Three Strikes Legislation Repeal Bill

We come first to the interrupted consideration of the Three Strikes Legislation Repeal Bill. When we were last considering this bill, Part 1 was being debated. This is the debate on clauses 3 to 10, and schedule—“Amendments to Sentencing Act 2002”. The question is that Part 1 stand part.

I do cast our mind back briefly to the debate we had about three strikes, and the question I asked was: why are we doing this bill? The repeal is to take away the three-strikes legislation, which was targeted at our worst repeat offenders to keep them in prison for longer. These were—and there’s only been a handful of people who’ve had three strikes—our most serious repeat offenders. The Minister’s claim—Minister Faafoi, when he introduced the bill—was because it hadn’t worked. I pointed out that, well actually, the advice from the officials was that there was no evidence at all, or no international detailed evidence, showing whether the legislation had worked or hadn’t worked.

So I asked the Minister why she was doing this in the absence of any evidence, and she replied that “Well, clearly there is evidence, because violent crime has not decreased since this bill has been introduced.”, and, secondly, that “Because there has been a stark rise in sexual offending since this bill has been introduced, therefore it hasn’t worked.” I haven’t heard such an infantile argument put forward by a Minister of Justice in my life, which is to say, “Behold, violent crime hasn’t decreased since the introduction of this bill.”—therefore, three strikes hadn’t worked.

Perhaps, I suppose, the question I have is: did it occur to the Minister that there could be some other reasons why serious crime hasn’t decreased over the past five years—particularly since they’ve been in Government—and I can suggest one or two other potential reasons, such as the soft-on-crime approach to law and order that this Government has focused on or such as the massive failure in social policy and housing policy, and the fact that 100,000 kids are not in school regularly. There’s a whole host of reasons why crime has increased over the past few years, and it strikes me as an infantile argument for the Minister of Justice to make the claim, as she did in our last debate, that the evidence that the three-strikes legislation hadn’t worked was because violent crime had not fallen. So I do ask the Minister to reflect on that.

The second question I asked—which I didn’t get an answer to—was how on earth could the Minister of Justice come to the conclusion, looking at the scene that we face in New Zealand today and every day—and today has just another example on the news tonight of a dairy owner had a couple of regular attacks on his property, fearful for his property and, ultimately, his safety. We see the rise of gangs, we see shootings on an unheard of level in Auckland and around the country, and we’ve seen an increase in violent crime of more than 20 percent. We see all this—everybody sees it; everybody understands it. Why is it that the priority for this Government and the conclusion that they’ve drawn is that, “Oh, we’re too tough on the worst offenders and we’ve got to reduce sentences for those worst offenders.”? Why and how does she come to that conclusion? Thank you, Mr Chair.

Members, the time has come to leave the Chair. The House is suspended and I will resume the Chair at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning.

Sitting suspended from 9.56 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Wednesday)