Ardern Jacinda: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Ardern Jacinda: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:8792] 
JACINDA ARDERN (Labour) 
: 
 Last night I spent some time thinking about how I might describe this Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill to someone who was hearing about it for the first time—to someone who perhaps had no knowledge of our youth justice system political agendas and the issues we face in New Zealand—and thinking about how I would tell that person what we were doing here today. I would probably start with this: our youth justice system as it is now is unique. It is something we should be proud of. It is a system that acknowledges that young people should be treated differently; that for the most part we have an opportunity to turn their lives around. It is a system that until now at least has been internationally respected. But this bill and the policy that surrounds it undermines our existing system. 
I will take this opportunity to go through the most significant elements of the bill. In fact I want to focus mostly just on two elements but first I give my thanks to all of those who participated in the select committee: practitioners academics youth leaders and community organisations. They all gave up their time to present to the Social Services Committee. They are people with more hands-on knowledge than ourselves and they undoubtedly told us how it is. 
Two parts stood out for me in particular as a member of that select committee. The first was the Government’s decision to enable proceedings to be commenced in the Youth Court against children aged 12 or 13 years who are alleged to have committed specified offences. This point has been well canvassed in this House this evening. As my colleague the Hon Annette King has already pointed out the Principal Youth Court Judge said it best when he stated that this part of the bill constitutes “the most fundamental change to the system since its inception in 1989.” Why would we make such a significant move such a fundamental change? I have to be honest and say that after a full select committee process I was still none the wiser and neither were the submitters. 
If a child commits the worst offences in our law books they can already be sent to our adult courts. As for the rest there is no denying that if a child—I repeat a child; a 12 or 13-year-old—is committing the kinds of crimes that the Government has identified then there are issues going on in that child’s home and that child’s life. The best court we have in New Zealand to not just deal with that child but also assist that family is our Family Court. Nothing the Government has proposed has convinced me otherwise. 
Again Andrew Becroft noted that “there is a real concern by Youth Court judges that the Court will be assuming responsibility for the worst child offenders who by definition will have the most serious care and protection issues yet the Youth Court will not have the necessary statutory ‘ammunition’ to deal with the inevitable care and protection issues at the root of offending.” He did not talk in that statement about issues of streamlining or of the Youth Court being inundated with young people. He talked about its inability to deal with those young people with the statutory powers it has. 
If the heart of the issue as the chair of the select committee has pointed out was the desire to give judges the right kinds of powers then why in the first instance did the Government not look at giving greater powers to the Family Court? We proposed this to the Principal Youth Court Judge who said that it would have been a much more elegant solution than the fundamental change we see before us today. Labour refuses to support such an amendment a fundamental change that the Government cannot justify for which it has no evidence and which undermines our system. 
Perhaps more telling though was the fact that the most commonly raised and discussed element of the bill was something that was not really even a formal part of the primary legislation. As the chair of the select committee has pointed out everyone had a view on the Government’s so-called boot camps. I call them “so-called” because in fact it was the Prime Minister who first coined and referred to the military element of these camps so strongly. Almost unanimously the view of submitters was negative. Submitters told us that these methods have been tried and have failed in New Zealand. We have heard over and over that those who graduated in the early version of these camps’ corrective training had a 92 percent reoffending rate. 
Hon Steve Chadwick 
: How much? 
JACINDA ARDERN 
: It was 92 percent. If that was not enough plenty of other jurisdictions have also tried these programmes and have failed. But Government members—and I acknowledge this—continually maintained during submissions that their programme would be different. It was not the same as corrective training. This programme would work intensively with young people it would focus on providing good role models and it would take a wraparound approach. It was presented as if it was a completely new idea. Well it is not and if this is truly what the National Government is aiming to create then we already have it. It was called Te Hurihanga and for the listeners who may not have heard of this programme before it was established several years ago by Phil Goff and Judge Caroline Henwood. 
Te Hurihanga was small and intensive and it took on the worst offenders in Hamilton and the surrounding area. At first we must all acknowledge Te Hurihanga was controversial. Some local Hamiltonians did not want it but that was then and this is now. I do not need to pass judgment on this programme which was based on multi-systemic therapy and was operated by the Youth Horizons Trust. It has been evaluated favourably by a reviewer and that review is now publicly available but more important it has been judged by local police officers family and friends of those in the programme and the local community. It has been described—I say to the member from Hamilton West who is with us in the House—as a godsend it was filled with talented and skilled staff and it was the reason that offending has dropped by 82 percent by those who have graduated. It now even has the buy-in of some of its biggest opponents. 
Let me be clear and honest. In youth justice success rates are low and tough not just here but everywhere in the world. But Te Hurihanga was making gains and for less than it would have cost to imprison someone for just a few years. Without this programme many of these young men would have been facing that as soon as they hit their 17th birthday. Last week the Government announced that it would close Te Hurihanga and I am left with one big question. If it is not the model that the Government wants to follow as it describes then what is? 
I fear that despite the Government’s denial the answer is closer to the boot camp model which is the failed model that the Government has tried to distance itself from. I fear that the Government’s Fresh Start programme rather than being the full wraparound it describes is based on the idea of a short sharp shock as my colleague from the Maori Party described: short-term programmes that churn young offenders through with little acknowledgment of the hard and difficult truth that the methods that work take time; they take work not just with the young person but also with their family; they take experienced staff; and inevitably they take money. 
Ultimately gains in youth justice take political courage. In a society where a “lock and throw” mentality is popular investing in early intervention programmes that already exist may not make for a sexy headline nor may having an evidence base or using programmes with acronyms like MST or multi-systemic therapy and FTT or functional family therapy or following the recommendations of expert advisory groups but those would have been the right things to do. It is time for some political courage. 
For a brief period I thought like my colleague Lianne Dalziel that Simon Power might have been capable of it. He launched the Drivers of Crime conference. He committed himself to listening and to addressing the precursors of crime and investing in them. He heard the things that we have all been told over and over: if we get a group of young offenders in a room we will find something common in all of their backgrounds whether it be poverty family violence a lack of engagement in education or drugs and alcohol. We know the problems; we just need to invest in the answers. 
I lost faith in this Government’s desire to make that investment last week when it closed Te Hurihanga. If the only measure for early intervention for this Government is something that is cheap then that move is truly short-sighted. Nothing costs this country more than the intangible cost to a victim a family who has lost a loved one to crime or as a consequence of it and a wasted life behind bars—nothing except perhaps the absence of political courage.