Katene Rahui: Policing (Storage of Youth Identifying Particulars) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Katene Rahui: Policing (Storage of Youth Identifying Particulars) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
[Sitting date: 16 August 2011. Volume:675;Page:20881. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
RAHUI KATENE (Maori Party—Te Tai Tonga) 
: 
 I will first speak about retrospectivity. Clause 3 states: “This Act amends the Policing Act 2008.” According to the explanatory note on 30 September 2008 the police lost the power to store particulars. So any records kept since 1 October 2008 have been kept in breach of the law. In essence the retrospectivity of this bill validates illegal behaviour by the police. If the police have acted in accordance with current law and have destroyed those records that is great. No records have been kept so there should be no need at all for this bill to be retrospective. As I have said previously in this debate it is the secrecy and the urgency that are the key issues. That is what creates this problem with process that justifies opposition to this bill until the issues are considered properly.  
I will look at the purpose of the bill. Clause 4 states: “The purpose of this Act is to amend the principal Act so that it indicates clearly when it authorises the storage and when it requires the destruction of youth identifying particulars.” I guess that is a description of what this bill will do but it is not a sufficient explanation as to why we need to store the fingerprints and photographs of our young people.  
I will share with the Committee a staggering statistic from Kim Workman who is the director of the Rethinking Crime and Punishment project. In his work  
Redemption Denied: Aspects of Maori Over-representation in the Criminal Justice System 
 we learn that for Maori males born in 1975—for example my eldest son—it is estimated that 22 percent had a Department of Corrections - managed sentence before their 20th birthday and 44 percent had a Department of Corrections - managed sentence by the age of 35. Thankfully my eldest son does not fit that statistic. A Department of Corrections - managed sentence includes both custodial sentences and community-based sentences. This is a fact that every MP in this House should be aware of before they vote on this bill.  
This bill as it sets out in clause 4 provides a legislative means for the unique identifying particulars of our young people to be stored on the record. National members and Labour members alike have tried to encourage me to keep the issues I have raised during this debate for another time and said that we need to focus our korero on the theme of this bill: to correct a mistake that was never intended. They say we are restoring the status quo. We have been told that the Maori Party and the Green Party have missed the point. We have been challenged that we should have raised these issues when the Policing Bill came up in 2008. Without putting too fine a point on it neither the Green member David Clendon nor I was in the House at that time. However I have read over the contributions made by the Maori Party when the Policing Bill came before the House and I want to restate a comment made by my colleague Dr Pita Sharples that effective policing relies on a wide measure of public support and confidence. Public support and confidence means having the courage to open up to scrutiny all issues around police behaviours. Thank goodness there are two parties in this House that have raised questions about process and about why we would introduce legislation under urgency to store the unique particulars of our rangatahi.  
I remind all those well-meaning members that there is a broader context to Part 1 of this bill which is the grossly disproportionate youth apprehension and prosecution statistics that provide us with a distinct challenge when we think about the relationship between the police and young Maori. We know that the apprehension rate of Maori youth is more than three times that of New Zealand European youth. We need to be open to scrutiny in this House and allow substantive debate whether or not it occurred in 2008.