Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment 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 Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Justice Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 13 February 2025.

In recent years, we’ve seen a reduction in the use of imprisonment, despite the increasing seriousness of offending coming before the courts. For example, the imprisonment rate for burglary offences with a maximum penalty of 10 years reduced from 50 percent in 2016 to 39 percent in 2022; the imprisonment rate for robbery with a 14-year penalty dropped from 74 percent to 58 percent. Public confidence in the ability of our sentencing system to deter and denounce offending has diminished, and this can’t continue.

The Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill has three objectives: to ensure real consequences for crime, first; secondly, to restore the principle of personal responsibility for offending; and, thirdly, to better recognise the needs of victims, particularly those who have suffered from years of increased retail crime. I must make it clear from the outset that there will be real consequences for crime. I’ve become increasingly aware of the public frustration that, all too often, penalties do not reflect the seriousness of offending and the harm that it inflicts on victims and on our communities.

It’s an established feature of sentencing regimes that offenders can receive discounts on their sentences for personal mitigating factors such as previous good character. While this in itself is not an issue, I’m concerned that over time, offenders have grown to expect very sizable discounts. In some cases, these can be up to 70 percent, which can mean the difference between a lengthy sentence of imprisonment and a sentence of home detention.

The Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill will put an end to this practice by capping the sentence discount at 40 percent. On current estimates, around 20 percent of cases involve discounts that exceed this cap. I expect this policy will have a significant and measurable impact on sentencing outcomes. I recognise that there will be exceptional circumstances in which a larger discount may be justified—for example, when an offender provides substantial assistance to the authorities. For this reason, the bill provides a limited judicial discretion to guide against the risk of manifestly unjust sentences.

The bill also clamps down on discounts for remorse and youth. All too often, offenders have been coming before the courts, each time claiming to have learnt their lesson—this rings hollow for their victims who don’t find it as easy to move on past the trauma and the loss that they have experienced. It’s particularly frustrating to many when discounts for youth extend well into the mid-20s. We’re not talking about under-18-year-olds, as they’re treated differently in the Youth Court. The law changes I’m seeking relate to New Zealanders who are over 18, for whom repeat youth discounts are harder to justify.

The bill’s focus on holding offenders to account also extends to undue generous discounts for guilty pleas, especially those entered late in the day. When offenders drag out the court processes unnecessarily, they waste valuable court resources and add to the stress and anxiety that victims already experience. That’s why I’m proposing a sliding scale for early guilty pleas that caps maximum discounts of 25 percent while diminishing benefits for offenders who enter guilty pleas later in the process, despite having an early opportunity to do so. It’s an approach that’s been adopted successfully elsewhere. I’m therefore confident that it will be effective in ensuring appropriate discounts are applied without coercing guilty pleas.

These sentencing reforms represent a decisive response to crime trends that are of particular concern, notably the alarming growth of retail crime. Everyone deserves to feel safe in their homes, but we’ve seen an increased victimisation in retail locations, which have more than doubled since 2018. We’re all aware of the scourge of ram raids and other robberies that have hit small businesses hard, and the senseless acts of violence against bus drivers and other vulnerable workers. For this reason, the bill introduces several aggravating factors that are intended to result in tougher sentences for offenders who target, first, victims working alone; second, people who work in a business connected to their homes, such as dairy owners who live upstairs; and, thirdly, public transport workers.

The sentencing package reform also rationalises aggravating factors included in other legislation currently before the House, and particularly in two scenarios. The first involves adults who take advantage of children and young people by encouraging them to participate in their offending. This highly irresponsible and selfish behaviour needs to be condemned in the strongest terms, not the least because it helps create a new generation of offenders. Second, I’m concerned about the phenomenon of people live streaming or posting their offending online as a means of glorifying criminal conduct and encouraging copycats. Both of these aggravating factors have been carried over from the Raid Offending and Related Measures Amendment Bill, currently at select committee. These victim-oriented reforms are also supported by the revision to the principles of the sentencing, which gives greater weight to the needs of the victims.

Another element of the bill responds to the growing use of concurrent sentencing for offenders who commit further crimes while on bail, in custody, and on parole. Victims are right to be concerned if the punishment for crimes committed in these contexts is simply rolled into the sentencing for the original offending. This has been a particular issue for correction officers, who work in very challenging conditions, assaulted by prisoners, and finding that the penalties don’t reflect the crime. That’s why we’re changing the law to set a clear expectation that cumulative sentences would generally be imposed for offending on bail, in custody, and on parole, unless there is good reason.

The bill also makes some minor changes to the Sentencing Act to improve the efficiency and workability of the legislation. For example, it is making a protection order an option in sentencing where a person has been discharged without conviction for a family violence offence. We know that the proposed reforms to the Sentencing Act will result in more offenders going to prison, and we make no apology for that. Modelling suggests that the prison population will increase by about 1,500 extra prisoners over the next 10 years. We’ve planned for this. Much of the costs have already been factored into prison population forecasts. The Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill has a three-month commencement period before the reform comes into force to allow time for everybody to prepare to make the changes.

This bill builds on this Government’s ongoing work to restore law and order, including new laws to address gang harm—which were passed just this week—and reinstating the three-strikes regime. The Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill strikes the right balance between ensuring real consequences for crime and maintaining judicial discretion to avoid unjust outcomes. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

I’m really concerned that the Minister presented quite misleading facts, which he’s obviously been given by someone else, to the House at the very start of his bill. He would do well to read the regulatory impact statement from his own department, which actually provides, on page 11, a very helpful graph of imprisonment rates. Of all offending in 2015, 11.4 percent of people who were sentenced were put in prison—that’s 2014-15. In 2021, it was 11.4 percent—remember that number. In 2021-22, what percentage was it? It was 11.4 percent. That’s strange, isn’t it? In 2013-14, 10.3 percent were imprisoned of all offenders who were sentenced. In 2020-21, it was 10.7 percent. So it’s actually fictitious. It’s the kind of fiction that the Minister would do well to make sure he gets his facts right about before he comes to the House, because it is weaving a narrative which is inaccurate and which is not helpful to the deliberations of this House.

Now, there are three kinds of provisions in this bill. Some are pretty good. They’re the ones that were taken out of the Labour Party’s Ram Raid Offending and Related Measures Amendment Bill. There’s some that are pretty much doing nothing, and there’s a good number of those, and then there’s a couple which are actually quite nasty, but I really struggle with the Minister standing up here and saying “I’ve come up with a cracking idea. We’re going to cap discounts for guilty pleas at 25 percent”—

💬 Hon Paul Goldsmith: It’s the sliding scale that’s a clever idea.

—when, in fact, if he’d done his reading, he’d know already that in the law, that is already the case.

In the case of Hessell v R, a case that’s from 2010 in the Supreme Court, it looked at exactly that question. It said, “How should we deal with guilty pleas as a mitigating factor?” There it is, right in that judgment, where the court says—and I’m going to actually find it for you—“The reduction for a guilty plea component should not exceed 25 per cent.” “Oh, good idea. Let’s do what the court told us we’re doing already.” Genius, Minister. Genius.

Then he talks about having a guilty plea and a sliding scale. In fact, that case was about the sliding scale, and, to be fair, the case looked at the sliding scale and said that it doesn’t really work because it sends perverse incentives and doesn’t take into account the full context of the guilty plea. For example, if you’ve got a tricky question of law, and if you don’t know whether something’s fraudulent or not fraudulent, or whether a communication is legal or illegal, there’s actually a fair bit of work that has to go on before you’re in a position to take good advice.

Or perhaps the police haven’t done a great job. Perhaps it’s one of those awkward cases where they forget about a document and disclose it late. That’s another thing that needs to be taken into account. Or what about this? With all respect to the police, what if they’ve got a raft of charges and they drop more than half of them just before trial? All of those are highly relevant to whether or not a guilty plea at a given time was the first reasonable opportunity or not.

Now, there are really good reasons, and I think that, across the House, we recognise that having an early guilty plea is a good idea, but, in fact, in this legislation, it gives you all the rules and then, in new section 9C(3) in clause 7, it says: “However, the court may, if it considers it appropriate, make a reduction to the sentence under the guilty plea factor that—[doesn’t follow the sliding scale].” The irony is that is says, in new section 9C(2), that it “must not exceed the applicable maximum” unless it wants to depart from it. It’s a nonsense piece of drafting: “You can, you must, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.” I’m going to have a lot of fun with this in select committee. There’s a lot of messiness, a lot of poor drafting, a lot of duplication, and some real rubbish clauses. I look forward to it.

Thanks, Mr Speaker. We oppose this bill for obvious reasons, but the biggest one is, again, pointing to the regulatory impact statement (RIS), if you look at paragraph 206 in the RIS, it says that this bill alone could double the prison population, with most of the additional people in prison having committed only minor offences.

One of the problems that this bill is trying to address is that the use of imprisonment over time has reduced, and there’s a reason for that, and that is because imprisonment doesn’t work. Prisons do not reduce offending, prisons do not rehabilitate, and prisons do not make our communities any safer. The idea of prescribing longer and harsher sentences for people who have committed crimes is absolutely false and will not lead to any good outcomes that this bill purports to be about.

Prisons don’t reduce offending; they just simply shift the problem elsewhere. Someone who has harmed—

💬 Ryan Hamilton: That’s right. Out of the community.

Oh, would you rather that they take it out on prison guards or on each other? It simply is shifting the issue; it’s not addressing the harm that happens in the first place.

Second point: prisons don’t rehabilitate. If you look at the Justice Sector Long-term Insights Briefing, it says that rehabilitation, even in its best form, has a success rate of 7 to 15 percent. Prisons don’t rehabilitate because prisons aren’t therapeutic environments that are able to rehabilitate people in the first place.

Thirdly, prisons don’t make our communities any safer. Ninety-nine percent of the people in prison are going to come back out into the community at some point, and what have they learnt during that time in prison? They’ve learnt that violence is an acceptable tool to use to get what you want. The reason that judges don’t use imprisonment as a tool as much as they used to is because they’ve read the research, they’ve read the evidence, and they’ve seen that prison does not get the outcomes that that side of the House thinks it does. If the core purpose of our justice system is punishment and retribution, which is the ideological basis of this bill, we will never ever break cycles of harm.

Now, on to judicial discretion. Judges need flexibility, not rigidity. When a judge has a person before them, they need to be able to take into account the entire context of that person’s life so that, when they determine a course of action to address the harm that has happened, it actually works. This bill completely restricts judges’ discretion—so does the three-strikes bill; so does removing the section 27 report funding. It means that judges don’t have the information that they need to apply an appropriate course of action that addresses the reasons for offending. I know for a fact that judges will come out; that lawyers will come out in strong opposition to this bill because it will not work, because it’s been designed to win votes. It hasn’t been designed to make our communities safer or to help people with rehabilitation. It’s been designed as a PR strategy to look tough on crime.

Now, the final thing that I want to point out about this bill is it makes a number of false assumptions about the decision-making process when someone decides to commit a crime. It makes the assumption that if someone’s going to, let’s say, rob a dairy owner, they’re going to go into that dairy and think, “Oh, if I do this right now, I’m going to get five years instead of three years, so I won’t do it.” That’s not the way that they think, but this bill makes no attempts to understand the reasons and nature for offending or to address that, because, again, it’s a populist policy that has been designed to win votes, as opposed to actually address offending. If we have a justice system that is based on retribution, it creates endless cycles of violence.

The last point that I want to make is I want to bring up a quote that we all know: “An eye for an eye makes the world go blind.” This policy has been designed to further punish people and to win votes, as opposed to addressing the reasons for offending in the first place. It is not a service to victims. Locking people up in prison for longer amounts of time and making certainty of imprisonment is not a service to victims at all, and that’s why we won’t support this bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise in support of this very sensible measure by the Government, led ably by the Minister of Justice. Now, this bill has been a long time coming. As someone who went around, and I’m sure many in this House did, during the election campaign, and before, talking to businesses who had suffered at the hands of crime—I’m sure many of you can empathise and understand what I am about to say—victims’ needs have not been put first. Businesses, people who are going about their honest daily lives, have felt like they were getting classed as second fiddle to the criminals. That last Government that was unceremoniously turfed out last year had it coming. One of the things that was coming to them was the increase in crime that we were seeing in New Zealand. Victims’ needs need to be first, and I’m proud to stand and speak on behalf of this bill which will do just that.

There are going to be some changes. I would like to relay a story of going to a small-store owner in the Bay of Plenty who had just suffered their second ram raid. Now, I’m no detective, I’m no sleuth, but I asked this victimised shop owner, “What did you see beforehand? Did you see anything coming?” This shop owner told me, “We saw some adults that we thought were pretty sketchy, coming in and sussing out our shop in the days ahead of that ram raid. We thought something was going on. They were bringing kids who probably should have been in school but weren’t”—because truancy was also a massive problem in the last Government—“and then, sure enough, we have a whole lot of kids, who probably should have been at school, committing a ram raid.” Well, we are adding a clause to the Sentencing Act to make sure that an adult offender can be convicted as a party to an offence committed by a child or young person when there is some encouragement there.

There are other things around live streaming, and we’ve seen the abhorrent images, I think, of the Papamoa Plaza which had a rather famous—I almost don’t want to draw attention to it—ram-raiding incident with some delinquents charging through the centre of a shopping centre and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. Then these muppets decided they were going to post that image, along with the bounty which they’d achieved too from a small skate shop, and it would have equalled 1/100th of the value of the damage which they did to that store.

We’ve seen abhorrent scenes on our public transport in this country, where people who are going about a job of providing a service to the good people of Auckland—wanting to get places—have been assaulted on public transport. Well, I’m glad to say we’re adding a clause that makes public transport passenger service workers—well, it would create an aggravating effect if you were to take some criminal activity out on those good people.

Then, the final thing I would like to speak about is a policy which I was very proud ACT was championing in the election campaign and that this Government, as part of the ACT-National coalition, is now putting this into practice. This is sole-charge workers, people who are often left alone working and can feel extremely vulnerable behind a counter, with people coming in and out. This needs to be an aggravating factor when someone is taking a criminal act upon these good people. Also, people who are working from a business which is connected to a home.

Now, I’m going to relay a little story. Over the weekend—I have a small business attached to my home—some little thug came along and kicked out the place where an honesty box once lived, took this honesty box, which is the business run by my small children, and took off with it. I have to say, I was really disappointed, but this clown decided to have some distinctive tattoos showing on a video camera, so I hope that assists police in the Bay of Plenty in piecing together this delinquent’s behaviour.

Just to reiterate, I mean, I didn’t feel overly threatened in my home, but I’ve got small kids and this is a home where we live and we have a business near it. I do not think that the things that they were exposed to anybody should be exposed to. For people who think about their parents or young children—when they’re thinking about their kids—working sole-charge at a business connected to their home, I hope that this change makes those families feel a little bit safer tonight. Mr Speaker, I thank you.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak in support of the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill. I acknowledge the importance that this is another step towards making our communities safer and making our public aware that we are listening to them, and I must bring comment when we hear narrative from across the other side of the House. The same member that referred to the public preferring to walk down an alleyway with a patched gang member rather than a police officer is now talking about the fact that we need to be concerned about what’s going through the mind of the offender, when they walk in to do grievous harm to the public and do not worry about the value the victim holds and the fact that we will not be giving unreasonable concessions to sentences for crime.

Then we talked recently in this House about how we needed to provide protection for women who are abused, are subject to significant violence, and are needing to break that hold over them by dissolution of marriage, and yet those are the same women who will be dragged through a court system with an offender pleading not guilty until the very last minute, and who will then have the indignity of that offender being given massive concessions in their sentence because at the eleventh hour they pleaded guilty. These are the standards we will not allow to continue.

We are the Government that will listen to the victims, and the moment that you raise a hand or the moment you cause harm to an innocent member of the public, you cease to be able to claim to be a victim of the system. You become an offender and you need to be dealt with as such, and until you take the opportunity afforded you to be rehabilitated, we will continue to ensure that the communities are kept safer by having those who commit crimes being held and imprisoned for the period of time that’s relevant to the harm they’ve caused. For that reason, I am honoured to be able to commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Look, it’s a real pleasure to rise to support the first reading of the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill, and I look forward to its passage through the House and off to the busy and effective Justice Committee, whose workload is only increasing by the hour. I would like to encourage all of us here to continue to support the work of the committee, and my colleagues who are on the committee as well.

Can I just congratulate all members of the House for being with us and for debating these issues—they are important issues. I think it’s just worth acknowledging that we do turn up and we stand here in this Chamber and debate those issues, so I want to acknowledge that. I was a little confused that we won’t be considering both of these bills—this bill and the next bill—at once, but it is my intention to speak with my Justice Committee colleagues to see if we can progress them through the committee together, because they are so closely interlinked.

With that, I look forward to the bill coming to the Justice Committee, I look forward to deliberating on it over the next few months, I look forward to the contributions of all members and those submitting on the bill, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and thank you for the opportunity to say a few words about the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill. I too, like the previous speaker, look forward to it coming to the Justice Committee and to thoughtfully being able to contribute to some of the issues that certainly need to be thrashed around a little bit. If my colleague the Hon Dr Duncan Webb has anything to say about it—and I’m sure he will—it sounds like there are several things that he’s got in his sights.

We’ve heard today people talking about the victims of crime and the fact that victims of crime need to be put first, and that is certainly a commendable sentiment. We also heard about the fact that victims of crime need to feel listened to, and that is also a commendable sentiment, and no one would disagree with that. The trouble is that it can’t just be window dressing, it can’t just be simplistic, and it can’t just be something you say and signal as a means by which to make people somehow feel better, but you don’t do anything about the actual problem—and there’s another word for that but that’s a whole new speech.

When we think about this bill, we have heard other contributors talk about some of the very specific things that don’t seem quite right with it, or some of the things that feel a little bit nonsensical because they’re unnecessary, but it’s in line, and it’s conducive, and it’s congruent with the fact this Government is nearly—nearly—signalling doing something but not actually doing something. If we look at the caps on discounts, we’ve heard tonight that the 40 percent cap on sentence discounts severely restricts judges’ ability to consider that full range of mitigating factors, particularly in complex cases. I think it is incumbent upon us to lean upon the experience and wisdom of judges sometimes, as they are much better placed to make those calls.

We also have heard about some of the aggravating factors, and the one that popped out when I looked at it tonight was the new highly prescriptive aggravating factor—not necessary in many cases. When we look at the one about the sole-charge shop worker, if someone rushes into the corner dairy, a sole-charge shop, and assaults someone, that is already a serious offence in its own right, so I’m not entirely sure that this bill does what it says it’s going to do. Two of the other aggravating factors are taken from the previous Labour Government’s proposal in the ram raid bill, currently in front of the Justice Committee. On the one hand, this Government certainly wants to make outlandish claims that nothing has been done for victims, but, on the other hand, it’s more than happy to criticise and steal our homework at the same time.

One of things that also concerns me is the increased cost to Corrections. The justice Minister estimated that the changes made in this bill could likely result in an increase of between about 1,500 and 1,700 to the prison population, which is a massive increase. We only have to look at the prisons’ capacity at the moment, and the fact that there needs to be buffer and the fact that prisons take an awfully long time to build and they’re awfully expensive, to mull over the numbers and realise that this doesn’t actually make much sense. Radio New Zealand reported it was an estimated cost of $165 million to $192 million. That is an awful lot of money to do something that’s not necessarily in the best interest of reducing crime or speaking up for and defending victims and ensuring that there are fewer victims.

National’s plan is focused on the appearance of toughness, and I feel like I’ve said this time and time again over the slew of rather small bills that make up the Government’s law and order programme, but we haven’t actually seen anything really tackle the drivers of crime, and unless you’re going to tackle the drivers of crime and get serious about it, it’s nothing more than window dressing, as I said. The interesting thing about that is that while we’ve heard all this commentary and this lip service paid to the victims of crime without any real substance behind it, National are, so far, we know, at risk of not even meeting their own violent crime target. They have set a target of reducing victims of violent crime by 20,000, but, as we know, the number of victims is up by 30,000.

They’re not on the right track. It’s not a very good track. This is another example of a piece of legislation that won’t do what it says on the tin, and for those reasons, whilst I look forward to debating it at the select committee, we do not recommend it to the House.

It gives me great pleasure to rise for this first reading of the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill. I just want to focus on one of its objectives, and that is to crack down on posting and boasting. Posting and boasting—this Government is getting tough. There was a lot of talk from the other side during the election about it, but this Government is actually going to deliver on posting and boasting.

What we’re talking about there is introducing new aggravating factors. Not only will this address concerns with crime against public transport, passenger service workers, sole charge workers, and those whose homes and businesses are connected; these new aggravating factors that will be introduced will deter adults from exploiting children and young people by aiding or abetting them to offend, and key is deterring offenders from live streaming or posting serious crime online, which may encourage copycat offences. Posting and boasting will be an aggravating factor at sentencing, under this Government, and those posting and those boasting will finally get to face the consequences they deserve, under this Government. I commend the bill.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, and thank you for the opportunity to take a call on this bill. Those measures that member just mentioned, which is children being involved in crime and also the posting on social media, are great ideas because they were part of a policy announced by Labour during the election, which were copied by that party opposite. That’s great; we’re in agreement on some of the things in this bill, but there’s other things that we’re not in agreement on.

I was listening to the great Kathryn Ryan on Radio New Zealand earlier in the week and she was interviewing a former district court judge, and it was Judge Harvey, and it was a really interesting conversation because they were specifically talking about the changes that Minister Goldsmith has brought to this House and the likely impacts that they will have. The point was made quite clearly that a lot of the provisions in this bill already exist at the discretion of judges, so it’s spelling out quite clearly what is already actually able to be done.

He did raise, though, a fair point. He did raise a point that has been discussed before and that’s the kind of semi-war that this Government has waged upon the judiciary in terms of trying to curtail what is their usual sphere. I’d like to just refer to paragraph 22 of the regulatory impact statement, because it’s quite thorough. The Ministry of Justice has been doing a great job of pulling these together in short times, I understand. In paragraph 22, in the short amount of consultation they were able to undertake on this, they say that “Stakeholders have advised that the limitations on judicial discretion included in the proposed changes create the potential for unintended consequences.” Unintended consequences.

“These risks include legal challenges on procedural grounds for breaches of [New Zealand Bill of Rights].” That’s additional money, potentially, that will have to be in that space if there are additional legal challenges to the Crown and the courts. “A prescriptive approach can drive court delays as sentencing becomes increasingly complex and can drive the potential for later guilty pleas,” —which would be the antithesis of one of the measures in this bill—“which in turn may lead to an increase in the prison … remand populations. Officials therefore consider it [is] important that appropriate levels of judicial discretion are maintained across the various proposed amendments in [the] reform Bill.”

Those were some of the similar points that Judge Harvey was making when I listened to him on Radio New Zealand—that there are unintended consequences. Some of these things make the shop front look pretty tidy and make it look like things are being tough, but we will see down the line how they play out in reality. The concern is what is already a very congested court system can be made far more difficult, and that’s no doubt why the next bill will be wanting an additional judge to churn through some more of these things that will be happening in this space.

The 40 percent cap on sentence discounts does severely restrict judges’ ability to consider the full range of mitigating factors in complex cases. For those ones where a rehabilitative pathway might stop that person coming back and creating more victims in the system, that’s a real loss, because if there’s an ability to find a pathway that prevents further victimisation, it would have been good to have legislation that enables that. Already, with the removal of funding for cultural reports, or looking into the reasons underpinning offending, this removes even further the ability for judges to understand the drivers of crime, to understand what is underpinning the reason why an offender has come to the court, in order to attempt to prevent victimisations happening again and again and again.

That’s why I do question whether reducing victims and being concerned about victims’ rights is actually at the heart of this Government’s desire or not. Much of the advice I’ve seen in this report actually talks about some of the lack of ability to be able to provide for victims, and the Ministry of Justice actually prefers retaining the status quo, when the Government’s told them to commit to prioritising victims, because there are already provisions in the Act. Once again, their own officials are telling them that their window dressing is already in place, but they still want to push ahead and talk about doing it anyway, because this is a Government that is all talk, all shop front. There’s nothing going on to actually drive and reduce reoffending in New Zealand.

It’s actually a pleasure to stand in support of this bill, the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill, because the changes in this bill address what my neighbours in Takanini are thirsty for. The last six years have left the good people of Takanini parched—parched for a drop of real consequences for crime. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is, That the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill be considered by the Justice Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Justice Committee.

Instruction to Justice Committee