Clendon David: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8082. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): It has been interesting to see the uniform responses from Opposition members about the primary content of this part which of course is clause 3 the purpose statement. What purports to be a purpose here is stated as being to “obtain information from returning offenders and establish release conditions for offenders returning to New Zealand …”. That is not a statement of purpose; that is a description of a mechanism for achieving a purpose or a range of purposes. It is a remarkably monocular view. I understand how it emerges: you get too close to a document and you do not get the distance from it to realise the gaps in it. This is the value of a multi-party multi - stakeholder development of policy which this patently is not.The Minister of Justice put up some defence of this purpose statement saying that those matters about support which we have heard referred to already are being dealt with elsewhere. The Ministry of Social Development was mentioned as were various other agencies. What I do not see in this bill is any legislative framework that provides incentives for returning offenders to cooperate and to actively participate in their own rehabilitation and reintegration. That is what is fundamentally missing. The clues were actually there. The officials I think did a very good job of steering towards what could have been a much more balanced and much more useful and helpful piece of legislation.We have heard reference already to this little table—this matrix of options—and the strengths and weaknesses. The enhanced support service was seen as being poor in terms of public safety. I agree that standing on its own a voluntary system of “Yes I’ll turn up and I’ll go along with some of these support services.” in itself would not have been sufficient to assure public safety or to contribute to making our communities safer. But I do argue that a set of enhanced support services wrapped round these people is necessary to get to achieve the outcomes the real purpose which is to make our communities safer to endeavour to ensure that these people do not reoffend and to improve the likelihood of them reintegrating and ultimately becoming useful and productive members of our society.I say the officials did a very very good job of that. They noted in passing that the enhanced support service option mechanism scored very well in terms of cost-effectiveness. A little bit of money spent well will go a very long way to reducing the likelihood of these people ending up back in jail at a cost of $100000 per year simply to accommodate them in jail. That is putting aside the social cost of offending the cost of prosecution the court process and the like.I mentioned that I believe that the officials have done some good thinking here. I reference particularly paragraph 33 of the regulatory impact statement where they talk about the option as being partially based or potentially based on a refugee resettlement model. I think that is a really interesting idea. I think that is a very constructive idea. The idea that these returning offenders will come along and simply plug into Work and Income to the Ministry of Social Development and to the various other existing services overlooks the fact that these people are a unique class of people. These are people who might feel very little connection to New Zealand. We have heard evidence already of individuals who left the country as infants barely children and now they are returning as adults and unwillingly at that. They may not necessarily want to be part of New Zealand. They are a unique group of people.I think this notion of treating these people more in the way that we treat refugees—for example there is the notion of having an orientation programme making it attractive and giving these people some incentive to participate actively in reorientation. It would say “OK guys and girls. You’re here. This is it. You’re back here for now. Let’s make the best of it. Let’s help you get your bearings.” in what to many of them is actually a new community a new culture albeit not vastly dissimilar from where they have been but certainly with some substantial significant differences. There is focusing on the information needed to help people live in New Zealand people who have not lived here perhaps since they were infants and who have no memory of it and there is the idea of completing physical and mental health checks to assess their settlement needs. We can impose and we will come to this later in a later part of this bill—it talks about the possibility of establishing either under the standard conditions or the special conditions conditions that one way or the other require people to go through a needs assessment. That is OK. Yes we are demanding that they must which can immediately create a level of opposition.We know people who have the lifelong experience of disguising illiteracy low levels of educational achievement and alcohol or drug dependency. Those people get pretty good at hiding those realities. We could get people involved in a much more cooperative approach something along the lines of this proposed refugee resettlement where these people can become active participants in their own reintegration. I see nothing in this legislation that is going to encourage or incentivise or even frankly oblige these people to do that.The point as I say has been made very clearly that these offenders will face very similar challenges to the ones that those refugees who are coming to this country are facing who are coming in a sense unwillingly. They are very pleased I dare say to leave where they are coming from. Perhaps this was not their first choice. The fact is that there is a sense of volunteerism if you like which will be absent from these people who are being returned against their will. So I do think we have missed a considerable opportunity there to legislate to do the right thing by these people.The mention of cost has been made. It is about $2000 per person. That does not sit very well. The only significant—if you could call it that—resource that the Government has put in to date was $100000-odd which has been given to People at Risk Solutions in Auckland in order to assist it to at least meet these people and make some effort to settle them. The fact is that it has been doing that work at least since the early months of this year. In March and April I know for sure it was doing that and that $100000 has to last it until June next year. That is more than 12 months. That is spreading that $100000 extremely thinly given the numbers we are likely to see even using this quite modest notion of $2000 per person.This is as I say and I will come back to the point—some of the provisions in this legislation are necessary but they are simply not sufficient. For that reason we cannot offer our support to it.