room, with tables and lawyers in the way, whereas, in this situation, you were coming face to face with the person that you hurt, the person that you harmed, and that was far greater and far more impactful than the current justice system and how it operates. In many ways, in this three-strikes system, there is no accountability, but seeing the restoration—and no, not the shaking hands and hugging and walking away and all being friends again, but being in a place where the voice of the victim was heard, where the offender was able to understand the harm that was caused, to understand the ripple effect not only for the victim but for the victim’s family, for the victim’s community, and it goes on and on and on.

So I am standing in support of repealing this piece of legislation so that we can actually focus more on how we reduce harm. Harete Hipango, who just sat down previously, talked about this crisis on crime and the cost of crime crisis and being smart on crime. Well, yeah, we on this side of the House are going to be smart about crime; we’re going to continue to lean in. And, boy, we’ve got more work to do, I know—I know we do—but sticking with what this is and the status quo isn’t going to solve things.

I look at my own community in Taranaki and I look at START Taranaki, which is an initiative that serves young people who are at high risk, who have already caused harm, and who have already offended, and it’s around intervention in the early days. It’s about intervention to not let them end up in prison, to ensure that—yeah, they have to do time for their crime, that’s for sure, but what are the causes right here, what are the issues that have allowed for this young person to be in front of a judge? What are the causes of this young person having to be arrested by the police? What are the causes of the hurt that this young person has caused that has meant that they have had to go through the justice system. So we need to figure out ways where people do not offend or, if they’re in that space, they need to find ways to reform. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to take a call on the Three Strikes Legislation Repeal Bill.

I want to begin just by drawing on some of the comments from my colleague Arena Williams around the politicisation that we’ve been facing in this House and in the national narrative—and by national, I mean a nationwide narrative—around whether we are being soft on crime or tough on crime; whether we support the victim or whether we support the perpetrator. We look at these matters relating to justice in a black and white way.

I just want to take a short time to speak about the time when I was actually a victim of a serious crime. It’s context that I bring in my analysis around justice. Because, when I was in my early twenties living in Auckland, I had what could almost be termed a home invasion of someone entering the property, which I was sleeping in on my own.

It was probably one of the most frightening experiences of my life to open the door of the flat I was staying in in the heart of Parnell and to see a man who I did not recognise standing at the top of the landing stairs in a very large villa, all by myself in the middle of Parnell. I recall running down the stairs and ending up on the main road just outside Auckland cathedral, where I worked, and having to ring the police at that time. They brought dogs to track the offender through the night and because of the rain and the wet night, they weren’t able to track him.

Following that period, I had a really difficult period of time—a very difficult period of time. But what I’m also really clear about is that having a lock-up-and-throw-away-the-key approach does nothing to solve those issues. The man was just as scared to see me as I was to see him. He was probably looking for somewhere to shelter, some food, somewhere to get support.

For me, one of the things I bring to this House, and that I spoke about in my maiden speech, is my faith. For me, when I consider people who enact a crime of that nature—and if he’d been caught, he probably would have faced a very serious penalty.

But that’s not what I want for that man. What I want for that man—and for all people who are faced with these situations—is a warm, dry home, a decent job, a whānau, and friends who love them, the support to end addictions to drug and alcohol. These are the things that we need to be putting our time and energy into in this House.

It’s not about a sound bite for sound bite’s sake. People who commit some of the most serious offences: they’ve often been victims themselves. So when we speak about a victim or a perpetrator scenario, we can only support one side of a crime. We’re not looking at the evidence. We’re not looking at the reality and the totality of the person’s life that has lead them to that place.

So for me, I look at this type of legislation around evidence; around my own lived experience, but also around evidence. What we know is that the three-strikes legislation does nothing to deter people from committing crime. It does nothing to reduce the prison population. It does nothing to limit the impact of crime on victims. It achieves none of those things. It just achieves a meme, a sound bite, a short news story where people can feel good about themselves and beat their chests, that “Here we are, we’re doing something. We’re being tough on crime.”

We need to be tough on the causes of crime. We need to be tough on inequality, on poverty, on poor housing, on all of the things that lead to people being disconnected from society and being put into a place where the only way they know is to commit a crime. That’s not what I want for this country. That’s not what the Labour Party wants for this country, and I’m so pleased that we are removing what has been a draconian and ill-thought through piece of law that does nothing to actually make our country a better place.

I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, and can I say that I respect the spirit in which the last contribution has been made. I don’t have any particular sound bites in this space, but I do want to make a number of points that go to the way that the three-strikes law is often characterised.

I think we would do well to understand some of the principles for the criminal justice system that we have in New Zealand; for better or worse it is a very complicated beast. There’s plenty of opportunity, and, indeed, we should all feel encouraged to take enlightened approaches to criminal justice. I’m pleased that the last National Government did a lot of great work in the space of, for example, establishing alcohol and other drug treatment courts, rangatahi courts, and so on. But that’s not to say that there isn’t a role for the criminal justice system also in recognising very, very serious harm to very vulnerable members of our community. The vulnerability of those who perpetrate such crime does not take away from the vulnerability of those who are its direct victims.

A number of different points, in no particular order. Often, we hear that the reason that Parliament should repeal the three-strikes law is that it is inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. With respect, that is not the strongest argument on the other side of the debate. There are good reasons to and fro in relation to the three-strikes law, but lack of proportionality under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act isn’t one of them. This is because the lack of proportionality in the three-strikes law—which is to say the third strike, so to speak, is treated differently from the second and first strike—is a feature of the system, not a bug. It was quite deliberate that Parliament made that law. Proportionality was an aspect of what the Parliament at that time was trying to achieve. Now, of course, that Parliament, in 2010, can’t bind the hands of a future Parliament, which is why Parliament, now, can make a different decision, and clearly it will with the majority support not only of Labour but I think some of the other support parties. So it’s well within the right of Parliament, collectively, to change the law, but to do so on the basis that there’s a perceived inconsistency with New Zealand Bill of Rights Act—and that can’t be reconciled in favour of the legislative branch of Government—is to misunderstand the respective roles of the branches of Government.

The second point is that the courts—it has rightly been pointed out in the debate so far—apply the law. There’s been a criticism from the other side that there isn’t real discretion in the case of the three-strikes law because the manifestly unjust safety valve is a threshold that’s set too high. But that again misses the point that it’s the discretion of the courts being exercised on so many occasions previously that has led to a loss of trust by the general public, rightly or wrongly. You know, we can all make arguments about the need for an enlightened approach to justice, but the fact of the matter is if the people of New Zealand as a whole lose trust in the institution that dispenses justice, then we will see vigilante action whether in an active or reactive sense—which is to say self-defence—and that will take us into an even darker place. That might sound merely as though it’s a thing that a person might say in favour of the three-strikes law, but in fact I can tell you it is absolutely real. The fear in the community, the lack of trust in our institutions, and the desire—yes—for revenge; and I don’t say that that is a good thing that reflects well on human nature, but it is a real thing, and we cannot be ignorant of that in this House when we are making laws. We should not give in to our basest instincts, but we cannot ignore them because that would be to compound the error.

Another point I think it’s worth making is that in the previous part of the debate—actually, it took place on a day before this one, but the same reading of the bill—talked about the fact that Parliament’s proper function is to make laws and the courts to interpret them.

Therefore, it was said that the three-strikes law was anathema to that because it was Parliament seeking to apply the law in specific cases. There’s an element of truth to that, but of course, sentencing law is an aspect of law, and I don’t think we can take that argument so far as to say that Parliament should set no guidance whatsoever in sentencing matters. So that point is fine as far as it goes, but to its logical conclusion it doesn’t make sense.

So I don’t think that Parliament should hesitate to give guidance to the judiciary when it’s appropriate, responding to the people—the people, of course, being in democracy for whom the rule of law is intended to benefit. Yes, the courts are a branch of Government so they should be responsive to, in at least a limited sense, the will of the people—if not in relation to a particular case, because we don’t want mob justice and so forth, but if we do want a court system that reflects the desire of the people in a democracy, it must be so.

I think we can have a good conversation—I hope that at select committee we will have a good conversation—about anomalies that are sometimes pointed out in the current law. I think it’s fair to say that the categorisation of crimes that trigger the three strikes, that are considered strikes, could well be looked at, and it might well be that there are offences that are not appropriate for inclusion in a three-strikes regime; I think that’s a fair point to make.

Likewise, there might well be offences that aren’t currently subject to the three-strikes regime that, if the regime were to continue, should be included. A colleague across the House made a point in relation to white collar crime, and I think she might have a very good point, indeed. That may be a moot point, however, of course, if the repeal as a whole goes through, but I think it’s a conversation worth having nevertheless.

The point has sometimes been made that the three-strikes law, supposedly, has not reduced crime, but, of course, we don’t know that because what we know, without the benefit of a parallel universe which is the same in all respects except only that it didn’t have such a law—we don’t know what the crime rate and what further atrocities would have been perpetrated by those who have been convicted of a third strike were that not available.

This brings me to the point that the criminal justice system does have one of its aims: deterrence. Yes, that’s fine; that’s good as far as it goes. We can drill a bit more into deterrence, and I think we should in our remaining time tonight, but deterrence is not the sole aim of the criminal law. The criminal law also has aims which are not necessarily mutually exclusive but are different and separate: one is prevention.

Prevention is different from deterrence, because deterrence means that a person who would be committing another crime thinks to themselves, “Well, I won’t do that because the penalty is such and such.” I agree, that doesn’t always hold true, and there are categories of offence to which that is not a realistic expectation.

But prevention, by contrast, is when a person who has committed a crime and we have reason to believe would be likely to commit another crime, another offence—whether that’s murder or something less than that—is prevented from committing a further crime because, at least for the time that that person is behind bars. Now, of course, the obvious rejoinder is, “Well, if a person is behind bars, they may merely be delaying their release into the community, at which point they’ll continue to commit further crimes or they might learn further bad habits”—at the risk of using a trite phrase.

Well that’s fine, as far as it goes, but that assumes that our criminal justice system and the corrections part of that isn’t good for anything by way of rehabilitation. We should have more confidence in that. We should, and I mean the Parliament as a whole, both sides of politics—we all need to make the effort to make our prison system better so that we are keeping the community safe; yes, preventing crime for that period of time, but also rehabilitating people who are in there for the time that they are in there before they are released and hopefully can enjoy a better life from there on. I presume that every member of the House is on board with that aim, if not the way in which it can be achieved in relation to three strikes.

So, just going back into that question of deterrence, it’s true enough to say that deterrence doesn’t occur for crimes that we might call crimes of passion—excuse the shorthand—but, of course, there isn’t such a categorisation in the existing law that’s sought to be repealed. It’s entirely possible that an act is conducted in a cold-blooded, calculating fashion, and that’s a three-strike offence. I don’t think that we should give up a legitimate tool in the tool box of the legislature for actually stopping such premeditation. Deterrence, the extent that it can be effective, should be used by our jurisdiction.

I do want to acknowledge that, having visited a number of victims of crime recently, and I presume that other members of Parliament do, whether in a deliberate fashion or because they’ve come to us in our respective electorate and community offices, and their view on the matter is very clear: they often raise it proactively.

So for all these reasons, I think that this House should pause seriously before considering kicking away one of the supports of a criminal justice system that has as its aim not only deterrence—importantly deterrence but not only deterrence—but also prevention and thereby rehabilitation as well. We cannot support the repeal of this bill.

It’s great to be able to take the final call on this bill, which strikes out the three-strikes law. It is a clumsy, arbitrary, unfair, and ugly piece of legislation. It is racist in its effect—81 percent of the 23 offenders who have received three strikes are Māori—and it doesn’t work. It has not made communities safer and there is no evidence for that, and that is clear in the Ministry of Justice evidence brief in 2018.

But even if it did work, even if there was evidence that it worked, it does not make it right. We know that torture works—torture somebody long enough and they will give you the information that you’re seeking. But that does not make it right, and the three-strikes law is simply not right. It has resulted in absurd sentences that are disproportionate—in one case, somebody going to prison for 10 years for a crime that would normally elicit an 18-month sentence. That belongs in a banana republic—it does not belong in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The fundamental reason is whatever the Opposition tries to make about the three estates of power—or the four estates, if one includes the media—what the three-strikes law does is it takes power from the judiciary, puts it fairly and squarely into the executive and makes one big and unbridled mass of power that then usurps the role of the courts. That is the sort of thing Trump tried to do when he was in the States, trying to say that he had power that was above the law. That is what this three-strikes law does. It is jurisprudentially flawed, it plays to popular politics, it preys on people’s fear, it doesn’t make sense, and it diminishes trust in the judicial system and in our democracy. Therefore, I am commending this bill to the House that strikes out the three-strikes law.

Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow.

The House adjourned at 10.01 p.m.