Clendon David: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Continuation and Reform) Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Continuation and Reform) Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 05 June 2013. Volume:690;Page:10765. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): It is never a happy sight to see this Parliament passing bad law and that is what we are seeing tonight. With the passing of this Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Continuation and Reform) Amendment Bill we are embedding as a permanent provision in our legislation a mechanism that was marginal at best as a stopgap short-term measure which is all it was ever intended to be. It intended to respond to the particular moment in time: an unfortunate series of incidents at Mt Eden prison and the ongoing public concerns about that. It was intended to be legislation with a sunset clause. It should have been allowed to simply fade away while we did something much more sensible and much more long term.This legislation and its various iterations—I think this is the third cycle of legislation it has gone through: an extension a continuation bill and now this legislation to make it permanent—have chewed up an inordinate amount of parliamentary time and resource. In the meantime we are told the Minister of Justice and her officials are too busy to even consider or contemplate a very good proposition that came from Judge Boshier some 7 or 8 months ago proposing that we create an offence of family violence. That would have been a means by which we might actually have addressed the issue of protecting victims of reducing the number of victims. That would have been a useful and appropriate means of using the resources and time of this House and the people in it. Unfortunately instead we are spending time perpetuating bad law such as this prisoners and victims legislation.Does the Government continue to be genuinely concerned about a public backlash if inmates seem to reap some financial benefit some restitution for having their rights denied them or for suffering abuse while in the custody of the State? If there is a problem if the Government is genuinely concerned about that the solution is actually self-evident. The solution is to create a safe humane decent environment in our prisons to ensure that inmates do not suffer abuse or denial of rights. The problem simply goes away. There would not be an issue if we created an environment in the prisons where prisoners’ rights are secured and where they are safe environments for both inmates and indeed staff who work in them on our behalf.The events at Spring Hill Corrections Facility last weekend and the series of events over recent months which are becoming more frequent and more serious demonstrate we do not have that safe environment in our prisons and that demonstrates we have a great deal of work to do—genuine work finding real solutions to real problems rather than fiddling about the margins with this piece of legislation that actually has not even worked.What we have done here effectively is to create a lose-lose situation. This legislation being embedded in legislation takes away the rights of prisoners to fair restitution if their rights are abused or compromised. It diminishes our right to claim we are a country that respects human rights and basic decency and as the previous speaker Lianne Dalziel pointed out it does contravene international law. And what do we get in exchange for this? A piece of legislation that over 8 years has delivered virtually nothing to victims. A figure of something like $45000 has been returned to victims under the provisions of this legislation. That is less than $6000 a year—basically pennies rats and mice peanuts. We would have been better to not devote any time to it close the House early one night save a lot of money and give that to victims. That is an equally nonsensical suggestion as the one that we continue to embed with this piece of legislation which is a lose-lose piece of legislation. It has not worked for 8years. Why will it work for another 8 years or 8 years beyond that? It simply makes no sense.It has been claimed that the Greens’ opposition to this bill reflects some sort of lack of concern for the well-being of victims. Indeed at an earlier reading one of the Government’s spokespeople saw fit to suggest that I had made a speech on this bill without once mentioning the word “victim”. In fact I suggest to that member a course of active listening because I continually referred to “victims” in my 10-minute speech and that particular member managed about 90 seconds of commentary on this very important piece of legislation. We do have significant concerns for the well-being and rights of victims and would seek to put in place a comprehensive review. When the Greens supported this legislation in 2005—somewhat reluctantly but we did support it—it was on the understanding that there would be a comprehensive review of the rights of victims ideally a cross-party approach as Mr Little has indicated. I was somewhat surprised to hear the chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee a competent and typically quite amiable chair talking about this Government’s comprehensive reform of the justice sector. I think the Government is being remarkably modest. If it is undertaking a comprehensive reform of the justice sector why is it not telling anybody about it? There is no evidence of any such comprehensive reform. We are seeing short-term reactive stopgap measures.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.DAVID CLENDON: I am pleased to take the opportunity to make some further comments about this unfortunate piece of legislation that has been inflicted on the House. It would perhaps be a defensible piece of legislation to continue to embed as a permanent feature rather than a temporary one—which is how it was designed and enacted—if we had any evidence that in the ensuing 8 years it had done any good. As I mentioned earlier it clearly has not done a great deal of good. A total sum of $45000 has been dispersed to victims as a result of this piece of legislation. Despite the significant cost to the country of enacting it both the process cost and the cost of the various stopgap pieces of legislation—the continuance and now this one—it is all for a grand sum of $45000 to victims.As I said earlier our original support—our somewhat tentative support but support none the less—for the 2005 legislation was predicated on the expectation that a comprehensive review of victims’ rights would be undertaken. We have an issue in New Zealand with having a very disjointed and not very strategic or well-considered approach to making restitution to victims. We have some good programmes in place. We have some good restorative justice processes albeit not as many as we could use—those very positive means of getting good fair outcomes that are transparent that serve the needs of victims and that make offenders think and hopefully deter them from reoffending.Unfortunately we have never seen the review the significant review—a sort of clean slate approach to how we can make good and how we can ensure that the victims of crime get restitution as appropriate and that they get the appropriate treatment and counselling. There are means not to undo an offence that has been done to a person but certainly to help them recover from it. We are not even at page 1 of thinking through what that might look like. That is a piece of work that I suspect will require as Mr Little indicated earlier an approach from a new Government a Government with a more progressive set of ideas and a Government not frightened to take a step back and undertake the difficult piece of work of a comprehensive review rather than these add-on stopgap short-term measures which really do us no good and indeed are now doing us harm. Thank you.