Collins Judith: Criminal Justice Reform Bill — In Committee 
Collins Judith: Criminal Justice Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:640;Page:10575] 
JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon) 
: 
 We have definitely seen MMP in action and we have seen something else that will surprise many commentators on Parliament. We have seen a fleet-footed agile Minister of Justice manoeuvring around MMP and the votes and being rolled. That was what was about to happen to Labour. The Minister of Justice has like a mountain goat negotiated those tricky passes. He has come right through them. I have never been as impressed with him as I am now and I congratulate him on being able to count. The counting would have told him he was about to be rolled and in fact victims were going to retain the right to be able to attend a parole hearing in their own right rather than simply if they were asked. It took Mrs Roy and her work to get that through. I congratulate her on that because I have always seen her as an extremely good member of Parliament. “Good on Mrs Roy.” I say. 
One of the things that I think we should look at in this bill is that it is actually about keeping people out of prison. It is about getting the prison numbers down. Part of that little plan was stopping victims from being able to turn up at parole hearings and actually say what they wanted to say. I see Mr Mark is nodding and agreeing with me so I do not understand why he is in fact voting for this bill in its entirety. I say that because this bill has other provisions that are also about keeping criminals out of jail and out in the community. 
One of those is the idea of a Sentencing Council and sentencing guidelines. The Sentencing Council is all about replacing the power of a judge who currently has such discretion with a council that will tell judges pretty much what to do. Judges already look at precedent. They already have guidelines and they work to those guidelines. But they also have the ability—a much greater ability at the moment—to look at the evidence look at who is saying what make some judgment calls look at the age of the person look at the whole background look at someone’s previous history and make a call as to the sentence. That is the role of a judge. 
So why do we need a Sentencing Council to come in on top of judges all of whom are highly experienced people and tell them how they need to do that work? We already have sentencing guidelines. They already take into account precedents in relation to sentencing and they already take into account the facts. Instead this measure is some sort of attempt to get a whole pack of limp-wristed sociologists from Steve Maharey’s next workplace at Massey University to come along and tell judges what to do. That is who will be on that council—a whole pack of limp-wristed sociologists all about to tell everybody why a person is a mass murderer or why a person happens to have 16 convictions for attacking people and the last lot are for rape and murder. That is the sort of nonsense we will get from a Sentencing Council. 
 I am particularly concerned too about the sentencing guidelines which some of my colleagues have referred to today. We are not allowed to know about those guidelines but apparently the Government has sent them all around the country to various other people whom it wants to agree with it. But yet again those guidelines are all about cutting down the time that prisoners spend in jail. On the one hand the Government says that it will resile from its previous position and say that people cannot get parole until they have served two-thirds of their sentence—in other words the National Party’s policy and that is fine; we can share it with the Government—but on the other hand the Government is to make it easier for people to serve much shorter sentences in the first place. That is one of my concerns. I know that is why the Government wanted to keep victims out of parole hearings. It did not want victims like Mrs Croskery from my electorate and many others turning up and saying it is not fair to grant parole because people who have done the crime should do the time. 
We say there should be no parole for recurrent violent offenders. They should not be getting parole in the first place. Victims and their families should not be hauled in to come and tell the Parole Board what has happened to them. They should not have to relive that every single year and when there are multiple offenders on multiple occasions. Victims and their families should be able to get on with their lives as much as they can knowing that thankfully the perpetrators of crime are locked away in jail and should stay there.