Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Minister of Climate Change): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise on behalf of the Green Party in support of the Rights for Victims of Insane Offenders Bill. I am speaking on behalf of the Green Party but I also just wanted to mention that I'm also in particular speaking on behalf of our justice spokesperson Golriz Ghahraman who I know would have wanted to have been here to speak in support of this bill having worked alongside the Hon Louise Upston and the select committee over a very long time to get this bill into its current form. Unfortunately she's not able to. She would be able to make the case much more competently than I'm about to.I do want to acknowledge the Hon Louise Upston for her work on this bill. It's often said in this Chamber that there are two kinds of member's bill: one being a sort of a political statement which probably has no chance of getting anywhere but is used to lay out a position; the other is a genuine attempt to solve a very real challenge. This bill falls into that category. It is a complex and a sensitive area as a number of speakers before me have mentioned tonight and recognising it has taken quite a long time from first reading to make its way through to here. It is one of those bills that is truly worth taking the time to do properly. So I do want to acknowledge the member who brought the bill and I do want to acknowledge the work that Ginny Andersen and the select committee have done and that the officials have done over a number of years over what is quite a narrow but important and difficult and challenging area where issues of mental health and criminal justice are conflated and not easily picked apart. I think that the bill has landed in a very good place having taken quite a journey to get there.The gap of course is in the justice system where currently until probably about 30 minutes from now there is no mechanism by which victims of criminal acts that are committed by insane persons—to provide any form of victim impact statement. That is a gap in the sense of being able to create justice to provide a justice system that actually lives up to its name. The Green Party of course has always strongly supported the inclusion of victims' views in the justice process. We do believe that victims must be supported at every stage of the justice process and that includes by having their views and their experiences safely and affirmatively given in the context of the proceedings.As with a number of others of course we did have a problem with the wording in the original bill. Where as a number of other speakers have said the original language around proven but insane" implied criminal responsibility. So I think that there was an amendment that was put up quite early in Golriz's name but actually events then overtook it. The Chief Justice made the submission by writing to Parliament asking that that issue get addressed and you know the work was done. It's landed in a very very good place as a result. So in that sense I think that the kind of key issue that we were anxious about has been very well resolved to the satisfaction of everybody has been noted as well.I also just wanted to mention there were some other organisations that engaged with this bill including JustSpeak and the Mental Health Foundation who were at least initially opposed to this. They had some concerns about the risk of non-judicial and non-clinical input into the decision-making process that concerns about how there might be a risk of longer sentences being conferred which would harm rehabilitation—which of course then errs back into the issues around mental health and criminal responsibility and so on—and that context of it being about mental health rather than being about holding the offender accountable which is of course what normal sentencing is about. So the committee has clearly engaged deeply in all of those very thorny issues. Those changes that have been made to the bill have kind of addressed those risks. So we're very pleased or we're assured that victims' statements aren't going to be able to be politicised that those decisions will be contained within the process in a way that is safe for victims and actually for the people who have committed those acts.I think some of the concerns about the bill speak to wider concerns about the justice system. It is an imperfect system. There are gaps in it but they aren't going to be resolved within this bill which does have a very narrow focus. I think that we need to continue always to ensure that we are seeking to improve the justice system so that those kinds of concerns when they do come up through bills like this are able to be addressed. We do hope that this bill does signal future legislative improvements to further our approach to restorative justice for insane offenders in the future.So in conclusion I just want to come back to the beginning in acknowledging the work of everybody involved but particularly the member who brought the bill. It's a very good piece of work and I think this is one of those moments tonight where you can see Parliament at its absolute best; a rare and beautiful thing. Thank you Mr Speaker."