Reports — Inquiry into the Identification, Rehabilitation, and Care and Protection of Child Offenders

I move, That the House take note of the report of the Social Services Committee on the inquiry into the identification, rehabilitation, and care and protection of child offenders. The Social Services Committee has produced this report as a result of our inquiry into the way child offenders are dealt with by our justice system. It also provides an assessment of the effectiveness of the current care and protection model in identifying and rehabilitating child offenders. This is an important issue in my local community in Maungakiekie, and the committee believes it is an important issue across the various communities that form our nation.

Seventeen submissions were received from professional and non-governmental organisations, service providers, individuals, and the courts. We also considered advice from the Ministry of Social Development, the New Zealand Police, and the Ministry of Justice. Our terms of reference of the committee’s inquiry covered four key areas: first, identifying potential child offenders; secondly, the effectiveness of rehabilitative programmes; thirdly, the care and protection referral process; and, lastly, the effectiveness of the care and protection mode.

The law defines child offenders as over the age of 10 and under the age of 14, under the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act 1989. These offenders have “committed an offence or offences the number, nature, or magnitude of which is such as to give serious concern for the wellbeing of the child;”. There were concerns around delays in processes to deal with child offenders, especially between apprehension and resolution. We know that some child offenders continue offending after they are caught, simply because we lack the tools to address their offending before their case is resolved. Although we cannot treat children as adults, that interim offending needs addressing.

The report also makes a number of recommendations designed to change Government responses from a model too focused on what works for agencies to a model focused on best practice and what works for these children and their families. This, I believe, is a conversation our community needs to have and needs to address, and this report is certainly a step in the right direction. It is about getting behind our young people and making sure we are putting them on the right track to success in life, and it complements the programmes that have been undertaken by this National Government since our coming into administration in November 2008.

So what are we doing? Well, our focus is on building a safer New Zealand. We have embarked on a comprehensive programme of reform to protect communities, prevent crime, and put victims first. The Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Amendment Act of 2010 created a dual-track system by empowering the Youth Court to deal with children aged 12 and 13 who commit serious offences. By the end of January 2012, nine of 19 twelve and thirteen-year-olds referred to the Youth Court had been either referred to the Family Court for resolution or dealt with by other means—for example, through family group conferences. Twelve and thirteen-year-olds cannot be transferred to the District Court for sentencing. The only means by which a child can be dealt with by adult criminal courts is if they are charged with murder or manslaughter or if they elect trial by jury.

This National Government is staying tough on criminals, keeping record numbers of police on the beat, and ensuring the justice system focuses on the rights of victims. We are firmly committed to reducing child offending and youth crime, and this is highlighted by some of the policy changes to date. As the chairman of the Social Services Committee, this report has many sound recommendations that will address the serious issues facing our youth today and into the future. Our Government has already acted in the interests of our youth, their families, and our communities. I commend this report to the House.

Members, our bell sounds a bit feeble this morning. I will see how we go.

It is my pleasure to speak on behalf of the Labour Party in response to the Inquiry into the identification, rehabilitation, and care and protection of child offenders. This was an inquiry in which Labour participated actively on the Justice and Electoral Committee. At that time the committee was chaired by Chester Borrows. I am very pleased that he now has a role as a Minister, which allows him to carry forward the recommendations of this report, and I look forward to working with him as he takes on that role.

But there are a couple of things that I want to highlight from Labour’s perspective that were of concern while debating this issue at the select committee. Labour’s focus when it comes to child offenders has always been very, very clear. For us, it has never been about just dealing appropriately with children when they are found to criminally offend. As Mr Lotu-Iiga has pointed out, those children are defined as being over the age of 10 but under the age of 14, because, of course, beyond that they are dealt with through our youth justice system. But Labour’s concern has always been about what we can do in the early stages of a child’s life to prevent them reaching our criminal justice system, whether it is a hybrid form of care and protection or youth justice. For us, there were several issues highlighted in this inquiry that demonstrated that we were not making the most of our early points of intervention, and that, in fact, our threshold for intervention was particularly high.

There are three areas in particular I want to highlight that are part of the recommendations of this report that I think deserve further scrutiny. The first is the agency that holds accountability when a child begins criminally offending. We had examples from the Family Court, in particular. Peter Boshier very kindly created a mock Family Court situation, using real examples to demonstrate to us the delays that happen in the Family Court. Often those delays are caused by the agencies involved either not taking a primary role of accountability for a child, because there is confusion as to whether or not it is primarily a care and protection or a justice issue, so accountability was an issue there, but also delays generally within the Family Court process. I am very pleased that my colleague Charles Chauvel will be taking a call to flesh out how, actually, recent changes in our Family Court system may in fact make that situation worse, not better. So the Family Court has a strong role to play here, and there are some very strong recommendations in here on how we could utilise that process more effectively.

The second point of debate is the quality and effectiveness of our interventions when we do identify a child offender. Are we using well-researched, evidence-based programmes that are fit for purpose in the New Zealand context? I do think there is more work to be done to make sure that we have quality evaluation of the programmes that are being used. We have a very ad hoc approach to contracting at present. The third area, as I have already touched on, is the issue of our threshold for intervention. Let me give you an example. Early on in my political career, when visiting a school, I met with a school principal who was talking about issues amongst her student body. She raised the issue of, I believe it was at that time, an 8-year-old child who she said clearly had had issues at home in the past. These were not clear care and protection issues, but issues that led her to believe that that child and their family needed assistance. That was manifested by the child one day going out of the school grounds and lying in the middle of the road. That school principal’s only choice was to call a police officer and ask for their assistance. The threshold for intervention for that child, because it was not a clear case of neglect or abuse, was not high enough for Child, Youth and Family to be involved, yet the trajectory that child has since taken was one that would lead them into the criminal justice system.

My point is that we have a child protection system that is under strain. There were 150,000 cases reported to the Child, Youth and Family last year, 58,000 of which required follow-up. We have in this country 1,200 social workers. By default, they are dealing with the most serious end of care and protection issues. We do need a system that responds as early as possible to the needs of our most vulnerable children, before they enter into our criminal justice system. If we are to truly make effective use of taxpayer money and care for those vulnerable children, I would suggest that that is where our attentions thus forward need to be paid.

I am pleased also to speak on this Inquiry into the identification, rehabilitation, and care and protection of child offenders, and I want to acknowledge Chester Borrows for bringing the inquiry to the Social Services Committee in the last term of Parliament. Data shows that children growing up in violent families are more likely to engage in youth offending. The inquiry reiterates this fact, this connection, but then does not deal effectively with this part—addressing these issues of family violence and how we can connect the dots on these issues for our most at-risk kids. The social and economic risk factors for youth offending correspond very closely to those risk factors for domestic violence and child abuse, so joining the dots between these things is critical. Given the findings, an effective strategy to combat child abuse, domestic violence, and youth violence would be a collaborative, community-based prevention, an early intervention effort that aims to reduce the social and economic risk factors for families.

There is a very strong argument for the development of national and local collaborative prevention efforts between these three areas, and that approach is missing from the inquiry and its report. Child abuse and domestic violence often occur in the same family and they are linked in important ways to the serious consequences for the safety of all family members. First, where one form of family violence exists, there is a very strong likelihood that another also does. Second, research shows that the impact of children witnessing parental domestic violence is strikingly similar to the consequences of being directly abused by a parent. Both experiences are significant contributors to youth violence.

There has been some new research in New Zealand by psychologist Julia Ioane, following 600 Māori, European, and Pacific Island violent youth offenders. That research shows a very strong connection between exposure to family violence and the likelihood that those young people will become offenders themselves. More than half of all violent youth offenders involved in the study, regardless of their ethnicity, were exposed to family violence at some point in their lives. There is compelling evidence that exposure to inter-partner violence is associated with a host of negative mental health and social consequences in children and adolescents, and that these children display more negative effects and negative cognitions, as well as more social and academic problems compared with those who do not.

I agree that the thresholds for activating care need to be lowered, as has been set out by previous speakers. What I am concerned about throughout these findings and recommendations is that there is no mention of how this support is going to link together youth-offending, child abuse, and domestic abuse services. When we look for opportunities for that early identification, we could start simply with the 150,000 notifications to Child, Youth and Family that happen every year. They are often described by the Minister for Social Development as false positives—those who do not meet the threshold. They are not false positives. They are indications of concern and problems that need to be addressed. The problem is that those people do not meet the threshold for active intervention. They go into a waiting room and there they stay, waiting for someone to help them. There has been a cry for help and there is no response. We do not have a system that connects all of those things together and provides support to those families at an early stage, when they need it the most.

Where is the protective place? Where is the place that a protective parent can go when they need help? Where are the services that will provide direct intervention for those families? This was identified in The Netherlands Study, which Every Child Counts put out last week. In the Netherlands there are places, community hubs, where families can go at that early stage of need to get their issues addressed, before their kids become young offenders in the future. We need to stop working from a model where we need to identify those children, and work to a model where we have a place for those families and those kids to come for help, and that does not exist in the services we provide at the moment.

The Family Courts have recently announced changes whereby, in a rush to save costs, they are increasing the risk of those who have been exposed to domestic violence to continue to be exposed to that violence by having a family resolution process together, without addressing the issues of family violence and domestic violence. Often, those who are subject to that violence are then exposed to further risk. Are we really so blind that we cannot connect the dots between all of these parts of the family violence issue?

This Inquiry into the identification, rehabilitation, and care and protection of child offenders has been effective in some respects, by raising these issues and addressing and providing some recommendations that are very good. But without a concerted effort to join the dots between youth offending, domestic violence, and family violence we simply will not provide support to those families and those kids who need us the most before they get into trouble. And surely that is where we should put our resources. Kia ora.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to this report on the Inquiry into the identification, rehabilitation, and care and protection of child offenders. First of all, I acknowledge the work of the Social Services Committee, which resulted in this report being submitted to the House. New Zealand First is pleased to be involved in the discussion, although it was very much at a late stage, given our return to Parliament at the recent election. There is no question that an inquiry was needed and it is a shame that it was not done earlier. Now that the report into this inquiry is before the House, the Government needs to do something about it.

When identifying potential child offenders, the Social Services Committee addresses the importance of early detection of at-risk children. The Government needs to look closely at the committee’s recommendations, especially around Government agencies, to focus on risk and protective factors. There needs to be a thorough analysis of the severity of risks that children identify with and whether all these risks justify intervention. Having collaborative cross-agency and Government departments is key to creating successful interventions. It is acknowledged that the health and education sectors must have more responsibility and input into the process. However, I believe that the Government should consider a wider approach involving different key ministries—namely, the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs and the Ministry of Māori Development. These ministries need to contribute more towards addressing the social and economic drivers of offending.

Recent incidents arising as a result of poor system administrative processes in Child, Youth and Family services highlight poor strategic thinking. Of child offenders who are apprehended, 57 percent are Māori and just under 6 percent of them are Pacific Islanders—that is, 63 percent are Māori and Pacific Islanders alone. The lack of awareness around cultural perspectives will make rehabilitation hard not only for existing youth offenders but also for those who are possibly at risk. The culturally specific approaches in the Youth Court for Māori and Pacific offenders have been commended. However, there are still loopholes within these approaches. Application of specialised cultural services—for example, cultural assessment and relevant resources—would contribute to addressing some behavioural issues of children falling through the cracks. It should be mentioned that demographic areas need also to be considered when considering where Government resources and funding should be allocated. These should be allocated not by the populations of cities, but by the highest concentration of youth offenders.

There are still concerns surrounding programmes to address at-risk children. The question needs to be asked as to whether there will be a clear difference between rehabilitative programmes for offending children and at-risk children. Compounding these two areas could lead to children ending up in compromised situations. The committee has identified mentoring programmes as a solution for at-risk children. However, the Government will need to look at the effectiveness of such programmes, as this will be very much dependent on the mentors themselves. I would also like to raise the question of parent accountability when it comes to child offenders. In most serious offences the child has been brought up within a dysfunctional and often abusive family situation, which potentially leads to behavioural problems. I do question whether a lack of accountability at family group conferences needs to be addressed. Often these sessions are clouded with political correctness, which then blurs the lines of accountability when addressing the real issues. It has been recommended that educational programmes promoting good parenting are positive and effective ways to address these issues. Most programmes need to be established in terms of early parenting. There are not enough avenues nor sufficient programmes and support during the early maternal stages, especially for first-time parents. This begs the question why parents are not being held responsible, as their actions could very well be a leading factor in the circumstances of their child’s offending. Thank you.

It is a pleasure to rise to speak to this report on the Inquiry into the identification, rehabilitation, and care and protection of child offenders. Before I begin, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate a young woman—this is the first time I have had the opportunity to do so—Lydia Ko, a Korean-born, 15-year-old Auckland schoolgirl, who has done wonderfully well in the United States a couple of weeks ago, and also in Canada, becoming the youngest-ever LPGA winner, as an amateur. Although she did not win the $300,000 prize, she was very happy with the trophy. I do know that she worked really, really hard to achieve that result, and I would like to congratulate her in this opportunity that I have got.

Earlier speakers have talked about the purpose of this report. It does have merit. National is committed to reducing child offending and youth crime. This is reflected in the policy changes we are making to build a safer New Zealand. How we deal with child offenders and the balance that is involved is an important part of ensuring that today’s child offenders do not become tomorrow’s career criminals. The Government is engaging with the child and youth justice sector in the coming months as it develops its response to these recommendations. I will be welcoming that, as a mother of a 13-year-old.

When you look at the child offending age, child offenders are over the age of 10 and under the age of 14—and my son fits right into that; he is 13. As a mother, you do worry. The kind of stuff that I am actually worried about is whether he is going to be naughty in school and be called to the principal’s office. But we are talking about more serious issues here. When you look at the statistics from 2010-11 there were 7,896 apprehensions of children aged between 10 and 13, with crimes like theft and related offences comprising 37 percent of these.

I would like to commend the Social Services Committee in the previous Parliament, which actually began and almost completed this inquiry, because it is a serious issue. Children are the future of this country, and we need to make sure that we protect them, that they are on the right path, and that they are on the right side of the law, but often we do find that a lot of children are not.

There are concerns around the delays in process to deal with child offenders, as my colleague Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga has alluded to. We know that some child offenders continue offending after they are caught, simply because we lack the tools to address their offending before the case is actually resolved. Where we cannot treat children as adults, the interim offending needs to be addressed.

As a woman of Korean heritage, what Asenati Lole-Taylor talked about in terms of cultural sensitivity and the way we deal with children of different ethnicities went straight to my heart, because, as a child growing up, the neighbourhood, the community, actually dealt with child offending. I remember when one of my friends got into trouble, and an old man came and clipped him around the ear, dragged him by the ear, took him to the house where his parents were, and told the parents off. That kind of community involvement does not seem to exist in today’s society, and perhaps it is a shame that we do not have that.

I am not in any way supporting the idea that we should actually clip kids around the ear, of course, but what I am saying in terms of community involvement in children’s offending is that perhaps we should care more about what our children are doing. And if our neighbours’ children are offending, perhaps we should care about what we are doing to get them on the right track.

New Zealanders deserve to feel safe in their own homes and communities. Our focus is on building a safer New Zealand, and we have embarked on a comprehensive programme of reform to protect communities, prevent crime, and put victims first. We know that many young offenders have no self-esteem, have uncertainty in their lives, and lack any sense of purpose or direction. It falls on us to ensure that we put in the right systems to prevent further offending. I look forward to the Government’s response.

Just a couple of corrections: the chair of the last Social Services Committee was Katrina Shanks, and I want to acknowledge her work in the last select committee. She actually worked very inclusively with us. This Inquiry into the identification, rehabilitation, and care and protection of child offenders was essentially a Government inquiry, proposed by Government members, and we went along with it.

The second point I want to make is that this inquiry was essentially finished and ready to be presented to this House at the end of the last Parliament, but for some strange reason it was not. There was no work to be done, and there was no explanation given. So the current select committee has simply kept it boiling for a little bit, and now we are presenting it. But this was an inquiry into three aspects of child offending: identification, rehabilitation, and care. Everything we know from research and from experience tells us that unless we have a comprehensive system and an integrated approach to each aspect of that system, and unless each aspect is well designed and well integrated, and unless the care and protection needs of children are met well—unless we have all of those pieces together—the system will not work.

If we look at the recommendations of this inquiry, there are 25 recommendations, and they are quite serious and far-reaching recommendations. What that points to is the fact that this inquiry did not find such a system. We did not find an integrated system or a system that is actually working well. At each stage of the process around child offenders, there is much more to be done, and our recommendations actually point to that. My suspicion is that if we went at the moment into any other aspect of care and protection or the child welfare system and shone a torch on it, we would find similar kinds of shortcomings. There is something that is quite wrong, quite broken, with the system that needs a major review. I suspect that what this inquiry has shown to me is that it has identified some of that.

If we look at identification, what we found was that there were many, many opportunities for cases to be identified early, whether it was in our schools or even our preschools, but somehow that was not done. The system was not tight enough, was not integrated enough, to say that we could take advantage of all of the opportunities that we have, that the system has, and that many systems have to identify these kids. So the first recommendation under that one recommended that the Government require “government agencies to focus on the risk and protective factors identified in this report,”—and we do not do that. We do not bring together the knowledge base around what the key indicators are, and actually use them in everyday interaction with our young people. What we do is we wait until something really blows over. That notion of early intervention is really, really important, and it is an important aspect of this report. We need to also ensure that we identify the accountabilities of Government agencies—so, who is going to do what, and to what extent that will be done.

When we go to the current rehabilitation system, that was another aspect of what the committee was asked to look at. Again, a really quite serious shortcoming is that the bulk of the programmes are not evaluated, so how do we know that these things are actually working? There are a number of recommendations here around that. When we also look at the care and protection system, it was really quite a worrying experience for us as a committee when the Family Court actually did a mock-up of a number of cases, and we found out how the system prevaricates. It can keep a case going for months and months and months, a year, and even beyond. That has to be fixed, because the system is not integrated. I am sure that Charles Chauvel, my colleague, will talk about that. In the end we did not have time to really look at the effectiveness of the care and protection system well enough.

What this report presents is that the system is good in parts, there are lots of things that need to be done with it, the recommendations are quite serious, and they ought to be addressed. Now that Katrina Shanks is here, I did acknowledge your work as chair of the last select committee, where all of the work of this committee was done and completed, but not presented for some strange reason. Thank you.

Dr Prasad has just stolen my thunder, because I too wanted to begin by acknowledging, in particular, the leadership of Katrina Shanks as the chair of the Social Services Committee in the last Parliament, and also the very important work that was done by our colleague the Hon Chester Borrows, whose knowledge in these areas is perhaps as great as any in this Parliament and who brings a huge amount of life and professional experience to it.

As my colleague Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga, the new chair of the committee, has acknowledged, the report of the Inquiry into the identification, rehabilitation, and care and protection of child offenders straddled two Parliaments and two Social Services Committees, and I think all of us who have had the opportunity to be a part of it have found it both a challenging but also a very rewarding exercise. So I want to acknowledge the fact that there are some members—Dr Prasad is one, and Su’a William Sio, Jacinda Ardern, and me—who worked on the report in the previous committee. We were able to do the work that went into it, and I want to thank the members of this current committee in the 50th Parliament for picking it up and bringing it through to the point where it can be presented to the House, discussed here this morning, and, most important, the lessons that we can draw from it are made available to all the agencies in order for it to be implemented wherever possible.

It is a very important topic. It is one of the issues that really pushes all the buttons for me as a member of Parliament. It is one of the main reasons why I felt it was so purposeful to come here in order to try to assist our society to intervene effectively with young people who are at risk not only of going off the rails but in many cases of getting into a serious lifetime of crime, drug addiction, and all sorts of other terrible social evils that are so devastating for them, but always devastating for the wider communities in which they live. Children in the bracket we are talking about—the ages 10 to 14 years—are probably at greater risk in our society today than ever before. That is simply because we are seeing more and more family breakdowns, more and more intergenerational welfare dependency, and more and more children struggling with literacy and numeracy, which means that they do not achieve what they need to in education in order to be able to set their sights on a pathway forward. Many of them have known no other sort of lifestyle than the one that is leading them on the path to ruin. So a report of this type is very timely and is very important, and I am hopeful that it will lead to some really effective forms of intervention, because, as Dr Prasad has just said, the notion of early intervention is a really important one from the report. We all know, I am sure, that the earlier we can intervene in the lives of these youth at risk, the greater the likelihood is that we will be able to help them turn their lives round.

Others have spoken in this debate this morning about the need to identify the youth at risk of becoming child offenders. That, of course, is absolutely critical. But I do also want to acknowledge that there are many people out in our communities doing great work in this area. We have outstanding teachers, many of whom would be able to tell you very quickly what the problems are and who those at risk are. Equally, we have social workers up and down the country doing outstanding work, and in both of those particular professions the challenges are often considerable. I think it is appropriate that we acknowledge them this morning and thank them all for the vital work they are doing. But it is the interventions and, in particular, the rehabilitative programmes that are most significant if we are going to turn things round. So I do just want to highlight chapter 3 of the report, which commences on page 21, to say that as a committee we acknowledge that to some extent the jury is still out about the definitive view of the effectiveness of the programmes that are on offer. To be valid, each assessment would require comprehensive evaluation over an extended period. There are people doing that work, and we will be monitoring them closely.

I want to acknowledge Child, Youth and Family, which is a vital part of this package. It stressed the need for agencies to work together, which is another theme that I am really very keen on, and we saw some good examples of the way things are moving in this direction. We had an opportunity to visit a number of remand centres, youth offending teams, and the like both in Australia, during our trip, and also around the country. I would just like to finish by praising the efforts of one very close to home, on my own doorstep of Hamilton—the Kauri Centre. It is an outstanding facility working with some young people who are outside the mainstream education system. For various reasons they are not able to be in our usual State schools. The Kauri Centre is working with these young people, and every time I go there I am really inspired by the work that it is doing. I am hugely impressed by the commitment of the teachers and the adults who are working there. I have to say, they are delightful young people. Their lives are, in many cases, in a bit of a mess, but there is hope there for them.

I want to conclude by saying that every one of those young lives that we can turn round and turn back from the path to ruin and on to a path of hope, aspiration, and achievement is good for them, good for their families, and good for our country.

I too am very pleased to speak to this report on the inquiry into the identification, rehabilitation, and care and protection of child offenders, from the Social Services Committee. I think right across this House we would all acknowledge the very important work that was done in this report, and the difficulties that are confronted by all of the professionals, as well as, indeed, the young people at the centre of this inquiry. It is a very, very challenging area, and I just want to commend the Social Services Committee for commissioning this report and the Hon Chester Borrows for his involvement in that. I think it is work that is worthwhile doing and is very much a moving environment in terms of addressing the challenges.

One of the most challenging features—certainly as a former policeman I can speak to this with some degree of understanding—is the multitude of risk factors and protective factors that are faced by these young people. I would just like to turn to the report and read some specific information related to that on page 13, under the heading “Risk and protective factors”. It states: “We understand that a number of widely recognised factors put children at risk of offending. They include antisocial behaviour or conduct disorders, mental health problems, suicidal behaviour, drug and alcohol use, poor academic performance and truancy, poor health, poor attachment to family, and low self-esteem.” The report goes on to outline a number of environmental factors that are also at play here, such as a dysfunctional family situation, abuse and family violence, parents with a history of mental health problems or drug and alcohol abuse, and poor parenting.

The report also goes on to outline what the committee has learnt about protective factors that reduce the likelihood of children offending. Some of these key factors were “supervision and monitoring by parents, with reasonable and consistent rules and consequences”. A common thread within youth offending is that a lack of engagement and a lack of parental oversight often see children aged 10 to 13 wandering the streets in trouble, and this is something that I have endeavoured to address by way of a member’s bill that looks at the importance of the relationship between a child offender and their parents. This member’s bill, which is currently in the ballot, would actually provide Youth Court judges with the ability to put a parent or guardian who is entrusted with the custody of that young person under conditions such as a curfew, such as a residence clause, such as a requirement not to use drugs and alcohol, and so on and so forth, so that as the Youth Court is endeavouring to deal with these young people it can also be assured that it can get engagement with the parents where the circumstances are appropriate.

The report goes to make recommendations of a similar nature right through to the Family Court, where we are indeed dealing with the 10 to 13-year-old child offenders who will be in front of a judge in only about 10 percent of the cases. Indeed, they will proceed through to the Youth Court only where they are involved in a murder, manslaughter, or an offence carrying a penalty of 14 years or more, which is the very, very significant sharp end of the offending.

Indeed, the fact that this report identifies that the Family Court would be well placed to have additional tools to help keep parents engaged, I think, is a very important part that I have gleaned from the report, and I can only hope that today I am lucky enough to have my bill pulled from the ballot. That would be gratifying, because I think it would go to support exactly the sorts of recommendations made in this document.

One of the other real threads of information that I pulled from this report was that so much of what we are dealing with actually falls outside of the court jurisdiction, and is dealt with by family, community, police, and agencies outside of the Youth Court and the Family Court. If there is one thing we can glean from this report, it is the need for systemic efficiency, the need for stakeholders to collaborate, and the need for all partners and all parties involved to be mindful that preventing offending is, indeed, something that we must be focused on. I could go on. This is an excellent report and we should all take heed of these recommendations.

I want to commend the work of the Social Services Committee in respect of the inquiry into the identification, rehabilitation, and care and protection of child offenders that it has conducted and the report that it has produced. There have been some excellent contributions in this debate, and I particularly in this regard want to mention those of my colleagues Jacinda Ardern and Rajen Prasad, but also the contribution of Metiria Turei. I think the point that she made around the need in this area to stop working from a model where, as she put it, we have to identify them, to one where they have a place to come, is absolutely apposite. I share her despair when I read that protective parents in a violent relationship need and would welcome parenting programmes. Parenting programmes are not designed to work within the dynamics of domestic violence, and they will not keep a victim of domestic violence and her—because it is usually her—children safe. In fact, there is a higher chance that they could be put at risk.

The inquiry clearly got great benefit from having heard from the Family Court. It is obvious from the report at pages 37 to 38 that the evidence given by the court to the committee was very useful in its deliberations. What I want to do is just place on record my gratitude to the outgoing Principal Family Court Judge, Peter Boshier, because I have certainly been a member of committees in this House where the judge has, as he clearly did here, come along to a committee and given very frank and helpful evidence about what it is really like at the cliff-face, the coalface—however you want to put it—in respect of dealing with the sorts of issues that confronted the committee. The judge in his time has done his level best to make that court work, and to make it an efficient and effective place from which interventions can occur. I think he will be missed in his tenure as a judge, but I certainly wish him well in his term at the Law Commission, where I know he will provide excellent advice and support in respect of his areas of expertise.

Having mentioned the Family Court, I do need, I think, to touch on the recent changes that the Government has announced to that court. Some of them are positive: the focus on mediation, the attempts to streamline the system and end the requirement to have representation where maybe that is not necessary, but to allow the parties to get quickly to the nub of a dispute. All those things are positive, and I have said that publicly. What is not positive is the attempt to introduce new charges for accessing the court and the ending of free counselling services. Those counselling services at the moment are a hugely important safety valve, and the ability to access six funded counselling sessions, I know, has been an extraordinarily helpful thing for families who are in trouble, including families who face issues around violence, care and protection orders, and the other sorts of matters that are touched on by this report. It is of real concern that we are changing the rules of access to the Family Court, and in the rush to save costs we are going to really have to take great care that we do not simply perpetuate many of the problems that are referred to in the report.

In this regard I am particularly concerned that although there was evidence given to the committee around the utility of increasing youth advocates, we are actually seeing that service being cut. We are seeing, as I have said, cuts to the free access to the Family Court, the elimination of free counselling, the new fees that have been brought in, and then, of course, there is the likelihood of a coming announcement about court closures around the country. These are the sorts of services dealt with in the report that are not amenable to videoconferencing, so if we do not get all that right we are simply going to be spending more money in the corrections and health budgets. That is certainly not something I want to see. We have to get this area of service right, including in the Family Court and the courts budget.

I would like to commend the Social Services Committee for its thought-provoking report, which raises very important questions around the way we deal with child offenders. National is committed to reducing child offending and youth crime. This is reflected in the policy changes we are making to build a safer New Zealand. Over the past 12 months our youth justice reforms have halved the number of youth needing to be held in secure units, but we need to continue this work. We need to ensure that today’s child offenders do not become tomorrow’s career criminals. Therefore, how we rehabilitate, care for, and, more important, protect these children is of utmost importance.

There are children in our country who, through no fault of their own, grow up neglected, lacking opportunity and aspiration; many of whom are abused and go on to live a life of crime. It becomes a never-ending cycle, one we need to do all we can to break.

According to the Ministry of Social Development, although child offender apprehensions have dropped in the past 15 years, there has been an increase in the number of children apprehended for violent offending. In 2010-11 there were 7,896 apprehensions of children aged 10 to 13, and 37 percent of them were for theft and related offences.

The issue of child offending is not new. A study in 1996 found that most child offenders had the marks of inadequate care and/or abuse. In short, the consequences that might be expected from ill-treatment were that they were difficult to manage both at home and at school, they failed to learn, they ran away, and they experimented with alcohol and other substances. At least a third came from families with a history of alcohol or substance abuse and/or criminal involvement.

We know that many young offenders lack self-esteem, have uncertainty in their lives, and have no sense of purpose or direction. They need help. As lawmakers we believe we can do better. We know that some child offenders continue offending after they are caught. However, often this offending is not addressed because we lack effective tools to deal with it. This interim offending needs addressing.

Child offending is considered to be a protection matter, and such offending is currently dealt with by the Youth Court and the Family Court. However, the Family Court has limited powers to change the personal situations of these young people in a way that would prevent further youth offending. Currently, more than 90 percent of children who offend are dealt with by the police through an alternative action—for example, writing an apology letter or paying for damage. Many of them do not enter the justice system. We acknowledge that there is a challenge before us to ensure that the systems we have in place are effectively addressing the issue of child offending, so that today’s child offenders do not become tomorrow’s career criminals.

The focus of this National-led Government is on building a safer New Zealand, and we have embarked on a comprehensive programme of reform to protect communities, prevent crime, and put victims first. We are staying tough on criminals, keeping record numbers of police on the beat, and ensuring that the justice system focuses on the rights of victims. We are firmly committed to reducing child offending and youth crime. We know that the investments we are making will pay off many times over in reduced costs in both the justice and social sectors, as well as in the incalculable gain of preventing future victims of crime. But, most of all, we will be giving these child offenders an opportunity to have better lives. Thank you.

Motion agreed to.