Adams Amy: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeAdams Amy: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5552. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon AMY ADAMS (Minister of Justice): I have been looking forward to taking a call in this appropriations debate in the justice sector area. There is a lot to cover and I want to take a double call which I will obviously call for in due course to cover off some of that. I think the starting place for me is to look at where we are sitting and then I want to talk a bit about where we want to go and the direction of travel that we have prioritised in this Budget.The headline really is that crime in this country is at a 35-year low. That really is a tremendous achievement and a huge amount of credit has to go to everyone who works in the sector. It is not just the Government—there are a lot of reasons why things are working well at the community level—but certainly the police and the justice sector agencies should really be commended I think for a tremendous deliverable for their work in that space.We have a Better Public Services target—target seven—that looks at crime in this country. We set a target of getting crime down by 20 percent by 2017. I can tell this Committee that we have already reduced total crime by 18 percent and we are well on track to reach our target long before the final target date. Violent crime is down by around 10 percent. That one is harder and slower to move as you would expect but none the less good progress has been made. In youth crime we set a target of a 25 percent reduction which we then increased to 30 percent because we have already exceeded it. Youth crimeis down 38 percent.I do just want to take a moment to commend the tremendous work of the Youth Court in New Zealand and the system that has been developed in New Zealand which is held in high regard internationallyfor the way we work with our young offenders. What we know is that our best chance to stop people becoming clients if you like of the justice sector is when they are young. Equally if they get on to a path of repeated offending as children then they are the ones who are most likely to become long-term offenders. If you take the 1970 population cohort and you look at all the crimecommitted by that particular cohort 80 percent of all crimecommitted by them is committed by people who had their first conviction before the age of 20. So working well with our young offenders is fundamentally important so as to not let them get into the cycle of a conviction and a sentence from which it is that much harder to come back and re-enter society. So in the youth crimespace tremendous work has been done.I also want to touch on one of the initiatives that I very well remember being passed when I was a member of the House when the Hon Simon Power was in my role and that is the offender levy. Legislation that was passed at that time imposed a levy of $50 on offenders to help contribute towards providing better services for victims. At the time one half of this House completely derided it and said that it would never work that it was a nonsense and that it was window dressing. One half of the House said it was a stupid and that they would get rid of it. Well that levy has exceeded all collection expectations. So far we have collected $16.5 million which has been entirely—entirely—set aside for victim support services. Because of that we have been able to provide services that were never previously available to victims. More than 40000 victims have had services funded by this Government thanks to that one piece of legislation which was completely derided and criticised by the Opposition. One of those services of course was the 24/7 support service offered to victims by Victim Support which is funded by us.Ms Dean the chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee talked about family violence in her speech on this section. I am pleased she did because as Ms Dean noted this is the area that I have made my No. 1 priority. I did that with some degree of trepidation because this is a hard area to make a dent in and if I was a more self-preserving Minister I probably would have picked things that were a little bit easier to deliver on. But like my colleague Hekia Parata I am here to make a difference on things that matter to New Zealand. We are not here to do the easy stuff and if this country really wants to get a grip on one of the most egregious horrific and embarrassing statistics in our society we have to deal with family violence.Let me just tell the Committee a couple of things that highlight how unacceptably high the incidence of family violence is. We have the highest rate in the OECD of reported violence against intimate partners. That is not what anyone in this House would accept for a country like New Zealand. We have more than 100000 notifications to the police of family violence incidents each year. That effectively is one every 5 minutes—every 5 minutes. So during my speech there will be at least two notifications to the police of family violence.What is really scary though is the statistic that tells us that on average a victim of family violence will experience 21 instances of family violence before she—it is generally she; not always of course—will pick the phone to the police. So we are getting one call to the police every 5 minutes and yet we know that behind that there is this enormous history of offending that has not even been registered into the system. Half of our homicides come from family violence so if we want to make a continued dent in that hard sticky area of serious violence it has to be through dealing with family violence.On average 14 women seven men and eight children are murdered in this country every year by someone they have a family relationship with and that cannot be allowed to continue. We had a remarkable statistic from my colleague the Hon Michael Woodhouse about police time. There was a discussion in the last speech around making better use of police time. Well 41 percent of all police response time is spent on responding to family violence. So if we want to have more police out on our streets keeping us safe and doing the things we would want them to do we have to deal with this issue. The statistics are just mind-numbingly horrific but what I am encouraged by is the fact that I have not found anyone in this Committee in the NGO sector or anywhere in New Zealand actually who is not committed and willing to help try to solve this problem and make things work better.I want to thank members of this Committee who have worked cooperatively collaboratively and across party lines with me to think about how we can do this better. I will say that I do not believe that this is an area that any Government of any political colour has really got on top of. Nor do I think it is one that any Government has not tried very hard to deal with. For years and years we have had countless reports and initiatives and experts and spending but the reality is that we are not getting cut-through. I cannot stand here and promise that we will solve that but I can absolutely stand here and promise this Committee that while I am the Minister of Justice this is going to be what I think about every single day and in this year’s Budget you have seen from us a commitment to ensure that this is right at the heart of our work programme.Just yesterday the Minister for Social Development and I released a stocktake of how the Government has worked in this area to date. What is interesting to me is that it is the first time that that degree of comprehensive all-of-Government assessment has been undertaken and it is certainly something that the sector has been calling for for a while. We as a Government—and I use that term not in the executive sense but in the Public Service sense—have to be better integrated in how we deliver our services. It is no good having different agencies looking at this lens through an entirely siloed vertical approach without giving thought to how other agencies are interacting in this space. It is inefficient it is expensive and actually quite frankly it can be damaging and counter-productive.So Minister Tolley and I undertook a comprehensive stocktake which revealed quite surprisingly that we are spending $1.4 billion a year on family violence—$1.4 billion—and yet very little of it is spent on prevention and screening. Almost all of it is spent on response. It is easy to look at this in the Budget round but actually trying to re-engineer that work programme is going to be quite a piece of work. Later in the coming weeks you will see more announcements from us about how we see that work programme continuing to develop and evolve and I can assure this Committee that as I say while I am in the role it is something I will continue to focus on.Let me just take the time I have left to touch on a couple of other initiatives one of which is the process to appoint a Chief Victims Advisor to ensure that the voice of victims remains absolutely at the heart of the development of Government policy. We saw what a tremendous advance it was to the quality of policy advice when we appointed for the first time ever a New Zealand Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor to really ensure that we had very good high-level scientific analysis at the heart of the Government. I want that same sort of rigour around ensuring that the victim’s perspective is represented at the heart of the policy process and that is why we are appointing that person.Finally the Harmful Digital Communications Act is a piece of legislation that I am incredibly proud of. It is being talked about now in a number of countries as a model on how to address this issue. There is still work to do to appoint the approved agencies that will have the core role in educating the community and user groups and working to resolve disputes but this is legislation that reflects that harm in the modern environment can be caused in a myriad of different ways. We have to be responsive and we have to be continually reviewing our harm frameworks to ensure we have those settings right. We know that harm in the online world is not only real and pervasive but incredibly damaging and the number of suicides and cases of serious harm that have occurred as a result are unacceptable. I am very proud of that legislation.