Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeReturning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8032. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Returning Offenders (Management and Information) BillFirst ReadingHon AMY ADAMS (Minister of Justice): I move That the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill be now read a first time. As the Minister of Justice my paramount concern is of course the safety and security of the New Zealand public. The aim of this bill is to better protect the law-abiding public by ensuring that a similar regime of supervision applies to convicted offenders who served their sentences in prisons overseas as applies to those convicted and imprisoned in New Zealand. It puts into effect the third of three initiatives we have had under way to strengthen New Zealand’s oversight of deported offenders.In late December 2014 Australia made changes to its immigration laws and in February of this year it became clear to me that there was the potential for a greater number of New Zealand - born offenders to be deported back home than had previously been the case. Let us be quite clear: we cannot stop Australia exercising its sovereign right to ultimately decide to deport any category of people that its Parliament decides is lawful nor can we change the fact that Australian law permits those being considered for removal to be held in detention centres during that process. We have registered at a number of levels that we do not agree with the policy and we do not like it but the fact of the matter is that we cannot force the Australians to change their law. So we have created a supervision regime that will better protect New Zealanders from those offenders returning to New Zealand. As with those released from New Zealand prisons we can never completely remove all risk but this legislation is an important part of reducing the risk for law-abiding New Zealanders.For generations Australia and other countries have deported New Zealanders who commit crimes abroad without any oversight back in New Zealand. On average these numbers were around 80 to 100 each year and included the most serious of offenders. With the recent policy changes in Australia these numbers have increased to potentially around 250 to 300 a year and this of course poses an increased risk to New Zealanders. However it is important to note that not all these people are deported offenders. The new regime also includes deportations on character grounds so the number of offenders being deported has not increased by that same amount.It is critical that we have in place a regime that can manage and supervise the offenders who do return many of whom have been convicted of serious offences. The proposed supervision regime as set out in this bill will mean that offenders who arrive in New Zealand shortly after being released from prison will be subject to the same sort of oversight as offenders who have served a similar sentence here. The proposed regime in the bill will apply automatically to returning offenders who are sentenced to more than 1 year in prison in another country who return to New Zealand within 6 months of their release from custody overseas and who were imprisoned for behaviour that would be an imprisonable offence under New Zealand law.The bill contains three specific aspects. The first is allowing police to compel returning offenders to provide information—names date of birth fingerprints etc. and in qualifying cases a DNA sample. The second is the standard monitoring and supervision conditions that will automatically apply to all returning prisoners who are sentenced to more than 1 year in prison in another country and who return within 6 months of being released from custody including time in detention centres. This includes those who are released early. The regime will apply regardless of whether the offender is eventually deported or removed or chooses to return voluntarily. The length of time each offender will be supervised will be based on the length of their overseas sentence. Finally the bill gives new powers to the District Court to impose special conditions on eligible offenders on either an interim or an ongoing basis. This allows the court to impose conditions on any offender who is subject to some form of monitoring or supervision at the time that they return to New Zealand regardless of how long it has been since their release.Another key addition to the proposals that I announced a few weeks ago is the inclusion of a mandatory review of the operation of the legislation by the Justice and Electoral Committee 2 years from the bill’s commencement. The proposal is that the bill is referred to the Justice and Electoral Committee for review and report to Parliament as I consider that the issues to be canvassed are likely to traverse across operational practical and social matters as well as just legal matters. From the outset it has been my intention that criminals being returned to New Zealand should be subject to the same sort of oversight as offenders who have served a similar prison sentence in New Zealand and this bill achieves that aim.The Government has moved at pace to get this entirely new regime in place. This has not been an easy task and it has involved working across three agencies and of course with Australian officials. A key aspect of the regime has been getting the information we needed from the Australians. With a register and information-sharing agreement now in place I announced the proposed regime earlier in the year confirmed Cabinet approval 3 weeks ago and am now introducing a bill to Parliament. Developing an appropriate oversight regime for returning offenders is complex. We have needed to strike the difficult balance between offenders’ rights and public safety. Despite these challenges we have introduced a bill that will provide protection for New Zealanders where there has previously been none.The estimated time to draft a bill from instructions being received to introduction is around 80 working days. This bill was drafted consulted on and approved by Cabinet in just 12 working days. The quick turn-round demonstrates the Government’s urgency and commitment to protecting New Zealanders. Kiwis can be assured that this Government has done all it could and moved as quickly as possible to get an appropriate oversight regime in place given the restrictions we have had in getting the information from Australia.Throughout the development of this supervision regime I have endeavoured to work with my parliamentary colleagues on all sides of the Chamber. In my view political parties should be able to work together on issues as important as these. I would like to think that every party in Parliament recognises that there is a gap in the law and supports a bill that does something about it. I have been working with all of the parties in Parliament all the way through the process since Cabinet confirmed its approach. There are some areas that we do not necessarily agree on but I have endeavoured to engage in numerous discussions with them and to provide opportunities for them to offer suggestions. They have received copies of the Cabinet paper and draft bills and have been updated regularly on revisions. We have gone backwards and forwards where we can and I have done that in an effort to try to build widespread support but in the end of course voting decisions are theirs.I also have to thank the Ministry of Justice officials and the Parliamentary Counsel Office for all of their tremendous work in getting this bill put together in such a timely manner.To conclude I wish to thank this House for accepting the need to pass this bill under urgency. There is strong public interest in putting in place appropriate systems to manage the risks posed by returning offenders. This bill does exactly that. I am proud of the proposed supervision regime and the speed with which we have responded to this issue and I commend the bill to the House.JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I want to begin by acknowledging that as the Minister of Justice set out she has indeed involved the Labour Party—in the last week or so—in the final stages of the drafting of this bill that is coming before the House. I will share as will my colleagues some of our misgivings over the content of this bill. We appreciated the opportunity to raise those with the Minister directly. I appreciate her giving direct responses to some of those misgivings but unfortunately on some of them we have not yet reached common ground. I would say though that in principle we absolutely see the need for a piece of legislation like this. We continue to question though why it is that we are debating this bill in such a rushed way when it was clear for many many months now that this was going to be an issue that needed to be addressed. That is a legitimate issue that we raised obviously in question time today.Before we begin this debate we need to be absolutely clear that there are two issues at play in debating the context of this bill. There is the debate around who is being deported and why. We will continue by the good work of Kelvin Davis and of Andrew Little to question the legitimacy of the policy that has been adopted by our Australian counterparts. Because of course offenders from overseas have been deported back to New Zealand where they are legitimate citizens for years now. Of course they have. But the operative word there is “citizens”. What we have seen at play in recent times is a real muddying of the waters over when one determines someone to be a citizen—or not.We have individuals now who for all intents and purposes are not New Zealanders in their minds. They identify as Australians their families are Australians they have grown up in Australia in some cases they are born in Australia and they are being deported to this country. We will continue to battle on that point on behalf of those who are resident here in New Zealand and whom it does not serve well for these individuals to be deported back here but also on the principle of human rights that these individuals are encountering themselves. That is a point that needs to continue to be raised by all sides of this House at the highest level.I have to say that this is not an issue that is newinternationally. There have been examples of this happening in the past. Tonga Samoa—they know policies like this. They have a growing population of people from Los Angeles Salt Lake City San Francisco and Dallas. These are individuals who grew up in the United States who have no recollection of life in Tonga who identify as Americans and have no family in Tonga but have found themselves deported to that country and have found a difficult path of reintegration let alone rehabilitation. Because we know this is a policy that has been adopted by another country in the past we can learn the lessons of a country like Tonga that has tried to then deal with the fallout of such a policy.First the lesson should be to battle the policy and we will continue to make that point. The second lesson then is in lieu of being able to successfully do that how do you ensure that your country is prepared for those who have been deported back here? And there will be a range of categories: those who sit in the minor offences category and those who do legitimately require—for the safety of the community—to be monitored within that community. But nothing in this bill speaks to the issue of proper reintegration and rehabilitation.And yet we only need to look at our own experience with offenders being released from prison to know that key to someone’s successful rehabilitation is their access to housing is their access to community support is their access to employment is their access to full health and well-being. That is fundamental if we want someone to be reintegrated successfully into a community. Why else for instance does the Department of Corrections have a policy of locating offenders in a prison close to their family and their community? Why else do we have Release to Work programmes? Why else do we ensure that parole boards do not release people from prison until they have appropriate accommodation? And yet here we have a policy where we already know people are walking out of an airport with nowhere to go and nothing that I have seen in any of the Government’s preparation for this bill speaks to that point. That serves those individuals poorly but primarily it serves New Zealanders poorly. They are the ones whose safety we should be ensuring when we are looking for answers in a piece of legislation like this. We know that we need to be prepared.The Minister raised that of course we have had people deported to New Zealand over a number of years—but not to the scale that we are seeing now and not for the range of offences that we are seeing now. In fact we are looking at five times the level of deportation per month than we have seen in the past. We know it is an incredible increase because those who are working in the community with these individuals have spoken of their struggle to manage that influx of individuals. What they have received? A paltry $100000 I believe it might be Mr Davis? PILLARS? A small amount of money in order to try to manage this huge increase in offenders.Yet what are we doing in this bill? We know that the Department of Corrections to be able to just make sure that it does the bare bones of monitoring—just checking where people live—needed an extra $5 million. So if you are going to do a proper job of wraparound and reintegration you are going to need a lot more than that and yet there is nothing in the preparation of this legislation that speaks to that point.I want to speak briefly to the time line of this bill. We had a short exchange in the House before this bill came before Parliament about when the Minister first instructed Parliamentary Counsel Office. Of course there would have been a bit of back and forth with officials before that point but we know that drafting began in October. My question is why were we able to identify that overseas offenders returning to New Zealand and going unmonitored would be an issue—in April 2014—and yet we did not begin this piece of work until October or at a stretch February? At the beginning of 2014 that is when we debated the Parole (Extended Supervision Orders) Amendment Bill.I want to read an excerpt from a definition in that bill. Section 107C of the Parole Act replaced by clause 7 of that bill sets out the meaning of “eligible offender”. It states: “(1) In this Part ‘eligible offender’ means an offender who— …(b) is a person who (i) has arrived in New Zealand within 6 months of ceasing to be subject to any sentence supervision conditions or order imposed on the person for a relevant offence by an overseas court;”—by an overseas court. We knew in April 2014 that we needed to apply a regime for the serious end of offenders coming in from overseas and yet we did not use that opportunity when we identified that gap in our legislation to put through a broader monitoring regime. Yes we did not have an agreement with Australia around information sharing at that point. That did not stop us from doing the preparatory work. We all know what issues there are when you put through a last-minute piece of legislation.This side of the House wants to ensure that we have a monitoring regime which is why we have said that we will support the bill. But we also proposed via David Parker and Andrew Little that we have a dual bill process: that we put a sunset clause into this rushed piece of legislation for a year and that in this House while we pass this bill today we also conduct a first reading of a duplicate bill. That bill could then go through a full select committee process a full second reading process and a full final stage—all in time to replace the rushed short-cut version in a year’s time with a bill that has had full consideration. We believe that would be a much better more robust process to undertake rather than waiting 2 years and simply having a select committee review that piece of legislation. We stand by that suggestion. We think it was a constructive one to make.Any bill where you are putting in place the potential to curtail civil liberties should at the very least have a decent process through a select committee. The public should be able to have their say. The legal fraternity should be able to have its say. That is how we make good law in this House. Not by trial which is essentially what this piece of legislation is about to go through. I will use my second reading contribution to talk about some of the areas where we have concerns that we are leaving gaps open; where we are relying on the Department of Corrections to highlight in some cases offenders who need monitoring regimes. We know it is a pressed department but I will leave that to my second contribution.Hon Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA (Minister of Corrections): It is an honour to speak on this the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill. Before I do though I must convey my thoughts and prayers to the people of Paris France and all those caught up in terrorist conflicts around the world.Returning to this bill can I congratulate the Minister of Justice the Hon Amy Adams on introducing this bill. It has taken some time to work through what are some complex issues. As she has already stated in her first reading speech it is about balancing the safety and security of the New Zealand public with individual liberties—as the last speaker Jacinda Ardern has mentioned—but it is also in response to the changes in immigration laws in Australia.This has been a process where we have been working alongside our colleagues in Australia as well as the officials in order to bring about a framework for change that will be enduring and lasting. Department of Corrections officials have formed part of that group and have visited Canberra. I was in Australia in July when we signed a memorandum of cooperation in order for the sharing of the information from the states through to our Department of Corrections here in New Zealand to ensure that that cooperation and that level of collaboration is expected and it certainly is required.At present the vast majority of deported offenders are not subject to any formal management on their return to New Zealand. This has been the case as the Minister stated over a number of years. So this is the first Government—the first Government—to intervene and to respond to this need. What it does is solve this problem by giving the Department of Corrections and the police the powers that are necessary to supervise these deported offenders on their return to New Zealand. That will be consistent with the approach that we take to managing released prisoners from New Zealand’s own prisons. It does that by allowing corrections officers to manage the risk that these people pose to the public. A number of these offenders have been convicted of serious crimes and the Government’s duty is to protect our citizens from harm and that is what this bill is about.The last speaker did talk about protecting the rights of these deported offenders and these criminals in terms of their citizenship rights. Well it was the Labour Government that was part of the agreement with the Australian Government to curtail some of the rights of New Zealanders in Australia. So she knows that we know that and the people of New Zealand know that.I think the second point to make around some of these deported offenders is you know if they do not want to give up some of their rights in Australia then do not commit the crimes. Do not commit the crimes—is that something simple to ask of some of these offenders?Hon Dr Nick Smith: It’s a very good point.Hon Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: Well I think it should be made Dr Smith. I think you know you give up some of your rights when you commit crimes.In terms of the reintegration services corrections officers are working alongside organisations like New Zealand People at Risk Solutions Goodwood Park and the Manukau Urban Māori Authority in order to provide some of these social services and it is a collaboration within Government. So the Department of Corrections will work alongside the police and will work alongside the Ministry of Justice as well as the Ministry of Social Development to provide some of the services that these returning offenders may require. But we cannot compel them to take up those services because obviously they are citizens returning to New Zealand who have the ability to choose to take up those services or not.As the Minister has already said the length of the supervision period provided by the bill is clearly linked to the length of the prison sentence imposed on the deported offenders in those overseas jurisdictions. So the longer the prison sentence overseas the longer that period will be on their return to New Zealand. So for example those on life sentences can be managed for up to 5 years out here in New Zealand. Eligible deported offenders will be subject to standard release conditions which are the same as those currently used to manage prisoners in New Zealand.In addition—and I think this is a really important clause within the bill—the Department of Corrections will be able to apply to the courts for the imposition of special conditions on deported offenders where it will help to reduce reoffending and enhance public safety. I think the last member who spoke should consider that point and consider the fact that the department through its chief executive can apply to the courts for special conditions to be imposed. One of the conditions for example can be the imposition of electronic monitoring where it is deemed necessary.This bill complements some of the changes made in late December 2014 to enhance the extended supervision orders and introduce public protection orders. I know there have been some questions regarding the use of those orders but there is a high threshold. Those changes were made to meet the need for those particularly high-risk individuals who do require extra supervision. So this bill provides for the Department of Corrections to apply for those extended supervision orders and public protection orders where appropriate.I just want to sum up by saying there is an increased number of deported offenders arriving not just from Australia but from around the world—250 to 300 per year. I believe that this bill is an appropriate response to that need to particularly supervise those deported offenders who are high risk who return to our shores. It is about supervision and it is about monitoring but it is also about rehabilitation and reintegration and that is why the support services and the Department of Corrections will be working alongside a number of Government agencies and also a number of NGOs that do fine work in the community to help these offenders reintegrate and rehabilitate as part of their release into the community.That is why this bill provides the Department of Corrections and the police with the powers to manage some of those risks to the public posed by deported offenders. It is about offenders’ rights versus public security but I will always come down in support of public security and public safety. I commend this bill to the House.KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. The previous speaker the Hon Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga was correct. We are debating this because of a law that the Australian Government enacted. That law was enacted in order to capture terrorists. What it has in fact done is cast such a wide net that it is now also capturing criminals including low-level lawbreakers. What the Australians have done is subscribe to the politics of fear. They have created an enemy and that enemy is now low-level crims. They have created the enemy and they are using that enemy to justify all manner of human rights abuses.My objection to their law is in fact the human rights abuses. Minister Adams was correct. The Australian Government has a sovereign right to make the laws as it sees fit but the objection I have to the law it has created is that it lacks any proportionality where these low-level lawbreakers are now being subjected to the most heinous of conditions in detention centres. I believe that New Zealand has an obligation as a member of the international community to stand up and expose just how bad those conditions are. It is easy for us as a nation to condemn terrorist organisations and Third World countries for their human rights abuses. It is a lot harder for us to stand up and address the abuses of our closest friend and our ally but that does not mean to say we are wrong to do it. I believe that we need to speak out wherever there is tyranny and abuse.There is no justification really for the detention centres—first of all because the prisoners could have their visa situation assessed before their prison sentence ends. If they go through that process and it is determined that their visa is going to be totally revoked before the end of their prison sentence and they get deported I am au fait with that; I am OK with that. Better still if the prisoners are let out into their communities and they spend time at home with their families working paying tax to the Australian Government while that process is going through that to me is an even better and more humane system. But if the Australians determine that they must detain these people then all I think our New Zealand Government needs to ask is that they be detained in a humane fashion.Everyone knows that I have been over there and I have met detainees. I have listened to their stories. We have heard how they have been abused and they have been antagonised by guards and how they have been beaten. The Australian Government is denying all this. There is a simple reason why. The bigger the lie the easier it is to hide. The Australian Government is hiding these human rights abuses.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Can I just draw the member’s attention to the bill. Can he sit down while I am on my feet; thank you. The member has spent about 3½ minutes outlining the current situation in Australia which has been well debated not only in the House but also across the media. He now needs to bring himself to the provisions of the bill and to debate those please.KELVIN DAVIS: The situation in Australia leads to these detainees being brought back. In a couple of days’ time we are going to have a planeload of New Zealand detainees arriving on our shores. My colleague Jacinda Ardern rightly raised the question as to why it has taken so long and why this legislation has to be drawn up in such a hurry.My first understanding of this problem was back in January of this year. Jacinda Ardern has said that this situation arose maybe in April of last year when we first became aware of it with other legislation. My understanding was that in January of this year a woman who committed murder in Australia was sent back to New Zealand and is living in Kaikohe up in Te Tai Tokerau. She arrived with no conditions whatsoever imposed upon her. If she had been released into the Australian community she would have had all manner of parole conditions but because she was deported directly to New Zealand she did not have any conditions imposed on her. At the time I said that it was really important that this situation be addressed. That woman I do not believe really holds much of a threat to the community. But let us change the situation. If she was a child molester and she arrived back in New Zealand back in Kaikohe and happened to live next to an early childhood centre or a school or a playground or a park that is the reason why this legislation is necessary and the reason why I do support it going through. But I do not think that that should stop me criticising the process it has gone through and the hurried aspect of it.Let us just also understand that these detainees do not want be here. They would prefer to be back in Australia with their families and their support networks. One of my main criticisms of this legislation is that although they are arriving here and they are going to have these monitoring conditions which I agree with my greater concern is that there is no social support in the legislation to really look after their needs. I understand that they are going to arrive in New Zealand and I think they will be given a couple of hundred dollars and 5 days’ accommodation in a motel somewhere. The concern is that they will be arriving basically with no food no clothes no job—nothing. That is why about 5 or 6 weeks ago I suggested that an appropriate response—a welcoming party—would be for the Government to open up and pay a marae to look after them for the first 3 4 or 5 weeks of their time here in New Zealand. That way they would have somewhere to go to. That way they would be fed. That way they could have a whole heap of support services descend on that marae to specifically address the needs that would help them to get back on their feet.The other day the Prime Minister said that he is the only one standing up for victims. Well my real concern is that if we do not have the support networks in place for these people when they arrive here they are going to be set up to fail. If they do not have support networks and they do not get on their feet quickly then they may have to resort to crime to get by which is going to create new victims right here in New Zealand.Another concern of mine is that when they arrive here and if we do not have the wraparound support services for these people then they are going to be easy fodder for gangs. They will be looking for someone somewhere to support them and help them get by and to protect them. The gangs will be sitting around right now going “Heck we’re going to have 20 or 30 maybe a couple of hundred ex-prisoners from Australia arriving here with very little support.” and they can fill the void of the support agencies. I know Minister Lotu-Iiga said that the Department of Corrections is going to be working with various agencies but it is not explicit here in the bill as to what that support is going to be. I think that the Government needs to act swiftly to make sure that these people are not set up to fail once they get here; that they are supported.I do have concerns about the Department of Corrections being able to monitor the situation when these people get here. We know that the department struggles to monitor people on electronic bail and in all sorts of other situations. We know it is struggling in prisons. I would like to think that the Department of Corrections does receive more in its budget to enable it to employ people who will look after these deportees.Just to wrap up—and again we are going through this whole process over the course of the evening. I just want to wrap up by saying—and it does go back to the situation in Australia. At some stage in the future there will be an inquiry into the human rights abuses in the detention centres in Australia. I believe that when that inquiry does happen guards will be called to the witness stand. They will be asked to testify and they will be asked the question—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member cannot go there. The member was given some latitude earlier in his contribution. This does not relate to the bill. The member should confine himself to the bill.KELVIN DAVIS: I do have just one sentence.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am sorry but the member cannot get into that situation. In effect the Speaker has ruled that you cannot go there and you should not go there.Jacinda Ardern: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. My colleague is speaking to the origin of a significant number of these offenders who are being deported directly from this place. In fact the bill itself references the fact that many of them will be held in detention before being deported here. It is explicitly mentioned in the bill and I would have thought it would be in scope.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: The provisions of the bill relate to the monitoring of those people when they are returned to New Zealand. Those are what the provisions are. It is fairly straightforward. The member has already been given 4 minutes of a 10-minute speech to cover that when he was asked now to confine himself to the bill. Once the Speaker has intervened and said “Don’t go there.” it is not in order for the member to say “Well I’ve just got a little bit more to say.” I am sorry but those are the rules and I do not make them.KELVIN DAVIS: The detention centres are wrong and they need to be closed.JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki): It is my pleasure to speak to the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill throughout the course of today. First of all before I address the bill a question was raised quite rightly that in the bill provisions around the reintegration of returning offenders who will be subject to conditions under this legislation are not noted in the bill. As my colleague in front of me Jono Naylor points out no it is not in the bill and in fact that is not normally in the bill.This Government has a very strong work programme under way traversing a number of relevant Government agencies involved in offender rehabilitation: New Zealand Police the Department of Corrections Immigration New Zealand the Customs Service the Ministry of Justice the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade the Ministry of Health and also the Ministry of Social Development. Those agencies are working together—and have been for some time—to ensure that we are ready to support monitor and begin the reintegration of these offenders upon their return to New Zealand. So it is this Government’s priority in fact to ensure that there are plans in place for these individuals who are being returned to New Zealand and who will be subject to the orders that are passed in this bill with a focus on reintegration but also keeping our communities safe. That is entirely consistent and in line with a number of pieces of legislation that have fairly recently gone through this House such as the orders mentioned by a previous speaker.On the extended supervision orders perhaps a point around the context of this bill that I want to make is that this Parliament did put through extended supervision orders which came into being in December and also public protection orders for those offenders who did not commit their crime in New Zealand. But in the absence of an information-sharing agreement it was not possible at that time to extend parole conditions and supervision conditions or orders against offenders who committed their crimes outside of New Zealand. We were simply unable to craft up a regime for monitoring and rehabilitating offenders in the absence of an information-sharing agreement. That was completed in February of this year and here we are in November with the bill before the House.Although the gap between February and mid-November might seem a long period to traverse in fact an awful lot of work has been under way to put a system in order that will cater for those people who are increasingly being returned to New Zealand many of whom are coming from Australia due to a change in its internal legislation with changes to its migration legislation. The register that is being brought about in this legislation to track offenders and information-sharing arrangements with Australia will give us the detailed information that we need and puts the New Zealand Government the Department of Corrections police and everyone else in a better position to properly assess and to monitor these offenders returning to New Zealand.We still need all criminals being returned to New Zealand to be subject to the same form of oversight as New Zealanders when they complete their term of imprisonment for a similar prison sentence. So this bill implements a regime a supervision regime to cover the gap. There are three key aspects in this bill. The first aspect is to allow police to compel returning offenders to provide information—so that is their name their date of birth their fingerprints and in some cases a DNA sample. Previously police could ask but there was no degree of compulsion. Secondly there will be standard monitoring and supervision conditions that are automatically imposed on eligible returning offenders. So they are pretty standard and will apply to all eligible returning offenders. Thirdly there will be new powers through the auspices of the District Court to impose special conditions. Those special conditions will be restrictions for example on not residing near a school or not residing near a day-care centre or something like that. Orders can also be subject to electronic monitoring. There will be further interventions today on this bill and I will leave my contribution there. Thank you.METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): The Green Party is abstaining on the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill today. We recognise the need for legislation to manage the return of New Zealanders who have serious convictions after they have been deported from another country. This is an old issue. Such citizens have been returning back to New Zealand for years and years and years. There has been no legislation in place to effectively manage this issue in the past but we do recognise that there is an escalation over the consequences of that deportation policy given the gross breach of human rights that the Australian law imposes on New Zealand people.There is no doubt that Australia has the sovereign right to make any laws that it likes but that does not excuse the wrongfulness of its law and nor does it mean that simply because it is Australia and we have a close relationship with it that we should be soft on Australia for its human rights abuses and we still have serious concerns about New Zealand failing to raise this issue when Australia was seeking a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council. That is the kind of time—exactly the right time—for New Zealand to stand in favour of the rights of our own citizens as opposed to the personal relationships between some members of Government in New Zealand and some members of Government in Australia. So I agree with Peter Dunne here when he described—I think he used the word “villain”—Australia as the villain; I think that is what he said and his condemnation of its Draconian and unjust deportation laws.We understand the need for legislation however to deal with that unjust law; we do not agree that such urgency is necessary. We want to see some kind of select committee process for this legislation even if it is a short one. This bill deals with a very complex set of issues a very careful balancing between the rights of every New Zealander to be treated fairly and the issues of public safety where New Zealanders with serious convictions are coming home. We do not underestimate the complexity of that balancing: what is the right framework; what are the right impositions; who has the responsibility to undertake what actions; and how do you assess the potential risk if you like of some versus others who are returning especially if you do not access to full information. All of that uncertainty and complexity is real but we need to make sure we have the best possible law that deals with that because of the complexity.We want to make sure that New Zealanders have the best possible systems in place to support the deportees when they return particularly with much greater support for their rehabilitation and resettlement here. For those who have never—or hardly ever—lived in New Zealand this will be quite a culture shock and there needs to be some support around that. There are many community organisations that invest all of their time and effort into providing that support and they need Government now to back them and there is not sufficient backing in our view.We also want every New Zealander to be able to access their appeal rights and where a person has completed their sentence not to be subject to any form of double jeopardy. They should not be punished twice—once in Australia for the conviction and then again here in New Zealand—because we have a legal regime that is inadequate that tends to impose more obligations on a person than can be justified in the context of their personal circumstances—the circumstances of their conviction.So it is really important that we get this legislation right—absolutely critical. Legislation passed in haste always leads to problems. Those of us who have been here for a few years have seen time and time again Ministers coming back for urgent and rather embarrassing corrections where mistakes have been found some weeks later in the legislation that they said was so urgent it had to be passed immediately. What is even important with that is that we do not want New Zealanders being caught up in the consequences of hasty mistaken legislation especially when you are talking about legislation that uses the coercive power of the State. The right to detain a person is the most—not violent but the most excessive use of power that the State has. If we are going to make law that allows for some form of detention or deals with those kinds of issues we need to be very very careful as to how it is constructed. So even just taking a few days for an external review of this legislation would be extremely helpful.We have precedent for speedy but also considered legislation. For example we can learn the lessons from the Canterbury earthquake bill. That bill was very hastily drafted in response to a terrible tragedy that happened in Christchurch. Despite the need for quick action and the emotional intensity of the issues surrounding the earthquake the Government did agree to a short select committee process. I think it was about 24 hours; I might need to be corrected on that. That gave experts and members of the public a chance to help expose the gaps and the inevitable mistakes that you find in hastily drafted legislation. As a result of a very short select committee hearing which was held in Christchurch 30 changes were made to that legislation. It meant that 30 mistakes or 30 inaccuracies or 30 potential injustices were remedied before the Parliament passed it and that is a good thing. That is why we have a democratic process for the passing of legislation.Unfortunately this bill is not going to be subject to that democratic oversight as it should be. It certainly is not unheard of for a bill to have less than 4 days of select committee hearings and there were at least three other bills passed in the last Parliament that had 4 or fewer days of select committee consideration but at least it gave a chance for an external review of the legislation. Taking some time for example to hear from the Human Rights Commission from the Law Society and from the New Zealand People at Risk Solutions among others would ensure that this bill is genuinely effective in the maintenance of public safety without unduly breaching the human rights of New Zealand citizens.I do appreciate that I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Amy Adams on Friday about the then draft bill. The bill has been improved over the weekend and that is good. We were concerned that the amount of information that was being asked of returning offenders—for example all of their familial ties which quite frankly is impossible to define let alone to provide—was quite Draconian. We are pleased to see now that the bill requires only the same amount of information that is required under the Policing Act. We were concerned to make sure there was equity in the treatment of the returning New Zealanders and the treatment of New Zealanders who obtain a similar conviction here. There is no need for more information. It needed to be much more equitable.The review clause is an addition. It is better than not having one. Two years in our view is too long. We would prefer to see a review completed well before the election because we are talking about a review just before the election—almost bang on to the month. That is too late and an earlier review process would be better. We think that a sunset clause is probably better because that forces the issue and Parliament does not tend to do anything it does not have to as we have seen with the consequences of this bill. But at least there is some kind of review and that process could be improved over the next day or so.We were also concerned to narrow the definition of “returning offender” so that those with minor historical convictions would not be caught up in this legislation. That did not happen. We think that it is still an issue with the nature of this bill. It is too wide. It casts too wide a net although we do understand how difficult it is to construct the perfect provision. It would be better if we had an external review through a select committee process to give us new ideas about how to improve the language of the bill and therefore narrow its impact.We understand that some New Zealanders are returning to New Zealand this week—they are being deported—and that there is a need for some urgency. We think that those two issues could be split and that the dual process that was described by Jacinda Ardern is another way of going about this. We need to be creative when we are in these kinds of situations. On balance we recognise the need for the legislation. We do not accept that it should go ahead without some kind of public scrutiny and we would like to see that. Thank you.DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): New Zealand First will support this bill through all its stages. Offenders have of course been returned to New Zealand over many years without too much difficulty and New Zealand no doubt has returned offenders to Australia in the same way. But never has there been an occasion involving the sheer number of people to be returned to New Zealand from Australia that we are about to see in the next few weeks or months or indeed years.We first need to ask the question: what has changed that this should now be happening and why do we now need this bill? What has changed of course is Australian law and more important what has changed is the Australians’ approach to human rights issues altogether concerning their non-citizen residents. Whether we like it or not the Australians are deporting people who should in fact not be subject to deportation because they have resided in Australia for many years—many of them for well over 10 years. Some would have arrived as infants. Many have their families in Australia their homes there their jobs there and their lives there. They are in every true sense really Australians despite their New Zealand citizenship. They are not New Zealanders by choice and have very little connection with New Zealand.Nevertheless these people are coming back and we will need to deal with that situation in the way that this bill or something like it proposes. Many have actually committed only minor crimes and some indeed may well have committed no crimes at all. It is actually doubtful in many cases whether their wrongdoing justifies deportation and one of the things we will need to consider in this bill is whether the regime that is to be applied to them here in New Zealand would be justified either. Most of these people will actually be punished twice as a result of what the Australians are doing in creating the need for the situation to be dealt with in this bill. The long-term residents who are being deported have committed crimes in Australia as the product of Australian society not as the product of New Zealand society so should it not actually be the Australians who deal with the aftermath of that and not New Zealand? Nevertheless we have to deal with the situation as it actually is not as we wish it should be. So we do need legislation of this kind.It seems that the right-wing Turnbull Government which is such an admirer of John Key is looking for a way to impress the Australian public and its deportation policy is one of those measures. The fact that it is a gross infringement of human rights seems to be no concern of theirs but it actually is a lot of concern to us because we have to accept back here in New Zealand what are essentially in many cases not really Kiwis who have committed crimes in Australia. It is actually an unreasonable imposition on New Zealand that our so-called Aussie mates are fobbing off some of their convicted crims on us and that is the truth of the matter. By contrast New Zealand does not deport people who have been here for over 10 years and that is what we have a right to expect should happen in Australia as well. Australia needs to reconsider its human rights actions and record in this way.New Zealand First does accept that this bill is needed. We regret that it is needed but we accept that it is needed. It is needed so that we will have a mechanism for dealing with the people who are already beginning to arrive back here in significant numbers. But we should not do it without protest. John Key says that he has raised it with Malcolm Turnbull with no obvious result. We should be making it clear that Australia’s law is wrong and should be changed. John Key has been acting more like a public relations man for the Australian Government than a Kiwi Prime Minister and that is the truth.There has been very little time to study the detail of the bill but I do appreciate the Minister of Justice providing advance copies of the draft bill to us so that we could have a good look at it because we know that the matter is urgent and we accept that this bill does need to be treated with urgency. There is a clear need to see that deportees are received here in an orderly way that looks after their need for reintegration and that allows New Zealand to impose conditions on their return to New Zealand so that the New Zealand public can be properly protected. In doing that we will be doing nothing much more than what happens to New Zealand prisoners who are released from prison. So I do not see that the intent of the bill is really much of a problem for us.I am interested in the definition as the Greens are I hear of what is a “returning offender”. The bill says that a returning offender is one who has been convicted of an offence that would be imprisonable in New Zealand for a term of 1 year or more—would be imprisonable for that period not convicted for that period. We know that a lot of legislation provides for maximum periods of imprisonment but we envisage that not all offending will be that serious and in many cases the actual term of imprisonment will be a lot less. So I think there may be a bit of a problem with the bill in this respect and that is one of the matters that will I am sure be the subject of a review when that happens within the next 2 years. So notwithstanding that problem New Zealand First will continue to support the bill because we do need a regime and this is better than nothing for the time being. But it is far from perfect and I look forward to the review so that we can deal with some of those issues.I also see that there are various provisions to identify people including DNA profiling and powers for the police and others to ensure that the necessary information is obtained. Some of those look to me to be a little Draconian and I wonder whether they should be necessary especially for some of the low-level offenders that we are going to be receiving back. So that is going to be another issue for review I feel within the next couple of years. The people who are returning can be required within 6 months to provide the information required. That seems to me to be a very long period and I wonder whether that is too long. If this is such an urgent problem and needs to be dealt with so effectively and so quickly then why should we be allowing a period of up to 6 months for that purpose? Again I think that is going to be a matter for review within the next 2 years. It is not something that will cause New Zealand First to vote against the bill at this stage but something that we will need to look at in the future.The Commissioner of Police will determine who is a returning prisoner and that is something I may be talking a little bit about in the second reading of this bill because again there are some issues there. There are also provisions for dealing with people who arrive after 6 months of release and that applies to people who were being supervised in some way before leaving for New Zealand or who were subject to the equivalent of our extended supervision orders or public protection orders. That is not inappropriate and I do not think that would be a matter for grave concern. It is a particularly important matter for public protection.In the end all of the fundamental provisions of the bill are acceptable to New Zealand First. We are not happy with the extent of some of them. I will be criticising them again later in the debate and I do hope they will be attended to at least when the bill is reviewed in the next 2 years. I want to commend the Minister for adding that provision to the bill because the next 2 years are a period within which we are going to learn rather a lot and the review then will be absolutely necessary. For the meantime however New Zealand First will support the bill.JONO NAYLOR (National): I have to say I was slightly perplexed by one of the things that the previous speaker Denis O’Rourke referred to when talking about the difference between something that was an imprisonable offence and somebody being convicted because at least in this country I do not think you can be imprisoned without first being convicted.This bill is part of the Government’s ongoing programme to make New Zealand safer for our citizens. It is part of an ongoing programme and over the last year we have seen an introduction of extended supervision orders we have seen public protection orders put in place and this is again just part of our ongoing commitment to New Zealanders that we will keep them safe. This bill does meet the expectations of New Zealanders that we will do what we can where we can to keep them safe. It is the very least that we can expect—that those who are being deported from other countries who are convicted criminals will experience the same or similar types of probationary regimes as people who have been released from New Zealand prisons. And so of course this is absolutely paramount. This is the primary goal the primary purpose of what we are trying to achieve through this bill and so therefore it is exceptionally critical that we get this in place.I know that there has been concern about the urgency of it but as we know there are people currently being deported from other countries to New Zealand with nothing in place. So I think it is important that we are in a position to be able to get this through now that we have got a good bill that is drafted and is going to serve the purposes that we want it to and that we now get this done as quickly as possible. So therefore I will commend this bill to the House.DAVID CLENDON (Green): As we heard just a few minutes ago from Metiria Turei the Greens are abstaining on this legislation and that is not a position we like to be in. We like to take a position to support or oppose. Whether we support or oppose legislation we would all agree that most bills coming to this House are improved by appropriate process through the House and its processes. In this instance the abstention decision was a difficult one. We do not disagree with some of the fundamental principles of the bill.The Minister of Justice in her introductory comments made the point that the matter of deportees arriving in New Zealand—people who have offended elsewhere—is not a new problem. She gave us a figure of typically 80 to 100 people historically who might be returning to New Zealand with this sort of history behind them. She suggested that possibly we are looking at something like a three-fold increase in that—from 80 to 100 to perhaps 250 to 300 people whom we can expect per year at least in the short term. That is a real problem. Acknowledging also that some of those people will not be offenders; they will be people deemed to be of bad character but who do not have a criminal record. So the numbers are not quite as severe as the Minister might at first have indicated but we do accept that there is an issue; there is a problem here to be resolved.Some of the underpinning principles of the bill we have no problem with such as the notion of endeavouring to align the treatment of returning people with those who have offended and have served some sentence in New Zealand. That is not a bad principle—treating like situations alike—however there is sufficient in this bill to concern us. We cannot support it not least of all because essentially we have been flying blind on the Minister’s intentions. We got a draft bill—a rough cut of the bill—less than a week ago. I think Thursday last week we got to have a little look at what the Minister was intending. We have heard already that even in a couple of days we were able to suggest positive and useful amendments to the bill that will make it a somewhat better bill. It is an unfortunate reflection I think on this Government that it seems not to have learnt the lesson that engaging with stakeholders at an early stage in any policy development is likely to generate better policy and is likely to get support for legislation if it is done in a timely fashion.We have heard various opinions about when this process began; when the problem was acknowledged. We know that at least from the beginning of this year we knew that there was a problem because the Minister and indeed others were hearing of the NGOs in Auckland that were endeavouring to offer some support to people who were landing at our airport with no support no network with a history of offending and nothing was there for them. We have known this has been a problem for quite some time. In July of this year I wrote to the Minister. I sent a letter to her on 16 July asking for a briefing for a conversation about her intentions and what the Government was planning to do about getting some sort of regime in place to manage this very real and existing and even urgent problem. Two weeks later I got a two-line response thanking me for my inquiry and telling me that the Minister had no time to speak to us at that point. That is not indicative of good process.Would one not think that this was always going to be an issue that would be controversial? It was always going to be a matter that involved human rights and we are seeing now the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act report that indicates that yes there are real concerns about that. Would it not simply be good practice to engage with other parties fairly and reasonably to endeavour to build support and critically for it to not only engage with us but to engage with the public? What does the regulatory impact statement—which incidentally we got to see about an hour ago when it landed on the Table—say? It gives a good overview of the policy advice that the Minister has received and the analysis that has been done. What are we told in this document about consultation? Well it is not a pretty sight I have to say.There was targeted consultation with the New Zealand Police and the Department of Corrections—entirely appropriate. An early draft of the regulatory impact statement—the policy advice—was circulated to: New Zealand Police; Department of Corrections; Crown Law; Parliamentary Counsel Office; Ministry of Health; Department of Internal Affairs; Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment; New Zealand Customs Service; Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade; Treasury. Nowhere do we see any reference to one of the many NGOs that might have added value to this. My time has now expired. I will return to the point of the lack of consultation—which has been acknowledged in the documentation—in a later contribution.MARAMA FOX (Co-Leader—Māori Party): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. I think it is fair to say that it has been no secret that I have been a critic of this whole process. That is not simply because of this bill but the situation that we have had in Australia that has meant that we have had to rush to get something together to try to fix this situation where offenders are coming back to New Zealand and are being largely unmonitored and we have no recourse to be able to do anything about that and in many cases we did not even know that they were here.I talk about the situation in Christchurch where it was found that a man who had been convicted of paedophile offences had been returned on a plane straight out of prison dropped off at the airport in Christchurch and was then recognised and living at the time with a family with young children just down the road from a school. That is when it came to my attention how little we knew—with the information sharing coming from Australia that was non-existent at the time—how little we had done to prepare for this despite the fact that this had been happening in this country for many many many years and how little the Australian Government actually thought of us to do it in the first place.I have been outraged—outraged—that deportees who have committed serious offences have been coming here for a long period of time with no information outraged that when all of this started to come about and some pressure came on the Australian Government that it actually then took those deportees and put them into detention effectively giving them a double jeopardy—as has been mentioned here—and impeding their human rights because to be there in the first place is exactly what that is. I have been outraged that people who have committed no offences are being deported and therefore we come to this situation that we are in today: rushing through a piece of legislation to try to deal with these issues that we have all spoken out against actually from both sides of the House—some more fervently than others but we have all criticised the Australian Government for the place that we find ourselves in now.I actually want to commend the Minister for taking the opportunity to come and speak with us personally. We had a number of issues that we were concerned about when the draft bill came to us—concerns that we were able to have alleviated through those discussions and some minor amendments that were made. Therefore the reason we are supporting it through urgency is that we have had our concerns satisfied that those things have been addressed but as you see a number of people have also picked up other things that may get addressed in the second reading and in the Committee stage.I also want to commend the Minister and the members of the National caucus and the other ministries because we are concerned not just about the law and how it pertains to these people who are coming back from Australia and into New Zealand but about their reintegration about their manaakitanga and the way that we are able to support them so that we do not have new instances of new crimes being perpetrated on a new set of victims in our country. I agree with the New Zealand First member that actually Australia has washed its hands of these people who have grown up in Australia have been criminalised in Australia and have been sent back to us for us to clean up its mess. I do not say that lightly. It is not about the people. We need to make sure we support the people because they need to be able to come back and integrate into our society so that we can ensure the safety of our people. So I do commend the Minister for getting this legislation on the table.I am absolutely appalled that this is a blatant disrespect of our nation from the Australian Government specifically so around the people of questionable character. I have been given assurances that the monitoring system and the regime that will be put in place will not be any more erroneous than it would have been if they had had those conditions placed on them in Australia and that there will not be an extension to that so they will not be further stigmatised in this country after having gone through some horrendous things in their country when they come back here. I am assured by the Minister that that is taken care of.We need to have time to go through it very carefully before the second reading—and that points to the urgency of it—but I want to make sure that something is done. We should have taken the opportunity to speak out against it. We did not. We had the chance and New Zealand should have reconsidered that at the United Nations periodic review and now we are rushing through legislation to deal with the mess that the Australian Government has made. Thank you.CHRIS BISHOP (National): I just want to make two quick remarks about the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill. Firstly just to deal with this issue of urgency—is the bill urgent? The answer is absolutely yes. There has been some debate in the first reading about when exactly this issue arose and who exactly knew what and when. Jacinda Ardern I think in her first reading speech said that everyone has been aware of this since April 2014 and Kelvin Davis says it was December 2014 and others have said perhaps it was in the new year. But I think the key point is that regardless of when this was picked up on the effect of the Australian policy change through its migration amendments in December 2014 has been to throw into stark relief the consequence that more people will be deported from Australia to New Zealand. It averaged about 80 people before the policy change and it is now expected to be about 250 to 300. So the key point is: what is the parliamentary and legislative response to that? It is important that we get that right.Actually the Government has been working quickly over the last few months to get that right and it actually takes time to get information-sharing agreements in place. It takes time to get a register in place and to get the information from the Australian authorities to make sure that we can do this properly. So now we have the legislation before the House and the Minister of Justice has talked about how quickly the officials have moved on this. I think they have done a good job.Actually if you read the section 7 report that the Attorney-General has laid before the House under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act he commends how quickly the officials from the Department of Corrections the Ministry of Justice and from other agencies have moved to make sure this happens. I mean this piece of legislation deals with numerous rights under the Bill of Rights Act: the right to be free from search and seizure the right of freedom of movement—numerous rights under the Bill of Rights Act all of which could potentially have been impinged on by this legislation. In all respects bar one very small matter that was to do with DNA samples which is something from back in 2009 this complies in the Attorney-General’s legal view with the Bill of Rights Act. I think that speaks volumes actually about how hard the officials have worked to get this regime into place. So that is the first issue.Just very briefly on the Australian policy—does anyone like the Australian policy on this? No—no indeed. Numerous members of the House to varying intensity have expressed that view but the critical point is that we need to do something in response. I take issue with what Mr O’Rourke said briefly about how the Prime Minister has been a—I think it was a puff—public relations person for Malcolm Turnbull and the Australian regime. Rubbish. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was actually a very good speech from Mr O’Rourke so I will not go too hard on him as I sometimes am wont to do—it was actually a very constructive speech and actually it reflects the general degree of constructiveness and collegiality that the House is expressing on this bill. So with those brief remarks I commend this bill to the House.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): The Hon David Parker I understand for 5 minutes.Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): Correct so I should start. This bill is being considered under urgency. It has been brought to the House after we are told 12 days of drafting because the Government has been so ineffective in running earlier processes that it did not get to parliamentary draftspeople until 12 days ago. And it stands out obviously in the form of the bill. Take clause 7—“Who is returning offender” does not even make grammatical sense. There will be a number of other mistakes in this bill.Unfortunately this House has to deal with it under urgency and we actually agree that given that the Government has got to this point it should be dealt with under urgency but it does take away liberties from people. The Attorney-General says that those interferences with the liberties of returning criminals are justified and I think he is probably right but we cannot be sure that that line is drawn in the right place exactly without considering these things carefully. Neither can we be sure that it is going far enough to protect the New Zealand public without these things being considered carefully.I thank the Minister Amy Adams for her interactions with the Labour Party and in particular with Jacinda Ardern but it is obvious from those interactions that the form of the bill has been changing substantially in the last day and yet we are expected to believe that the form of this legislation will be perfect. I made a suggestion through Jacinda and Andrew Little that we guard against mistakes here by passing two forms of this bill today. One would have a sunset clause that would say that it expired after a year—we said: “Say a year.” If the Government came back and said “Say 2 years.” we probably could have lived with that but it should have had a sunset clause.At the same time under the same debate with no more parliamentary time we offered to cooperate with this at the Business Committee. We said: “Pass a second version of the bill identical except that it would not have a sunset clause and it would not commence until the date of the sunset clause in the first bill and send that to the select committee.” And then starting tomorrow the select committee could have heard from the Law Society heard from the victim impact groups and heard from civil society as to where the flaws are in this bill because there will be flaws in this bill.I say Amy Adams why did you not respond positively to that request? The Minister Amy Adams replied saying: “Well we’ll have a review after 2 years.” That is not the same thing. That is a review as to whether the legislation was working as anticipated; it is not “Review now as to whether this legislation is right tomorrow.” That was a very good offer from the Labour Party as to how you get the balance right between protecting the public—because we might not have properly protected the public in the form of this bill—and making sure you are not unduly penalising people post-release who should not be further put upon. I cannot understand why the Government did not accept that.The final point I will make because I think I am just about out of my 5 minutes—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): No you have got a minute and a half yet.Hon DAVID PARKER: I have got a minute and a half left. Why is it that on a bill like this which is being introduced in such a hurried way under urgency the Government members are not taking their allotted time? Why is it that they are not taking the trouble to actually read this legislation? They only need to get to clause 7 of the bill to find the first obvious grammatical mistake which is on page 4 of the bill—it is not a long way to read through it to get that mistake. Why is it that we have not had a discussion as to how it is that we guard against the risks that we are creating—[Bell rung]—through the urgency motion? My colleague David Shearer will take the rest of this 10-minute call to illustrate to the public how lax this Government has been in terms of meeting time lines so that we would not be doing this in such an urgent manner.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): The honourable David Shearer for 5½ minutes.DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): On Thursday “Con Air”arrives: a flight that is chartered by the Australians that is arriving here with 20 people who have just been released. They will arrive here and we hope that the legislation that is going through urgency here will be in place for the arrival of that plane. That is a disgrace when this Government knew last year on 14 December that Australia had changed its laws.And that Minister of Justice over there received on 12 February a memo from her ministry that said “The number of offenders being deported to New Zealand from Australia is likely to increase significantly as a result of recent changes to Australian law.” that “Some deported offenders who have been convicted of very serious offences may pose a significant risk to the New Zealand community.” and that “Offenders born in New Zealand who have lived most of their lives overseas are likely to face additional challenges reintegrating into the community and avoiding reoffending.” That is a disgrace; that was in February this year and here we are with 2 weeks of Parliament to go and we are ramming through a piece of legislation that should have been written months ago.In the meantime there have been dozens of people who have already come back. Some of those have come back on charter flights chartered by the Australian Government which is too worried to put those people on commercial flights and instead is putting them on charter flights. As the Minister of Justice herself has acknowledged although some of those people are there for relatively minor offences they include people who have been convicted of murder of manslaughter of rape and of paedophilia. We have no checks and no ability to stop those people when they arrive and they will disappear into New Zealand. The police themselves say that 43 percent of those people who have arrived need to be on some sort of supervision list—43 percent.And last week we had the audacity of the Prime Minister who stood up here in an extraordinary outrage and said that the National Government was protecting New Zealanders. Can you imagine what he should be saying now? He should be apologising to New Zealanders that the Government has nothing in place for those people who have arrived back—nothing in place. He should be apologising now for not making the preparations for not standing up to the Australians and for not saying to Mr Turnbull—instead of having some sort of love fest—that nobody coming into New Zealand can come back unless the Australian authorities give the details of what they were convicted for.Right now we know that the Australian authorities are not giving us those details that we are seeking from them so we actually do not know who is coming through to New Zealand. We do not know what crimes they have committed and what risk they might be to New Zealand. Instead of Mr Key saying that we have a wonderful relationship with Australia—yes we might have a great relationship with Australia but at the end of the day that relationship should serve to further our interests and this is certainly not in our interests when they will not in any way cooperate with us in giving us the information about returning criminals to New Zealand.If we had just some sense of cojones in that Government we should at least say to the Australians—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! That is a term that has been ruled out previously. The member will withdraw it.DAVID SHEARER: I withdraw that. If this Government had any sort of moral standing it would have said to the Australians: “You don’t tell us who’s coming we don’t let you land.” It is as simple as that.I believe that we are in a serious situation where the Government has been telling us all along that it is standing up for our protections and our freedoms. It is certainly not. It is not standing up for us when it comes to New Zealanders coming back here with criminal convictions and no legislation and no procedures in place to receive them and it is not standing up for those New Zealanders who have been wrongly detained in Australia by Australian authorities after having done their time. That too is a right that should not be taken away from anybody. That Government is absolutely shameless and it should be ashamed of itself and of the way that it has actually treated New Zealanders.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Ah—Alfred Ngaro. I apologise; it was the first name that I was losing.ALFRED NGARO (National): That is all right—thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. Look there has been a lot of huff and puff and heat from the other side in the previous speeches that have been made but when we talk about actions of a Government the Minister of Justice has already spoken about the fact that in 9 years under a Labour Government nothing had been done. An estimate of around about 700 offenders had come into the country under that watch so this is not the time to turn around and ask what it is that we have done—what is it that the Government has done—because even during those members’ time we know that there were a number who came through. That is right—we will not hear anything from the other side because they are silent on that but what we are unanimous about—Kris Faafoi: Did you not just listen to David Shearer? Are you deaf?ALFRED NGARO: No—he actually tried to put the blame and the accountability fully on this Government. The Minister was also really clear that actually when she was officially informed was February of this year. So what this Government is doing and what this Minister is doing is taking the initiative with the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill rather than allowing this to continue to lapse.We know that under the regulatory impact statement it is really clear. The issues of concern which will concern all New Zealanders—and to my colleague Mr Bishop when he talked about the purpose of urgency—are that in the regulatory impact statement on page no. 3 it clearly indicates that since 2013 approximately 70 percent of returning offenders have been convicted overseas of serious offences. Hence the reason for urgency; hence us putting this in place because we think this is absolutely important. The offences that we are talking about are assault they are armed robbery and burglary they are rape and sexual assault they are murder and manslaughter—they are of the kind that is of great concern to the community and to the nation as a whole. We know that there will be a long term of urgency in the House.I just want to finish off with a couple of comments. The bill contains three key aspects that I think are really important. The first is allowing police to compel returning offenders to provide information. The information sharing that we are talking about is important and it may require DNA sampling. The second is around standard monitoring and supervision conditions that are automatically imposed on all eligible returning offenders. The third which we will hear more of is new powers of the District Courts to impose special conditions such as restrictions on not residing near a school that can be subject to electronic monitoring. I believe that this bill is important. It is important that we get this through the House in urgency. I commend this bill to the House.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am about to put the question but before I do put the question I just want to make a ruling because it appears that we have some conflict between our Standing Orders and Speakers’ rulings. Some members during the debate have indicated that they intend to abstain but I have not heard any member indicate that they are going to vote No. Normally the expectation is that members call for a further vote only if they wish to challenge the outcome and have given their voices in the minority and Speakers’ rulings 73/4 and 74/1 indicate that. However it is my view that it is in the House’s interest for members to be able to record their position when they wish to abstain. This is consistent with Standing Order 140 and with the principle that members cannot call for a further vote if they voted with the majority. So I am indicating that notwithstanding previous rulings I will take a division on the question notwithstanding no member saying No.A party vote was called for on the question That the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill be now read a first time.Ayes 107New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 32; New Zealand First 12; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Abstentions 14Green Party 14.Bill read a first time.Second ReadingHon AMY ADAMS (Minister of Justice): I move That the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill be now read a second time. In this slightly unusual situation where we are having the second reading immediately following on from the first reading I do not propose to do what I would normally do in a second reading debate and go through in some detail a number of the matters that I set out in my first reading contribution. Instead what I want to do is take the time to expand further on some of the rationale for the structure of the bill and the way it will operate to provide the House and anyone following this debate with a little bit more context around that. Then I do want to touch on some of the allegations that have been made around what is perceived as delay and I can assure the House that there absolutely has not been.So if we start with the operation of the bill I said in my first reading contribution that the bill is about trying to replicate as closely as possible—and I do not pretend that it is an exact replication—the sort of supervision and management of offenders that they would likely have been subject to if they had served the same sentence in New Zealand. The reason it is not an exact fit and the reason that it has been very complex to work through these policy matters is that of course you are dealing with a regime that needs to apply in a blanket way and yet be very careful to not traverse unfairly on the rights and the provisions of natural justice and the rule of law in respect of the returning offenders; have the right sort of oversight in place; and also provide the flexibility to seek additional specific conditions when that is needed in the absence of the mechanism that is normally used in New Zealand which is the Parole Board.So it is very easy I think at this stage when all that work has been done to look at the framework and say: “Well you know you could have banged that out sooner.” But the reality is that we were having to spend far too long—far too long actually—negotiating with Australia to get the right information so we could assess the type of people coming back; the risk profile; the sort of information that anyone who has been a Minister will understand you absolutely must have before you can work through any of the processes the Cabinet Manual requires around quantification of the impact of the changes you are proposing and the cost of them; making sure we had the budgetary provisions in the Cabinet paper to make sure it was adequately resourced; and getting all of the appropriate components that you have to be able to certify as a Minister when you are bringing proposals for a new policy to Cabinet and then to this House. To do all of that as I say it was a matter of working with corrections and with police but they really could not even begin to do their work until Australia had stepped up and provided us with this information.I have said publicly and I will say here again in the House that I am disappointed that we as a close neighbour and for a long time a close friend of Australia found ourselves in the position where the impact on New Zealand was brought to my attention first in February of this year. What that meant was that New Zealand found itself starting from a completely cold start once the law was already in operation. That is not ideal that is not the way that we expect to deal with Australia but that is the position we were in—that is the position I was in.I think we responded in an absolutely timely way. My officials have confirmed that the first advice that ever came in front of me—it was certainly not mentioned in the briefing to the incoming Minister; it was not mentioned in any briefings at the time—was on 12 February. At that point I instructed them to begin work immediately on this framework. The suggestion that some members of this House have made that somehow that is all just a bit of precursor fluff and the work actually starts when you start drafting I think reflects a lack of understanding of the process. Drafting is the end of the process.I want to commend and pick up on the comments that my colleague Chris Bishop made when he commented on the section 7 New Zealand Bill of Rights Act report by the Attorney-General. I would say this but I think he is absolutely right. These are issues that could so easily have gone one step too far in terms of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act issues or equally one step too light in terms of protection. We have ensured that we did everything we could to land it in an appropriate place. Yes the bill has continued to evolve particularly with the news that came through to us in the last few days around this large number of offenders who are on their way back where Australia has not given us advance notice and has not given us a lot of lead time with the information. That information has been followed up on. Given that that is now a new development in the way these processes are flowing—and it was certainly not mentioned in any of the briefings—we have continued to make sure that that is as tightly provided for in the bill as we can.I mentioned that the bill effectively replicates a parole framework. What that means is that if you have been—not you. If the offender—sorry Mr Assistant Speaker; it certainly would not be you. If the offender has been released from custody in the overseas jurisdiction—and can I just get on record very clearly that although a lot of the debate is around Australia and that is absolutely the source country for the vast majority of the people whom this bill will touch it is not the only country. This bill applies to anyone deported to New Zealand from any jurisdiction—we just have to bear that in mind. The framework applies when the offender is released within 6 months of their return and released from custody and that definition of “in custody” very clearly also covers any time they spent in detention centres.The reason for that is that what these conditions are about whether they are applied in New Zealand or under this bill is helping to oversee the highest-risk period for an offender which is the time when they are first released from prison. The longer they have been in prison the harder that reintegration is and therefore the longer the monitoring tends to occur. It is not a punitive attack on the offender; it is about making sure that someone who has been in an institution and under very strict rules for a long period of time is carefully monitored and watched for offending behaviours and for the assistance they will require as they reintegrate. If someone has served an offence in Australia for instance and has been living and working and going about their business in Australia for some time it would not be appropriate to then turn round and impose those sorts of oversight conditions. If however they have only recently been released then we absolutely need to be tracking that sort of behaviour.The bill then goes on to provide that there is recognition that although we have an automatically applying framework some offenders will require a more directive more restrictive set of conditions. Their offending will justify that. In that case the conclusions that I reached through that policy development process were that it would be quite inappropriate to try to provide for that in this legislation. The risk of getting it wrong one way or the other was simply insurmountable. So what the bill provides is that in that instance there are whole new powers to go to the District Court and have the District Court act in lieu of a Parole Board to make the case by case assessment as to when those additional more restrictive conditions are required.The final piece is the collection of information. I want to pick up on the comments Metiria Turei was making in the first reading around the definition of “identifying particulars”. We did have a good discussion for which I thank her on this point. She had picked up a concern that I was also considering at that time which was just saying—had that actually gone too far? Had the information that the police had asked us to provide for—was it too much in that they did not need it? Actually I felt that it was a fair point. We went back and looked at it and agreed that actually narrowing that down to the definition in the Policing Act was appropriate. But let us not cast aside how critical it is that we have that information. There is every prospect that as offenders are returned to New Zealand and we get their biometric details and the like we might find some cold cases unsolved in New Zealand now resolved. We do not know that but I would not be the slightest bit surprised if that is the case. It certainly means that that information will be held in the same way it would be if they had been serving sentences here.The last point I want to make in this contribution is just really to inject a little bit of a calm note I guess into what has become at times—not in this House where I think the debate has generally been reasonably constructive—but actually in some of the media commentary there has been a degree of almost hysteria. Let us remember that we release people from our prisons in New Zealand every single day. These are people whether they have served their sentence in New Zealand or Australia who have been sentenced and have served their sentence and actually in our system of justice and in most systems of justice around the world when you serve your sentence you return to the community. That is the reality.So all this hysteria about “There’s murderers walking around. There’s rapists walking around.”—actually every single day we release from New Zealand prisons people who have committed serious offences. These people are in the same category. So let us not overblow this. Let us not suggest that somehow the public should be battening down the hatches. It is actually still a relatively small number of people compared with the New Zealand population and the same sort of people and the same sort of conditions that happen in New Zealand. Yes it is important that we have a commensurate regime in place but let us not suggest that somehow the bogeyman has landed and it is the beginning of the end. We need this legislation but I think some of the hysteria from some quarters of the media has been unhelpful. With those words I commend the bill at its second reading.JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I want to respond to an issue that has come up across the House during the initial first reading of this bill. That question has been that we somehow as a party are not able to critique the speed of this legislation and the timeliness of it because we have had offenders from Australia deported into New Zealand under a Labour Government. We also had Australian offenders deported here to New Zealand under a National Government before that. No one has ever argued that we have not had a regime that allowed legitimately New Zealand citizens to be deported to New Zealand. What has changed under this Government in recent times is that an amendment was made to Australia’s immigration Act that has led to a significant increase in the number of people being deported here—significant. In fact from what I have seen it is up to five times per month the number of offenders than we have seen in the past. So the scale has changed significantly.The second thing that has changed is that finally New Zealand was able to negotiate an information-sharing arrangement which allowed a monitoring regime to be put in place—pretty critical if you are going to undertake this piece of work. Things are not the same as they were 7 long years ago when Labour was in Government so I think it is probably not necessarily the legitimate point of debate that members on the other side of the House would like it to be.Like the Minister Amy Adams I think this is an unusual second reading speech given that it is immediately after the first reading. Usually at this time we would have a conversation about the changes that have been made at a select committee. I want to use this opportunity to just highlight again that it would have been useful if we had—as Metiria Turei and as David Parker have mentioned—a dual-track process that would allow this stopgap law to be put in place but we allowed for parliamentary consideration and a new regime to replace this law in a year’s time. If you look at the regulatory impact statement—under external consultation 3.6: “In the time available only New Zealand Police the Department of Corrections and Crown Law were consulted on drafts of this bill.” I know given the short time frame—we were being consulted right up to this morning on some changes—that that consultation would have been relatively rushed. There was no Law Commission no Law Society no Parole Board no PILLARS—groups that always bring to the table substantive and useful arguments and critiques of this kind of legislation. Again I want to make that point: we still could have been debating a dual-track process the public still could have had their say and that would have been highly desirable.I want to use my second reading speech though to highlight some of the issues that we are likely to spend a bit of time critiquing in the Committee stage the first of which is the fact that we will keep making references to detention centres despite the discussion between the member Kelvin Davis and the Deputy Speaker in the first reading where the Deputy Speaker requested that we stop referring to detention centres. I would like to point out to the Deputy Speaker that under clause 17(3) of the bill there is reference explicitly to immigration facilities because for the purposes of this bill they count as incarceration. And as defined by the Minister individuals who are released from prison and have 6 months outside of prison custody technically should not have elements of this bill apply to them unless that 6 months includes a turn in a detention facility. And why? It is because you are not therefore mimicking someone who is reintegrating into a community because you are still incarcerated. A detention facility is incarceration. Therefore it has the dual act of meaning that your liberties are removed from you for longer and the double whammy of meaning that you will be monitored for longer as a consequence. And yet you have absolutely no control over that period of incarceration. So it is a dual injustice as it were in terms of how this bill would then apply to you. So we think it is absolutely right that we are able to talk about incarceration in detention centres as part of this legislation and what defines of course that incarceration and what people are enduring in those facilities.The second issue that we will be drawing on in the Committee stage is the appropriate application of the law as it relates to the gathering of offenders’ information. I want to thank other members who have raised instances in the development of this bill anywhere in the legislation where we have seen the law go beyond what we would consider to be reasonable. Our bar for what is reasonable is what we have already passed through due and thorough process in the New Zealand Parliament already. So if we are for instance putting in place a regime that is more stringent in terms of who is required to give a bodily sample that goes beyond our existing bodily samples legislation then we would consider that to be unreasonable. If it asks for the police to gather more information than would currently be the case for someone who was being paroled we would consider that to be unreasonable. And that is where we need to critique as well. The legislation sets out the time for which a person could be detained in order to hand over those samples and hand over that information. Again we need to check that it mirrors exactly requirements in the current existing New Zealand law because at least that law has gone through a thorough process.It is probably right to point out that I am advised that where the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet falls down is around bodily samples and that that is because of existing bodily samples legislation having failed that New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet when it initially went through. But again that is something we will be looking at during our second reading.The third point that we will be focusing on during the Committee stage is the dual regime that is set out in subpart 2 of the bill because this is where the bill applies to both sets of categories of individuals—returning offenders and returning prisoners. Our concern is that between those two groups there is the potential for some gaps to emerge and that those gaps actually could emerge at the higher end of offending rather than the lower end. And I want to just delve into that a little bit now. For instance in the bill under clause 16 it defines who is a returning prisoner: “A returning prisoner is a person who has been determined by the Commissioner to be a returning prisoner in accordance with the criteria set out in section 17.” Clause 17 then goes on to define that “The Commissioner must determine that a person is a returning prisoner” if they have “(a) … been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction of an offence for conduct that constitutes an imprisonable offence in New Zealand; and (b) has in respect of that conviction been sentenced to (i) a term of imprisonment of more than 1 year;” or cumulatively more than 1 year and “(c) is returning or has returned to New Zealand within 6 months after his or her release from custody during or at the end of the sentence.” Then it goes on for the sake of clarity to point out that custody does indeed include immigration facilities.So we have here a default regime. Basically if you are in prison for an offence of a certain period of time and you come out you are immediately stuck in a detention centre and then you are shipped to New Zealand automatically you will have a monitoring regime applied to you. What if however you are released into the community for 6 months and then come out? You could have a life sentence and be in that category. Well then we are reliant on the regime that applies to returning offenders. That regime requires the Department of Corrections to make an application within a specified period of time to the courts to have your parole conditions as they were in Australia—to apply to have a similar regime to apply to you here in New Zealand.We are relying on the department to be quite spry under these circumstances and it could well be that those whom we wish them to be spry about have committed a range of offences that we would consider to be high end. We know from the information that we have seen in the regulatory impact statement that for instance we have already had since 2013—15 percent have been offenders with rape or sexual assault offences and 5 percent with murder and manslaughter. And yet how many extended supervision orders has the Department of Corrections applied for when for the last 2 years we have had people in those high categories—how many? Not one. So we will use the Committee stage to delve into whether or not a system that is relying on a department that is struggling will deliver the outcomes that New Zealanders desire.JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki): In this second reading speech I just really want to briefly reaffirm that this Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill gives authorities the power to assess—so they have the power to assess returning offenders—and to supervise those who are returning to New Zealand most of them coming from Australia.What this bill does is it strengthens the oversight of deported offenders as they come back to New Zealand. Why do we do that? We want to protect New Zealanders. We also want to continue this Government’s very strong move towards successful reintegration back into New Zealand’s society if it is the case that these offenders will be staying in New Zealand. It brings them into the same monitoring and parole regime experienced by New Zealand - based offenders who have committed a similar crime. That is why I am a little sceptical about the objections we have heard so far from some Opposition members around the fact that this bill is passing through all stages under urgency. There are no extra parole conditions no extended supervision conditions no extra conditions being promulgated by this bill. What it is doing is capturing if you like—pardon the phrase—those offenders who hitherto have been returning to New Zealand and arelargely except for those who get caught up under the extended supervision orders regime unsupervised and that is of concern to us all.So if I look very briefly at clause 37 of the bill which looks forward to the review by the Justice and Electoral Committee of the day in 2 years’ time I think that rather than having two bills—one with a sunset clause and then working away on another bill—a review after 2 years is eminently sensible. Given the fact that this bill is confined to not changing parole conditions and supervising conditions but rather expanding the net protecting more New Zealanders and hopefully reintegrating more returning offenders I think this mechanism is eminently sensible. I think the Justice and Electoral Committee of the day will give a lot of thought as to how best to evaluate and if necessary make improvements to this legislation. Thank you.KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): I would just like to take over from where the previous speaker Jacqui Dean left off with the review by the Justice and Electoral Committee in 2 years’ time. What the member is in effect saying and what the Minister of Justice was in effect saying is that they are going to trial law for 2 years. That is not the role of Parliament—to test law out and to trial law out. You either make law that works or you do not make it at all. I think it is silly to say: “Let’s just try this law let’s just put it out there and see how it goes. In 2 years’ time we’re going to have a look at it.” It would have been a lot more sensible to have two bills one with a sunset clause and one that continues on.I would also like to talk about clause 17(2). Jacinda Ardern spoke about the “release from custody” which means “release from custody in a prison or if a person is detained in an immigration or other facility following release from prison”. I just want to finish off a point I was trying to make earlier. When there is a review of what has gone on in the immigration facilities in Australia guards will be asked why they participated in the abuses. Their answer will be that they were simply following orders. Where have we heard that type of defence before? That is why it is imperative that even though the Australians are a sovereign nation and they can make the laws that they want it is imperative that we stand up to laws that are wrong and that lead to human rights abuses.I would just like to talk about the criteria for determination that a person is a returning offender or a returning prisoner. They are similar but different. A returning prisoner is a subset of a returning offender: “A ‘returning offender’—(a) is a person who has been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction of an offence for conduct that constitutes an imprisonable offence in New Zealand and being liable for deportation or removal as a result of that conviction has returned to New Zealand; and (b) includes a returning prisoner.” That was clause 7. So clause 17 “Criteria for determination that person is returning prisoner” says “The Commissioner must determine that a person is a returning prisoner if the Commissioner is satisfied that the person—(a) has been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction of an offence for conduct that constitutes an imprisonable offence in New Zealand; and (b) has in respect of that conviction been sentenced to—(i) a term of imprisonment of more than 1 year; or (ii) 2 or more terms of imprisonment that are cumulative the total term of which is more than 1 year;”.The reason I raise those two definitions is because I have an actual case of a detainee. My understanding here is that he is still on Christmas Island. He is a guy that I met there. But who knows he could be on a plane right now and be ready to land in New Zealand in the not too distant future. But here is his story from an email from his mother. The young man’s name is Beaudine Adams. She says he has been in Australia since he was 4 years old so “All he knows is Australia. He has no connection with New Zealand at all. He is a son brother father fiancé and friend to all whose lives he enters. So he got into a toxic relationship. His partner used to beat the living—out of him. It was reported to the local Ipswich police several times. The response was always the same: ‘You’re a big bloke and she’s hitting you?’ There was never any paperwork filled out as they made Beau feel like a wimp. The partner’s father was a police officer there. Beau had asked her to leave many times. One day she was hitting him with a pole and it broke the skin on his right wrist. He grabbed the pole out of her hand struck her on the top of the leg. She left and went to the police station taking out a DVO.”—which I assume is a domestic violence order—“No mark was left on her leg. He decided it would be easier to get away from that relationship so he left and went north to Mackay.She constantly texted and phoned him then within a week of him leaving she boarded a plane and flew up there. She phoned him claiming she was going to drop the DVO and had no way home and no money. She pleaded with him to take him back to Ipswich. He answered her text answered her phone call picked her up from the airport and took her back to Ipswich. They argued all the way back. Back at the house she attacked him. He restrained her by the wrists while she constantly kicked him in the shins. She went straight to the police station and said he had broken the DVO and claimed he assaulted her. So he was charged with occasioning bodily harm and three breaches of the DVO: one was the texting one was the phone call—both of which she instigated—and one was holding her captive.” They assume that was because he was driving her in the car back to Ipswich.“He went to Brisbane Correctional Facility awaiting his hearing. He was there a total of 159 days. They took his issue to the Supreme Court. Judge Donaldson presided. He was shocked at her claiming she was ‘scared for her life’ yet continued to contact him and then boarded a plane to be with him. He was released on bail. He never broke the bail but he did break the parole conditions or the conditions of his release because he smoked cannabis. He was due to be released on 18 May.” They went to collect him only to be told he was going to Perth. He was flown to Perth and then went to Yongah Hill which is a detention centre. On 8 October he was sent to Christmas Island. The reason I raise this case is that reading this story—and I admit that this is one side of the story—I am not sure that he is either a convicted prisoner or a—what was the other?Metiria Turei: Returning offender.KELVIN DAVIS: Or a returning offender. So he has been in trouble with the law. It sounds like he was on remand. It does not sound like he was actually convicted of anything. Like I say I am just taking what I am reading here from the mother’s email. But if that is the case then what applies to him if he happens to be on the plane that is heading here in a couple of days? What category does he fall under? Does he turn up and have no conditions imposed on him? Does he turn up and certainly get no social support nor any sort of support to get himself back on his feet to get a job to feed himself to clothe himself? That is why I have concerns around this bill. It has been rushed.I have to admit I stumbled over a few words because of the wording. It says in clause 17: “Criteria for determination that person is returning prisoner”. Being a former school teacher I do not know whether I would have accepted that grammar from a student. This is why we have concerns that the bill actually does not cover everything that it should do. The least of the problems are grammatical errors; the worst of the problems are that some of these returning people are not actually going to fall into the auspices of this bill.I just also want to touch again on the social side of things. There is nothing in the bill around the social side of things and looking after these detainees when they return to New Zealand. Again it was about 5 or 6 weeks ago that I suggested that the Minister for Māori Development put some budget aside to look after these people when they arrive so they can be fed and housed on a marae for a few weeks so that they can get on their feet. He said no that is not necessary because every Māori—and let us face it many of these people are Māori—has some sort of connection to somewhere in New Zealand even if they do not know it. Earlier in the day when the Minister spoke about the terrible events in France he finished with a waiata: “Mā te tika mā te pono mā te aroha” which means: through the truth through faith and through compassion we can achieve things. I am just asking where the compassion of the Minister for Māori Development is for these people. If he is saying that all Māori have connections back here in New Zealand where is the compassion for these people so that we can actually stand them on their feet and get them back to those very people whom they are meant to be related to?I met Raymond. I forget Raymond’s last name. He was on TV the other night. He said he was born in the South Island. He was deported back to New Zealand and arrived a matter of weeks ago. He had nowhere to go nowhere to stay. An elderly couple from Tai Tokerau from Whangarei actually put him up in their place. That was a great act of compassion. The trouble is that that set a bit of a precedent. Not every person who comes back is actually going to have that sort of support when they get here. Kia ora.CHRIS BISHOP (National): Look I am very pleased to take a call on the second reading of this important bill. I just want to make a couple of remarks briefly—firstly just to respond to some of the criticism that has come from members opposite. I think it was David Shearer in the first reading of this bill who posed the somewhat provocative question or statement that the Government was not standing up for New Zealanders or for Kiwis.I actually think the record will show the opposite. When looked at in the light of day in the cold reality of the situation the record will show the opposite. The Government has stood up for Kiwis. The Prime Minister has stood up for New Zealanders. Minister Woodhouse who is sitting here in front of me and other Ministers have expressed their concern at some of the Australian policies that have come to light in the last 18 months or so. But Australia is a sovereign country that makes its own laws and makes its own rules and at the end of the day there is little that New Zealand can do about that. But what we can do is manage our own affairs and put in place a regime which this legislation does to make sure that we manage those who are returning to New Zealand.The second thing I want to briefly touch on is whether or not this law should have come before Parliament sooner. Members opposite particularly Jacinda Ardern and Kelvin Davis have suggested that this should have happened way back in February or March. Jacinda Ardern said that the Government had known about this situation since April 2014. Actually as the Minister of Justice said in her second reading contribution this was not in the briefing to the incoming Minister that gets provided. This was a law change made by amendments to the Migration Act in Australia in December 2014. The Minister was adverted to this in February 2015.Imagine what would have happened if the Government had turned up in Parliament and one of the first things we had done for the year at the start of this year was to immediately legislate to deal with that situation. Members opposite would have been up in arms. They would have cried that it was an outrage. They would have said the Government was moving too quickly. They would have said that the Government is legislating in haste. It will make mistakes. You can write your script yourself Mr Assistant Speaker. That is exactly what members would have done. Actually that would not have been the right thing to do. The Government has taken a deliberate process over the last few months working with the Australians to set up a register and get that information out of them that will allow this legislation to be effective. And now we come before the House today to legislate to put it into place.There has been a lot of hot air from members opposite. There has been a lot of huffing and puffing as my colleague Alfred Ngaro says.Denis O’Rourke: A lot of very good arguments too.CHRIS BISHOP: There has been a lot of huffing and puffing from Denis O’Rourke but that is typical of that member. But actually when looked at in the cold hard light of day this is a necessary bill. It is necessary to legislate under urgency. The Government can hold its head up high when it comes to this issue. Thank you.METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): I think Mr Bishop is wrong. It has been a very measured debate and rightly so. It is a very serious issue which we are having to deal with very quickly. I have appreciated the analysis from all sides of the House—probably bar that one—so far each of which has shed some light on both the process and the content of this legislation and why it is so important.I just want to reflect on two issues raised by the Minister of Justice Amy Adams. One was about the process. She described how a great deal of policy work goes into an issue like this and that criticising the 12 days of drafting—it sounds funny when you say it like that—does not acknowledge the amount of work that goes into policy development. I agree. When you are working on new policy and in particular complicated policy it takes a lot of time and a lot of work. The actual construction of the final legislation does not take as much time once you have got the policy settings right.The concerns from the Opposition have been that in the process of developing the policy the Government has not looked outside of its own confines to find out what the right options might be. My own colleague David Clendon offered in July to talk with the Minister about those policy settings and was refused. The Government did not want to talk with any of the Opposition members about this. I am not sure whether Labour was able to have a direct conversation about the policy as it was in operation. There is no indication from the Government that its members talked with agencies outside of Government agencies like the Law Commission the Human Rights Commission—agencies that they can trust to keep information confidential. These are major institutions in New Zealand and they are just as capable of keeping information confidential.But the point of policy development is you get new ideas about how to deal with the problem and you find as many different ideas as possible—constructive ideas of how to deal with the problem—and then you try to build the best policy out of it. That is why you talk with other people outside the confines of your own office. That is why you go and find experts from outside the parliamentary process who are less invested in the politics and the pressure of the issue and much more interested in the effect of the legislation on the community as a whole.That is why we have a select committee process. We have a select committee process because we want New Zealanders to tell us how this legislation will affect them. What are the areas of their lives that we do not know anything about that will be affected? How could we improve it if the effect is bad? What might we want to support more if the effect is good? That is the point of the democratic process of discussion and consultation.A wiser process would have been something like Ruth Dyson used to do when she was a Minister. She would call in the spokespeople on the particular issue she was dealing with as Minister. We would all go from across the political spectrum to her office to hear where the policy development was going what she was thinking about doing and what the pros and cons were. We could talk to her about that collectively so we could hear each other’s ideas and better policy was developed as a result. But early on in the process and on something as critical as this legislation that would have been a wiser course. We have had the entire year to enable proper consultation across the Parliament and with the experts outside of Parliament and none of that happened. That is why we have a bill where already there have been some issues raised.I would touch on Kelvin Davis’ example his story of a young man who is currently being detained where it is completely unclear what part of this legislation he would be covered by. Would he be a returning prisoner because he has been detained and there are some complications around his detention? Would he be a returning offender which has less oversight? How does that young man know where he fits in the legislation? Legislation that deals with the criminal law that deals with the coercive powers of the State to detain and question you should be as clear as possible for every single New Zealander particularly those who are going to be subject to that law. This is the kind of example that would be raised in the select committee. Experts would be able to have a look at how the law applies to that situation and perhaps another few to see where the gaps are in the legislation that need to be filled and provide that advice to the Parliament so we can build better law.That is why the Greens have said so strongly that we need to have at least a short period of a select committee inquiry to investigate that. We do not want to be supporting bad law that does not work bad law that is confusing bad law that captures people who should be not captured and infringes their human rights and bad law that fails to capture the people who pose a significant risk to the public safety of New Zealanders but manage to fall outside the cracks. We do not want to pass law like that. We want to pass good law. We cannot do that in a circumstance where it has been drafted hastily the policy has been developed without any consultation and there is no chance of an external review from the experts who deal with this sort of stuff every day on the ground.I would just end on Amy Adams’ own words where she said that the drafting of this policy of the law could have gone one step too far or could have been one step too low. The problem of course is that we do not know that. We do not know whether the balance has been struck because we have not got any advice or any information from anywhere but within the Minister’s own office. That is not adequate when you are in the lawmaking process. It is not what the democratic lawmaking process should be about. Thank you.DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): We in New Zealand First accept that we have a rather novel situation here. We also accept that it is not of the Government’s making. I have already criticised the Australian Government for that and am not going to go back there. I have also criticised John Key for some of his behaviour over it. Again I am not going back there now. But I do want to say that I think we should all see this bill as a starting point and that there is going to be a journey after this to continue to deal with what is happening in terms of the return of offenders from Australia to New Zealand and that the bill will need review. I am glad to see that there is a review provision in it so that we can do that. There are going to be a number of areas where there are provisions that may in the end prove to be inappropriate or that are likely to cause problems or that in fact prove to be unfair.I am certain that we are going to see all of that happen within the next 2 years but New Zealand First does accept that the matter is extremely urgent because of what the Australians have done to us and because there is actually going to be a significant—very significant—number of people returning from Australia to New Zealand and that is going to happen within a matter of days. So we accept that this is a pretty good attempt at some legislation in the first instance but we do not accept that it will be the end and we think that the review will be necessary and changes will have to be made in due course. So we accept and we will support this bill warts and all because it is certainly better than nothing at all. Nothing at all would in fact mean relative chaos so the urgency is obvious and the need for some fairly comprehensive legislation is clear. This is better than nothing. It is not as good as I would have liked to see in terms of the refinement of some of the provisions some of which I am going to refer to in a moment.But the bill is saved by clause 37 which requires the Justice and Electoral Committee to review the whole bill after 2 years and then to report to Parliament. Implicit in that is that the Government will be willing to make changes. It does not say that. There is no actual commitment from this Government—if indeed it is still here in 2 years—to make the changes that may be needed. However I welcome the provision for the review and I am sure it will be taken seriously by all concerned.New Zealand First does have areas of concern which I briefly referred to in my first reading speech. One of those areas is clause 10 and clause 10 relates to detention by police for the purpose of obtaining identifying particulars. Clause 10(1) allows detention of an offender at any time within 6 months of return and I wonder whether that provision is actually reasonable because one would expect that if any action needs to be taken it would need to be taken well within 6 months of an offender’s return. So I raise the simple question—why so long? Surely that period is too long and ought to be reduced. In fact where people have committed only obviously minor offences then I think that perhaps there needs to be some way of sifting those people out so that they are not subject to the full rigour of what we see in clause 10.One of the other provisions in clause 10(2) refers to police detention for the purpose of taking identifying particulars at any time within 6 months and states: “A constable may detain an offender … only for a period that is no longer than is reasonably necessary in the circumstances …”. What on earth does “no longer than is reasonably necessary in the circumstances” really mean? It is actually a very wide power conferred on the police for them to judge how long that may be and I would prefer to see a maximum period prescribed in the Act rather than to rely on such a wide and indefinite term.That is not the only issue because relating to how the particulars are taken we see that clause 11 states that a constable: “(a) must do so in a manner that is reasonable … and (b) may only use reasonable force … to secure those identifying particulars.” So there is a tremendous reliability on reasonableness and reasonableness of the police. I think that the police usually are very reasonable but there are many cases that one could point to in which they have not been. So New Zealand First is a little concerned about the breadth of those provisions and the reliance on the reasonableness of police actions. I accept that those particular provisions will probably be used only in relation to samples for DNA testing and not for other areas but if that is the case why is it not restricted to just that. I do not understand why it is as wide as it has been stated. That is one of the areas that may cause difficulty in the future so it is a concern to us and maybe that is something that we could discuss further in the Committee stage of the bill.The final area—actually the penultimate area in which I wish to express some general concern—relates to clauses 26 and 27 and these relate to special conditions that may be imposed by the court and the kinds of conditions are specified to be the kinds that are set out in the Parole Act. Having just reviewed the Parole Act we can I think all be relatively satisfied that those are generally reasonable conditions but I still suspect that the breadth and definition of this power for the court may actually cause problems. The reason I say that is because the basis is in terms of events that have occurred overseas convictions that have occurred overseas and circumstances that have occurred overseas and I just feel that that may lead to difficulties when it comes to imposing appropriate conditions.I do note however with some satisfaction that there are limitations on that. Clause 26(2) states: “A court must not impose a special condition for a longer period than the period for which the standard release conditions apply to the returning prisoner.” And clause 26(3) states: “A court may not impose a special condition unless it is designed to—(a) reduce the risk of reoffending … or (b) facilitate or promote the rehabilitation and reintegration of the returning prisoner; or (c) provide for the reasonable concerns of victims of the returning prisoner.” Those are well worthwhile provisions.But clause 27(3) is an area of general concern. Again nothing absolutely specific but when you read the words in subclause (3) it states: “to avoid doubt a court may impose interim special conditions on the information that is then available to the court even though that information is incomplete or additional information is still being sought.” So that power for the court to impose quite serious conditions on incomplete or unreliable information is for New Zealand First another area of concern. The application may be made without notice but the special conditions will expire after a period of 30 working days. Nevertheless I just express a general concern over that particular provision.The last part relates to Subpart 3—people returning more than 6 months after release from custody. There is some possible difficulty over that in that a person must have been under some kind of supervision or something like an extended supervision order or a public protection order for the subpart to apply and yet I still feel that there is room for concern that after 6 months the ability to impose those conditions may not be appropriate.ALFRED NGARO (National): I rise to take a brief call on the second reading of the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill in its stages before the House. I just want to make comment to Mr O’Rourke that I agree with his comments. I work with Mr O’Rourke on the Justice and Electoral Committee and I know as he said that we both agree that the bill is important and that it needs to be rushed through under urgency because of the concerns that there are in regard to safety particularly around the supervision and the monitoring.So my brief comments on the second reading of the bill are particularly in relation to Subparts 2 and 3 of Part 2. These define the returning prisoners and establish a supervision regime for them to be administered by the Department of Corrections on a basis comparable with its supervision of prisoners released on conditions as well whether or not they be non-custodial. Some of those conditions are that the Department of Corrections will be able to apply to a court for a period of supervision for offenders who have been in the community for more than 6 months where they were subject to supervision or monitoring at the time of their leaving the other jurisdiction as well.The second point is that under the supervision regime returning prisoners will be supervised in the same way as those who have served a prison sentence in New Zealand as well. The regime will also apply regardless of whether the offender is deported removed or returns voluntarily. As I said in my first reading speech in regard to the regulatory impact statement we know that of those who are returning offenders over 70 percent of them have committed crimes of a serious nature so it is important that the supervision regime is in place.The last point I want to make is that the length of supervision periods will be related to the length of sentences imposed. For example offenders with a sentence of 2 to 5 years will be supervised for 1 year which is similar to what would be in place for prisoners released in New Zealand. Along with my colleague Denis O’Rourke who has just left I agree with the urgency with which this legislation is passing through the House and I commend it in its second reading.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): The next call is a split call. David Clendon—5 minutes.DAVID CLENDON (Green): At this stage in the proceedings we are normally debating a bill as reported back from a select committee. That is the nature of the second reading of a bill. After the first reading a bill is sent off to a select committee. Typically there will be a period of some 6 weeks or so when the public and interested parties can make submissions. The select committee then hears some of those submissions orally. We will sit around a table with all parties represented and we will hear what the general public and people with some expertise have to say about the provisions of a draft bill. From that we cogitate digest and come back to the House I think almost inevitably with something better than was first presented as a draft bill. I think every drafter of a bill be they a Minister or a member will confess that bills are seldom perfect at first blush but they are improved.We have been denied that opportunity with this bill and I think that is significant given the public interest in it and the fact that it does make a number of people in our communities uneasy. We have already had proof just in the last few days that broader consultation has actually generated some improvements to this bill. I think there is some irony in the fact that in the regulatory impact statement which as I said earlier we only got to see at about 3 o’clock this afternoon the point is made in paragraph 98: “The timeframe for developing the proposals”—being the policy proposals on this bill—“did not allow consultation with the public. The Parliamentary process for options requiring legislation will get an opportunity for public consultation.” Unfortunately that has been denied to members of the public because of this urgency process. It is not a defensible process.Yes there is some need to get this legislation through. We concede and we have the need for some haste. We do not accept however that even a truncated select committee process was beyond the means of this Government. We could have reasonably expected to hear from the Law Society the lawyers and the judiciary who will obviously have a role in the implementation of this legislation. They are generally quite good at spotting fish-hooks and operational matters that we as legislators might miss. We almost certainly would have heard from the Human Rights Commission. We know from the report on compliance with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act—which again we have had access to for barely 2 or 3 hours—that there are concerns about that particularly around the bodily samples issue. We could reasonably have expected to hear from advocacy groups like Rethinking Crime and Punishment like JustSpeak like the Howard League for Penal Reform and like Prison Fellowship New Zealand—organisations that are credible with good evidence-based contributions to make with long experience in working with offenders both in prison and after their release.These people could have made a really valuable contribution to developing this legislation. They could have made it better and they are now to be denied that opportunity because this is being done with such unseemly and unnecessary haste going from go to whoa in a matter of 2 hours on a Tuesday when Opposition parties have had only a few days to look at the draft bill and did not get a final look at the bill as we are debating it until about 11 o’clock this morning. We could even have heard from the New Zealand Police and the Department of Corrections. I suspect that Police might have had some points to make about the impact on their budget as a result of the requirements on them to enforce this. We know that Police are already overstretched in budgetary terms. This legislation will add to their concerns and it would have been useful for them to have an opportunity to say that.I mentioned earlier that this bill has been improved given that the Opposition had a few days essentially over the weekend to think on it look at it and give feedback. A number of the improvements include the mandatory review. The Minister has suggested 2 years. We agree with our Labour colleagues that that is far too long. The 2 years will expire slap bang in the middle of—or very shortly after—the next general election which means realistically that it will probably be nearer to 3 years before a review is completed. We should have a review at least within a year if not sooner.The identifying particulars that returning offenders will be obliged to give will reflect the Policing Act. We think that is a good thing. It does narrow the scope. It means that we are not going on a fishing expedition. We will get the necessary information and nothing more than that. We managed to get more information available in determination orders. I will come to the specifics in the Committee stage. For now I express our regret at this very poor process.PEENI HENARE (Labour—Tāmaki Makaurau):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you very much for this opportunity. I rise for the second reading of this particular bill. I want to echo many of the sentiments of concern raised by my colleagues in particular on this side of the House. But before I do that I do want to just point out a comment made by the member Mr Naylor during the first reading around being convicted before being imprisoned. Recently on 5 November I remember Parihaka and Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi who were imprisoned without trial or conviction.Anyway I digress—and now to the points of this particular bill. We do agree that it is necessary for a particular regime or a system to be put in place. Admittedly we acknowledge that this is somewhat of a knee-jerk reaction and if there is one saying I am sick and tired of hearing in this House and even repeating in this House it is: “Well I guess this is better than nothing.” It seems to be a theme that is running across a lot of the policy agenda and the legislation agenda of this Government and here is another case. Members on this side of the House have expressed concern around the democratic process that most bills go through and around just how fast this particular bill has been rushed in.The member opposite Jacqui Dean has mentioned that a robust conversation was held in particular by many of the Government departments and those Government departments we know are the Department of Corrections and the Police. But I do want to just echo and support the point made by the Green members about some of the other organisations in our communities who play a vital role in prisoner rehabilitation as it currently stands in New Zealand. I am sure they have a lot to contribute and a lot to comment on in terms of this particular legislation however they have been denied that particular opportunity.Also just on the comment about the consultation or the discussion that was had by Government agencies I see too that in clause 15(e) in Part 2 it talks about how the Department of Corrections can make applications to the “appropriate court” and in the bill it describes it as the District Court. The Justice and Electoral Committee members of which are in this House will know about some of the capacity issues that have hit the courts in recent times in particular down south and that some of them have been closed. I just question the actual capacity of Government departments and Government agencies to deal with this particular bill.I briefly mentioned earlier rehabilitation and the importance of it. The definition to my mind of rehabilitation is a planned intervention that attempts to change or alter whatever aspects that caused the prisoner’s criminal activities—things such as interpersonal relationships behaviour addictions and addressing those issues. This is in the hope that the likelihood of recidivism is decreased.We are debating in particular two of the streams or capacities if you like of this particular regime and one of them is around a returning prisoner and the other one is talking about other offenders. We have some concerns around that and around the need for more rehabilitation services.I do want to support the notion put forward by my colleague Mr Kelvin Davis around the support from the Māori rehabilitation angle in which I think the marae can play an important part. I want to mention Waatea Marae in Tāmaki-makau-rau which as far as I know is certainly one of those points that can assist with this type of legislation and the return of our citizens back to New Zealand. Kia ora.JONO NAYLOR (National): Firstly can I just acknowledge the history lesson from the member opposite Mr Henare. It was a good reminder I guess that there have been times in New Zealand when things have been less than ideal and hopefully as we continue to improve things right across history we can now make sure that some of those things do not ever happen again and we can have legislation that will be good for New Zealand.This as I said in the first reading is good legislation for New Zealand because paramount behind this legislation is the protection of New Zealanders in order to keep them as safe as we possibly can—in this instance from people who are returning from overseas who have been deported because of their criminal behaviour. There is an expectation as I said in my first reading speech that New Zealanders can expect that we will have similar sorts of provisions in place for people who have been serving time overseas as for those who have been serving time in New Zealand.There has been—and I guess I would expect there to be anyway—a certain level of concern about people’s civil rights in this kind of legislation but I think ultimately we have got to find that balance between people’s civil rights and safety. I think it is important to highlight that this regime is going to apply only to offenders returning to New Zealand within 6 months of being released from custody. So we are not talking about those people who perhaps are just being deported for issues of character and we are not talking about just those people who have had issues with speeding fines or otherwise but we are very much targeting those people who have committed crimes that have had custodial sentences attributed to their crime.So what we now need to do is have something in place to ensure that if they are going to be returned to New Zealand whether it is against their will or otherwise we reintegrate them in the best possible way we can. That is exactly what this bill sets out to do and so I commend it to the House.Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): David Shearer in his contribution in the first reading debate said that as he understood it offenders from Australia who have been convicted and returned to New Zealand following conviction are arriving in New Zealand without particulars being provided to the New Zealand Government at the time as to what the offences were that they were convicted of in Australia and perhaps sometimes when they are arriving. I want to hear from the Government whether that is the case because there are only two explanations for that. Either there is irresponsible behaviour on the part of the Australian Government—firing convicted criminals back to New Zealand without telling the New Zealand authorities enough information so that New Zealand authorities can protect New Zealanders in case they need to be protected—or there has been absolute incompetence by the New Zealand Government in not getting that information which could have been made available if it had asked early enough. Those are the only two explanations I can think of and I want to hear if—Hon Michael Woodhouse: There are many others.Hon DAVID PARKER: Well the Minister of Police interjects that there may be many others. Take a call and tell us what is happening—Hon Michael Woodhouse: Well wait for the Committee stage.Hon DAVID PARKER: “Well wait for the Committee stage.” he says. Well it would be nice if one of your members could actually take a call and address these important issues now.I want to turn to another issue. You know this bill was dropped on us. The first time we saw the wording of this bill in detail—the outline of it had been provided by Amy Adams to Jacinda Ardern. But in terms of actually seeing the legislation in written form—which has changed even in the last day as I said in an earlier contribution—was after question time today at about 3.30. We then had the first reading and we were all preparing for that. We are now into the second reading—and it is not even yet 6 o’clock—and I have had a chance to read through it a little bit further.I am concerned that we are ousting the jurisdiction of the court to overturn an improper determination by the commissioner of whether someone meets the criteria for being a returning prisoner that would trigger the provisions under clause 24 which says that a returning prisoner is then subject to standard release conditions. Clause 17 sets out the criteria to be applied to where the commissioner must determine that the person is a returning prisoner and then it sets out what should be in a determination notice. Then it says that someone can apply to the Commissioner of Police to review that determination—that is set out in clause 22 of the bill—and then it says in clause 28 of the bill that a court may vary or discharge those release conditions except that in clause 28(2) it says: “A court must not discharge a standard release condition with effect from a date that is less than 6 months after the date … of the determination notice.”I want to hear from the Government as to whether it thinks it is ousting the jurisdiction of the New Zealand courts to say that the commissioner was acting illegally and applying the wrong criteria during that 6-month period because I tell you what if I had come back from overseas and I had had a traffic conviction or something and been convicted of an imprisonable offence overseas—and it is not just Australia that this legislation applies to—and I got back here and was slammed with one of these notices that said that I was all of a sudden subject to these notices and I thought it was wrong I would actually want to go to the court and challenge it. I would not be happy with only having the right to go to the Commissioner of the Police and say: “Please trust me I’m a good criminal. Let me off.” You know I think that if the effect of this legislation is that we are ousting the jurisdiction of the court to consider these things in that period then that is poor legislation and it goes too far.I am not sure that that is the effect of clause 28(2) of the bill but it does say that a court must not discharge a standard release condition with effect from a date that is less than 6 months after the date of service of the determination notice being given so it is arguable I suppose that during that 6-month period the court does not have jurisdiction. It may be that you can take a judicial review route but I am not sure—it is not clear from this bill.This reinforces the point that the Labour Party made which is that we should have a two-track process here. We should be passing this bill under urgency because we have got no choice but to do it in order to protect people now and it should have a drop-dead date of a year—a termination date. On the same date we should be passing an identical bill through only the first stage and that bill should commence on the termination date of the bill that is a short-term fix. It should not have a drop-dead date but it should go to the select committee and then we can sort out through submissions from the Law Society from the Sensible Sentencing Trust—although I do not often listen to it; it does not often have much good sense to pay but it does have a right to make submissions—from Rape Crisis from the civil liberties groups and from all in the civil society who have got an interest in these things. That is how a proper Government would deal with this conundrum but this Government has refused to do it.Finally I also hear that some of these people are getting back to New Zealand with no money and no ties and are ending up sitting on the Work and Income doorstep the next morning because they have been delivered into the hands of New Zealand without any support being provided to them. I would hope that as the Government sort of realises that this problem needs to be addressed it also looks at what it needs to do to minimise the prospect of those people reoffending and to maximise the chance that they can be meaningfully reintegrated into our community in a way that means that they do not end up reoffending against other New Zealanders.I again return to this point as to whether we have got the balance right between protecting New Zealanders from returning criminals—we are not clear that we have got that right in this legislation and we do not have time to properly consider that under urgency; that should be being considered on a parallel track in the bill that should go to the select committee—and similarly whether we are going too far in regard to some people who ought not to be caught up in this and truncating their ability to go to court to test whether they are being properly caught up in it. That too could have been sorted out in the parallel-track process of the second bill which could have gone to the select committee today—today. I think it just shows a complete lack of proper process on the part of the Government that not only would it leave it so late to bring this legislation to Parliament but having forced it upon Parliament it will not actually agree to us letting that occur.The idea that the Government would itself review things in 2 years—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.Hon DAVID PARKER: Before the dinner break I was talking about why it was important given that urgency has been accorded to this bill given that we have already found some defects in the bill and given that we do not know whether it goes far enough to protect the interests of potential victims being subject to crime by these returning criminals—and conversely we do not know whether it goes too far and catches people in the net who ought not to be caught and we cannot know in this truncated process because the Government has taken so long to get this bill to the House that urgency is necessary but none the less the normal protections that follow normal processes have not been applied—that we should have a two-stage process with two versions of the bill being read a first time now. The offer was made to the Government that one of them would have a drop-dead date or an end date of a year or 2 years—we were not too fixed on the specific date—and that that bill would be passed through all stages today. At the same time we would have a bill that was identical in all respects except that it would take effect only from the drop-dead date of the first bill and would pass only one stage and then go to a select committee.The Minister’s answer was that the Government was planning a review in a few years anyway. Well it is completely different and of course it is a review by the Government and the Government departments. If it gets this legislation wrong in ways that could have been fixed at a select committee it is not going to say in 2 years’ time or 3 years’ time: “Oh we got this all wrong guys.” It will be minimising the problems. It will be saying: “Oh well it was all right. There was this little detail that perhaps ought to have been fixed.”That is the difference between the Government being able to do things by itself and Parliament having oversight. If it was good enough for the Government just to do things quickly by itself without parliamentary oversight and public submissions from groups like the Law Society the Council for Civil Liberties Rape Crisis and other victim groups—if that was the way in which we ought to properly do things we actually would not have the normal three stages of legislation and the select committee process. I am dismayed that the Government has not taken up that very sensible offer that we made.TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West): This is a very important measure which needs to be enacted as quickly as possible. I welcome the broad support it is attracting throughout the House.Bill read a second time.In CommitteePart 1 Preliminary provisionsJACINDA ARDERN (Labour): This bill obviously sits in two rather concise parts. Part 1 is really the opportunity for the Committee to talk about the relevant legislation which this bill heavily references. I think it is really important that we make sure that those references are accurate. As a member from the Greens has already pointed out where the bill was seeking to mirror the legislation that sets out what identifying particulars the police can seek it actually went broader and further than existing legislation in New Zealand. I think it is important that we pay attention under the preliminary provisions to ensure that this bill does not overreach. Because as the Minister said in her first reading speech she has tried to draft a piece of legislation that substantively mimics existing legislation in New Zealand. So that is why in my contribution to the Committee I will be looking at the comparisons between this bill and existing legislation.I want to start with the purpose clause because obviously in the purpose clause you would hope that the Government would capture the primary aim of this legislation. The purpose clause states that “The purpose of this Act is to obtain information from returning offenders …”. Note there that it is from returning offenders. There is an absence of talking about obviously the agreement that we have signed with Australia because we know now from the Minister of Justice that we are receiving incomplete information for some offenders. So we are in this Act setting out how we will obtain information from returning offenders and secondly “establish release conditions for offenders returning to New Zealand following a prison sentence of more than 1 year in an overseas jurisdiction.”There are two really important points in that purpose clause. Firstly there is the question around the other jurisdictions. We are talking about just overseas jurisdictions in this purpose clause. A lot of the discussion in this House has been restricted to Australia. I would find it really helpful if the Minister in the chair could share with us because none of the regulatory impact statements discuss any additional analysis carried out beyond Australia what kind of information-sharing agreements we have with other overseas jurisdictions that will allow this bill to apply to them? How workable is it for those overseas jurisdictions? With New Zealand and Australia we know we have comparable legislation. Is it possible to make sure that we interpret overseas offences in the same way for a jurisdiction that goes beyond Australia? That is the first point.The second point from the purpose clause is that nowhere in that purpose clause does it talk about the safety of the community reintegration or rehabilitation. The words again are simply to “establish release conditions”. The reason I raise this is that within the Parole Act which is heavily cross-referenced in this legislation yes there is a relatively short purpose clause but that is because within the Parole Act 2002 it was pretty groundbreaking in the fact that it established a set of what were called guiding principles. So section 7 of the first part of the Parole Act 2002 talks about the guiding principles of the Parole Act an excellent piece of legislation that the Hon Phil Goff worked tirelessly on right up until 2002 when it was introduced. Some of those guiding principles are around the way that the Parole Board itself makes a decision about the release of a prisoner. Obviously that goes beyond the jurisdiction of this purpose clause because the decision has already been made for release. But it also goes to the guiding principles of release conditions.For instance we see in the relevant guiding principles of the Parole Act which is heavily cross-referenced in this bill that in section 7(2)(a): “Other principles that must guide the Board’s decisions are—(a) that offenders must not be detained any longer than is consistent with the safety of the community and that they must not be subject to release conditions that are more onerous or last longer than is consistent with the safety of the community;”. Those would have been useful guiding principles to establish in the purpose clause of this legislation because as the Minister has set out we are trying to mirror that legislation in this legislation and those guiding principles sitting alongside that purpose clause would have given I think some groups both the comfort and the satisfaction that we are not trying to apply here double jeopardy an extra layer of conditions on someone who has already served their time but rather a proportionate set of conditions. So that was a lost opportunity I think in that purpose clause not to have say some principle clause alongside it.Coming back then to the idea though of reintegration and reducing reoffending. If we look at the regulatory impact statement when it talked about the purpose of this bill it said that “The overarching goals are to protect the public from reoffending and provide greater support for the reintegration of returning offenders.” That in the executive summary of the regulatory impact statement is meant to be the main goal of this bill and yet none of that language is contained in the purpose clause. Because if for instance you were looking to the overarching goal of protecting the public from reoffending and providing greater support you would surely use the evidence that the Ministry of Justice has around what the most successful way to prevent reoffending is.I had a little look on the Ministry of Justice website to find what it was setting out as best practice when it comes to reducing reoffending. It has a little document here called “Effective interventions to reduce re-offending”. Again if that was the primary purpose of this bill I would have expected some of this to be contained in the purpose clause or even in the bill. But when we look at this set of guidelines—yes it does pertain to youth offending because obviously that has been a focus of the Ministry of Justice. It is an area where we assume that we have a better opportunity to reduce reoffending but the principles are the same. It states: “Good interventions that reduce re-offending are based on key principles to ensure they are effective when implemented and include key components …”. These are the key components—this is what I would have expected either in the purpose clause or at least in Part 1 of the bill: “To ensure interventions are effective they: start with a good assessment of a person in the context of their friends family whānau and community to identify needs and re-offending risks.” Nowhere do we see in the purpose clause or in this bill set out that there would be any analysis of that kind of those offenders.Secondly “work with the young person holistically to provide timely and appropriate support …”. We know there is no support set out in this bill for those being reintegrated because there was not even a Budget bid made for it—it is simply around monitoring. Also “focus on getting a young person back into education and training …”—and in this case it would be work—and “focus on transition back into the community”. So if the overarching goal according to the regulatory impact statement was protecting the public from reoffending I would have expected to see some of the Ministry of Justice’s guiding principles around reducing reoffending somewhere up front in this bill. They are completely absent not just from the purpose clause but from the bill itself.Instead what does it canvass as the options? In the regulatory impact statement option 1 is enhanced support services; option 2 is registration and monitoring of returned offenders—and we know that the definition of those is set out in Part 1; option 3 is a mandatory system imposing release conditions on specified groups of offenders; option 4 is a discretionary system where the District Court imposes release conditions on individual offenders. We have essentially in this bill a hybrid of options 3 and 4. Maybe that is why the purpose clause has not included anything that speaks to the wider issue of community safety by reducing reoffending because it did not opt for that option. It could have combined them but that is not what the bill has provided.I want to come down a little further under the interpretation clause because as I have set out we need to make sure that we analyse each of these clauses to check that they are being used appropriately. I want to ask the Minister in the chair a question though. Under “overseas jurisdiction” it includes the self-governing States of the Cook Islands Niue and Tokelau. Why has that been included? It “excludesthe islands and territories within the Realm …” but not the protectorate. Is there anything to suggest from Niue or the Cook Islands or Tokelau that they plan on bringing in a regime like that? Because otherwise it seems interesting to me that they are specifically included in this regime and in this monitoring regime.KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): I would just like to follow on obviously from Jacinda Ardern who has raised some very good points about the purpose of this bill—that is the purpose being “to obtain information from returning offenders and establish release conditions for offenders …” There is nothing there about rehabilitation and the reduction of reoffending. These people who are going to arrive on our doorstep within the coming days have no support conditions around them to help them get back on their feet having been deported from their support systems—their family and friends—which as Jacinda Ardern says is one of the key elements of reducing reoffending and helping people to rehabilitate.But I just want to touch on the release conditions and release conditions in the interpretation clause mean “a standard release condition or a special condition”. I have pulled out the Department of Corrections information from its website there. It says:“Standard conditions apply to all offenders and can include: reporting regularly to community probation.” That sounds well and good for somebody who has been released from a New Zealand prison out into their community near their family and friends but what happens to these men and women who have turned up in New Zealand who have no connection to New Zealand and who might arrive in Auckland for example but find that the best place for them somewhere where they can try to find work or maybe establish themselves with a family member is somewhere else around the country?I take the example of Raymond—and I forget his last name again sorry—who left New Zealand as a young child and lived all his life in Australia. He is 50-something now but he originally came from somewhere near Dunedin. On his return to New Zealand he has been put up by a compassionate couple up in Whangarei. For now Whangarei is where he is living and he may have to report to a community probation officer in Whangarei but the reality is that he does not have a job in Whangarei and he is looking for work elsewhere. So he is going to be moving around the country to various places while he is looking for work and it is going to be difficult for him to find where those community probation offices are in the various towns that he may have to move to in order to earn a living.So there are restrictions on living and working arrangements. Well the biggest restriction for them is the fact that they do not have anywhere to live. They arrive in New Zealand I am told that they will get a couple of hundred dollars in their back pocket and then 5 nights in a motel or hotel somewhere and then they are on their own. How on earth are their living arrangements going to be restricted when they have nowhere to live? Will they be banned from living in shop doorways on Lambton Quay or under bridges in Auckland?There are restrictions on associating with certain people. Look these guys are going to turn up in New Zealand with no support networks around them no family no friends and nobody to turn to. I have already said in the second reading that my concern is that they are going to be just fodder for gang members who are going to see these guys who they know have possibly been in prison and in detention centres. They will be ripe pickings for the Killer Beez the Mongrel Mob and the Headhunters without the support networks around them which are really necessary. Remember this bill addresses just the monitoring of release conditions; it does not address anything around supporting them in their social environment.Another standard condition is the limitations on the offender’s ability to move to a new residential address. Well it goes without saying that they are going to have difficulty moving to a new residential address. In fact they are going to have difficulty moving to any address let alone to a new residential address. We understand that these conditions are there so that if they are a sex offender they do not actually end up living next to a school or a park or a playground or an early childhood centre or somewhere where there are vulnerable people. We understand that. But it is one thing to have these standard release conditions for prisoners released from New Zealand prisons; it is another thing to have them for people who are coming back from Australia from detention centres or having been released from prison in Australia.I would also just like to touch on the interpretation clause—and again I spoke about this in the second reading—and the definition of a “returning offender” and a “returning prisoner”. “A ‘returning offender’—(a) is a person who has been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction of an offence for conduct that constitutes an imprisonable offence in New Zealand and being liable for deportation or removal as a result of that conviction has returned to New Zealand; and (b) includes a returning prisoner.” The other one is the criterion for a person returning as a prisoner I think it is meant to say—the wording in the heading in clause 17 is a bit weird. “The Commissioner must determine that a person is a returning prisoner if the Commissioner is satisfied that the person—(a) has been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction of an offence for conduct that constitutes an imprisonable offence in New Zealand; and (b) has in respect of that conviction been sentenced to—(i) a term of imprisonment of more than 1 year; or (ii) 2 or more terms of imprisonment that are cumulative”.The reason I raise this is if you look at Kō Rūtene a guy who has not been charged let alone imprisoned let alone detained—do conditions like this apply to a man like Kō Rūtene who is detained in a detention centre or a prison in Australia without charges and may in time be sent back to New Zealand? Does this—Hon Amy Adams: No.KELVIN DAVIS: The Minister is shaking her head. So Kō Rūtene will come back to New Zealand if he is deported and he will just fit back into society? That is good to hear—that is good to hear. The question is why on earth he is locked up in Australia in the first place and our Government is doing nothing to address that. Maybe it has information that we do not know but it just seems really strange on face value that this is a guy who was there to protect the Prime Minister in Afghanistan and would have laid down his life if he had to and yet the Prime Minister will not get off his feet in order to assist that gentleman.As we go through this bill no doubt there is going to be a number of issues that we raise. Again the whole speed of this process has meant that there are I believe drafting errors. I will just return to the heading of clause 7 which says “Who is returning offender”. That does not quite make sense to me. The heading for clause 17 “Criteria for determination that person is returning prisoner”—again the old schoolteacher in me is slightly offended by the grammar. Maybe I am just missing something in my naivety but as we go through I am sure that more errors will emerge. It is just an example of why it is necessary to take our time in drafting legislation and not rushing it through as this has been in 12 days I believe—because we have known that this situation has been on the cards for the last 12 months. Kia ora.CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): Normally in this part of a Committee stage debate we would have the opportunity to reflect on comments that submitters to the select committee had made and so on. Many of the things that we would reflect on at this point in the proceedings would be whether the bill is going to meet the stated purpose; whether there were other options that were not considered that should have been; whether in fact there are parts of the bill that do not address some of the issues that it purports to address; and whether there are in fact gaps in the legislation. Of course our ability to do that comprehensively and thoroughly is somewhat constrained in this instance because the bill has not been to a select committee. It has had its first and second readings already today and it will probably be passed into law if not tonight then certainly at some point tomorrow. Therefore we have to I guess guess at what people might have said when they were submitting and try to identify the gaps in the legislation within a very short and constrained period of time.The first thing that leaps out at me in reading through the legislation is one of the big gaps for me and that is if the purpose of this bill is to identify people who will be at risk of reoffending when they are deported to New Zealand the first question that I have is not about whether we should be fingerprinting them and all of those things which the bill adequately deals with; it is about what this bill does about reintegration and support within the community for people who have offended whilst in Australia for people whose base is primarily in Australia—or another country because of course this bill is not specific only to Australia. There is nothing in the bill that deals to that.Of course reintegration is one of the most important factors in preventing reoffending. Everybody who works within the corrections system will say that for a prisoner who has recently been released—and bear in mind the types of offenders whom we are talking about in this legislation have been released only within the last 6 months or so—the amount of support they get within the community during those critical first few months is actually a big factor in whether or not they are likely to go on and reoffend. There is very little in the bill that deals with that issue.The second part of the bill that leapt out at me was the fact that this requires the Department of Corrections to trigger things in the first place. There is nothing automatic about this. This requires the Department of Corrections to be on top of things and I have to say I have some real concerns given the recent performance of the Department of Corrections as to whether or not it is actually up to the job of doing that. We have seen huge issues and huge concerns raised about the performance of the Department of Corrections and yet we are now placing this enormous emphasis on it being the agency that would have to instigate any of these things to take place. That concerns me greatly.So we come back to the basic question which is: why are we here what are we trying to achieve and will this bill actually deliver on it? Our priority is and I am sure actually this is a shared priority across all of Parliament keeping New Zealanders safe—keeping New Zealanders safe and making sure that we are adequately monitoring and supporting people who have previously been sentenced to a term of imprisonment who are released into the community. We should not approach that differently if they have been released from a term of imprisonment in a different country from the way we would approach it if they had been released in New Zealand. That is a principle that I think we all support. The question is whether in fact this bill adequately addresses that.There are also questions that I have around the fairness of the way this legislation is being approached and the fairness of the way some of the people who find themselves subject to this might be treated. I have got questions about why the 6-month provision applies in the way that it does. As I said a moment ago this applies to people who have been released from prison within the last 6 months. What if it was 7 months? What if it was a serious offence that they were released from only 7 months ago? How does the 6-month time frame get arrived at? That is something that I would very much like to hear further feedback on.The purpose clause clause 3 which I want to turn my attention to makes it clear that these provisions apply only to someone who is “returning to New Zealand following a prison sentence of more than 1 year in an overseas jurisdiction.” I think that this is something that people at home would maybe get a little confused by given some of the recent rhetoric around that. So yes this bill would cover rapists and murderers absolutely but it is also going to cover a number of offenders who are much much lower down the scale of offending. Some you could even say would be deemed to be petty crimes although the phrase “petty crime” is something that I am hesitant to use because all crime is a crime at the end of the day.But these are people shoplifting for example—in some areas that would have a prison sentence of more than 1 year so someone could be deported back to New Zealand for shoplifting and they would fall within this category. There are probably some vehicular offences that may end up in this category as well and I think we should consider all of the range of offences that might be covered by this legislation and not simply say that the only people who are going to be covered by this are rapists murderers child sex offenders and so on. That is not the case. It is going to cover quite a spectrum of people and the response to the different levels of offending needs to be different. Again there is very scarce detail from the Government in the supporting material supplied around this bill for how that response will be different depending on the nature of the offending that has taken place.We are only on Part 1 now and I want to get into the substance of some of my wider concerns when we get to Part 2 which contains I think the operative clauses of this. But I do want to put on record just my general concern about the gaps in the legislation because simply collecting the information and bringing someone under the purview of the Department of Corrections actually really is just a fraction of the situation. I am far more interested in what the Government is going to do to support reintegration.If we are looking at people who have been living overseas for a long period of time they may have no roots in New Zealand whatsoever—no connection with the communities that they find themselves in. They will be isolated and in fact fingerprinting them even putting them under supervision is not going to change that unless they are supported. They are still going to be just as likely to reoffend even if they have had all their fingerprints taken and are being supervised. They are still just as likely to reoffend if they do not have the adequate support in place. I do not have any satisfaction or any evidence to suggest that the Government is truly prepared for that and truly has a plan in place for how to deal with that. Although the Labour Party is certainly supporting this legislation through—because we support the intent of the legislation which is to keep New Zealanders safe—let us not overlook the fact that this legislation has not had the scrutiny that it deserves and that it should in fact be more thoroughly examined.The final point that I want to make in this my first contribution to this debate and I hope to make many many more is I hope—Jacinda Ardern: Many?CHRIS HIPKINS: Oh many many more. I hope that this legislation will be re-examined in relatively short order. Whilst I can understand why the Government wants to progress this legislation with some urgency now because it has not dealt with the issue adequately up until now—it has known about this for a year and it has taken it that long to bring it to the House and therefore we have no choice but to progress it under urgency now—I hope that will not preclude it actually having a more thorough examination farther down the track. I hope that the House will be back reconsidering these matters with proper public scrutiny including a full select committee hearing so that we can actually make sure that we are doing the right thing and we are not just putting in place a knee-jerk reaction that will not do what it purports to do.Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): The heart of this particular debate on Part 1 is the purpose clause. The purpose clause sets out in a reasonably anodyne way that this legislation is about obtaining information from returning offenders and establishing release conditions for offenders who have come back to New Zealand having spent at least a year in a jail overseas. Well “overseas” is a euphemism. We are not talking about overseas; we are talking about Australia. We know that the reason for this bill is that we are going to have a flood of people sent back to New Zealand because of the changes to the Australian Migration Act 1958 which was changed last year. I want to ask the Minister in the chair Amy Adams why she did not act earlier if the purpose of this bill is actually to protect the safety of New Zealanders. There is not a person in this Chamber who does not want to protect the safety of New Zealanders. Why have we left it so late to pass this legislation through the House? We have got 861—861—deportees about to flood back into New Zealand.But it is worse than that because already in the period I think between May and September of this year 157 offenders have been deported back into New Zealand. I want to ask the Minister what the offending of those 157 people was. What level of risk do they pose to New Zealand society and why did she do nothing knowing that these people were coming back—having known that for a year? There are 157 people coming into New Zealand and we do not know what they did or what level of risk they pose to New Zealand or what things are in place to protect New Zealanders. I sat in this Chamber the other day to be accused by the Prime Minister of protecting rapists and murderers who come from Christmas Island. There were none there but amongst this group of 157 there very likely will be some rapists and murderers. When the Prime Minister can direct an accusation to the rest of the House about how we were backing the rapists and murderers and not worried about public safety—I want this Minister to come clean and say why this negligent Government has allowed 157 people who have offended overseas to come back into New Zealand some of them possibly rapists and murderers and why there was nothing put in place in a timely way to protect New Zealanders against that.The purpose of this bill is to protect the safety of New Zealanders. We are accused of backing rapists and murderers yet the Government sat on its chuff and did nothing while 157 offenders came back into this country without any release conditions at all without the knowledge or the information on those people that New Zealanders have a right to know. The Minister has known about this and the pending flood of deportees that the Australians very kindly are dumping in New Zealand for over a year—for over a year. Why do we get legislation not at the eleventh hour but at the 13th hour? There are already 157 of those offenders here and there are a whole lot more coming. I think it is a fair question Minister. Why could we not have put this legislation before the House a year ago? Is there any reason why we could not put this legislation—designed with the purpose of protecting the safety of New Zealanders—before the House in a timely way? We have had no explanation of that.I want to say that if we were looking at the purpose of the bill which is to protect the safety of New Zealanders the first thing we would have done was have the guts to stand up to Australia and say “Some of those people should come back to New Zealand and we will deal with them and we will have proper provisions in place but some of them are your responsibility. If a kid goes to Australia aged 6 months old has lived there for 30 years has children who are Australians and parents who are Australians and they are shaped by Australia why is it our problem?”. Did our Government have the guts to stand up to the Australian Government and say that it does not protect the safety of New Zealanders to send people to this country who do not know this country who have no support mechanisms who have no friends or family here? They will be alienated. They will be angry that they are separated from their family. And the Australians—our mates the Australians—have put the problem on us. So if we want to achieve the purpose—METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Continuing on with the theme in relation to the purpose of this bill and also the discussion in relation to rehabilitation I just want to notefor the information of those who are listening to and watching this debate that there were a number of options that the Government had. There were four in the main that had at various levels greater or lesser rehabilitative support. I just want to identify the decision making that the Government went through and some criticisms that I have of it.In the regulatory impact statement that comes with the bill there is a clear description of the objectives of this legislation which largely go to the purpose of protecting the public from reoffending and providing greater support for the reintegration of returning offenders. It talks in this official document about there being a strong link between those two objectives. Improving public safety is very strongly linked to providing rehabilitation for returning offenders so that they have optionsother than offending to live a good life.It talks about how vital it is to recognise that returning offenders are potentially vulnerable. They are a vulnerable cohort whether as a result of age their socio-economic background or their lack of social connections on returning to New Zealand. These all increase the risk of their reoffending if they are not supported. Core to reducing reoffending and therefore risk to public safety is making sure there is a great deal of support wrapped around those people who come to New Zealand from Australia under the deportation regime.There are four options that were considered by our Government. One was an enhanced support service—more like a refugee resettlement service if you like—a wraparound service around the returnees would look at all of their different needs over a period of time of 6 weeks to 2 months. It would be looking at where they were going to live how they were going to get work what kind of training they would need—all of those things to help them reintegrate. Option 2 was a register a bit like the child sex offender register that we have operating here. Options 3 and 4 were mandatory supervision and discretionary supervision. This bill is a mix of options 3 and 4.So the bill is a mix of options 3 and 4. But in this table which people can get access to if they want to have a look at the papers it is very clear that the enhanced support service has the best support for reintegration and therefore to help reduce the risk to public safety. It is the best option in terms of maintaining the human rights of returning offenders making sure that their dignity is upheld and therefore our dignity is upheld. The best option in terms of cost-effectiveness—certainly the cheapest of the options—was to have this wraparound support service. This official document gives it a low score for public safety which actually goes against what the whole paper is arguing—that the best support and wraparound services for these people improve public safety. I am not quite sure how they got there.Then it goes on to talk about the effectiveness of enhanced support services—which are very cost effective—and that there are existing programmes both the refugee resettlement programme and the corrections-funded Out of Gate programme that already exist as models to use. So they did not have to reinvent a new system; there is actually one already in place that could be remodelled to fit the needs of these particular offenders. The cost is about $2000 a person—compared with the existing system—as set out in the bill. We are talking around $4 million a year I think if I have got that right from the papers. Enhanced support services cost less than $2 million—about $1.5 million a year—so they are very cost effective. This is the kind of thing that we need to have alongside either a beefed-up or existing regime. In fact that is what the regulatory impact statement also says. It says that all the options except for this support system require legislation and that the enhanced support services could be easily run alongside any other regime we have.And this is one of the arguments that have been made. If the Minister had engaged with members of the Opposition and with experts outside of the ministries—those who are involved in the reintegration of prisoners or who have been involved in supporting ex-prisoners and reintegrating them back into the community—I think they would have got better advice about how to mould a better policy that properly addresses both the risk to public safety and the connection with the need to reintegrate.But they did not ask and so there is a gap in the policy framework that does not properly meld the best practice that we know. We know that the more support for reintegration and rehabilitation the less likely people are to reoffend. That has to be your first step in developing the policy for these returning offenders. Then from there you start to ramp up if you think that there is a need for more supervision like we might see with those with very serious convictions or very recent convictions. But the starting point is missing and so we are not going to get the levels of public protection that we could and should have because we do not have the enhanced support services that even the public officials know will work to reduce the risk to the public.It goes to the purpose of the bill which is too narrow and too constrained to really deal with the overall objective of the legislation. It goes to the failure of the Minister’s office to really work with others who are specialists in this area to get the best policy advice. As a result we have a bill hastily drafted that will probably fail in its effect.GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): I do want to pick up on the points that Metiria Turei was making in her contribution. I too want to refer to the regulatory impact statement which as the previous speakers have outlined gives us what the Government’s objectives are for the legislation. It is on the basis of these objectives that the Labour Party is supporting this legislation because we too agree with the idea of protecting the public from reoffending and providing greater support for the reintegration of returning offenders. I would venture to suggest that everybody in the House shares those objectives.So when we follow those objectives through to the purpose clause things start to go slightly astray in terms of meeting the objectives. It states: “The purpose of this Act is to obtain information from returning offenders and establish release conditions for offenders returning to New Zealand following a prison sentence of more than 1 year in an overseas jurisdiction.” Well it certainly could be argued that that represents some steps towards objective 18.1 in the regulatory impact statement: “protecting the public from reoffending;”. Getting the necessary information is an important part of that.What I want to focus on in this part of my contribution is that I think it fails completely to talk about objective 18.2: “providing greater support for the reintegration of returning offenders.” I do that on the basis of looking at the options that the Government considered when deciding what to do in this area. As best as I can tell having read the regulatory impact statement and the bill but not having had the benefit of a select committee process where this would have been discussed in some detail and where submissions would have been sought from the likes of the Law Society for instance which probably would have provided some very good advice right at this point on whether or not the actual drafted legislation meets the objectives of the Government and whether the purpose clause fulfils its role—so having had a look at that it is fairly clear that what are options 3 and 4 in the regulatory impact statement a “Mandatory supervision regime” and a “Discretionary supervision regime” elements of both of those is what we have ended up with in the legislation in front of us.If we then go to those two parts of the regulatory impact statement and see what the officials thought those two options did for the principle of reintegration which should be core to the purpose of this piece of legislation under the mandatory supervision regime the officials concluded that there would be good support for reintegration. However they highlighted the risk that a mandatory system “will treat all returning offenders as a homogenous group with similar reintegration needs. Offenders will be returning for a broad range of offences … [and] a formal system of supervision for a significant proportion of the offenders does mean that there would be a significantly higher level of support to reintegrate than the status quo.” That will work for those people if they get on to the conveyor belt of support in terms of what is defined in this part of the bill as a standard release condition.Where things get more concerning is when we do move into the area of a discretionary supervision regime. The concern I have here—and this is written quite well by the officials I think—is: “A discretionary order means that many returning offenders would not be subject to it and would therefore not receive the benefits the order may provide in terms of support for reintegration.” That is an area of grave concern for us because what we are looking for when we talk about reintegration are issues like employment prospects accommodation health needs and community support which Kelvin Davis outlined in his contribution. If we do not have a consistent regime in place here a regime that is appropriate for each person who is returning then we run the risk that a number of those core elements of reintegration will not be picked up. This is the danger in this clause looking at the purpose of the bill—that we actually in a rushed hasty process have not got in front of us enough advice in my view as to whether those concerns raised by officials in the regulatory impact statement are met by the bill. We have got the statement that “special conditions” can apply. Maybe—maybe—they will apply but we do not know that for sure. So I lack the confidence standing here today having not seen a select committee process and having not got further advice on this matter as to whether or not those core issues about employment accommodation health and community support are dealt with.What we do know is that the people coming back—Hon AMY ADAMS (Minister of Justice): I have just been listening to the debate over this first part of the bill and I wanted to wait to get a bit of a sense of some of the issues that members wanted to raise before I responded. So I want to go through a few of them.Kelvin Davis in his contribution was asking the question about whether and how the regime would apply to someone who may have been deported from Australia who had no criminal convictions. It is a fair point and I want to make it very clear. I indicated in nodding and shaking my head what was happening but I thought it was better to get it on the record. I want to be really clear about this. This bill is not about replicating the decisions Australia has made as to who should be deported. We do not take that into account. So if Australia deports someone because they are of a bad character it says or because they have some other concerns to Australia that is not a trigger under this bill. The only thing that triggers the provisions in this bill is a conviction for offending that in New Zealand would have been an imprisonable offence and for a minimum length of time.So if someone was convicted in—I happen to know that in Thailand it is an offence to insult the royal family. Well that is fine; it is not an offence here. So clearly if that person were deported back it would not be triggered. Similarly if a particular person in Australia is deported back to New Zealand who has no criminal charges or convictions but for other reasons which the Australians obviously have to work through and to justify they are not caught by this bill. This bill is not about being punitive and adding a layer; it is about trying to pick up exactly—well “exactly” is too strong—or in as similar way as possible the conditions that that offender would have been under had they served the same sentence in New Zealand. That is why the test is always “Have you served the minimum of a year in prison?” because that is the threshold we use for release conditions and “Is it conduct that would have been imprisonable in New Zealand?” because again we are not going to impose someone else’s standards and if it is then we need to mirror what we would do in New Zealand.The question was also asked about the 6 months. I think I mentioned in one of my contributions—the member may not have been in the Chamber earlier this evening or earlier today—that the intent of the 6 months is to say that these conditions are about monitoring an offender while they reintegrate from a period of being incarcerated in an institution. Once they have been back in society for some time the need is not the same. These people have served their sentence. This is about saying as they come out from that very restricted environment we know that is a very high-risk time for reoffending and so we want to support and monitor and oversee these prisoners in the same way that they would have been in New Zealand.The call I had to make—and yes it is a line call; you have got to put it somewhere—is that if they have been out in the Australian community for more than 6 months then that case cannot be made in the same way that we need to help them with that reintegration. Within 6 months we think the case can be made. However the question was asked about what happens if they have been out for 7 months and they still need monitoring. The bill provides that if they come back to New Zealand and are subject to an ongoing monitoring regime—let us say they have got lifetime monitoring because there was serious concern in Australia that they needed to be watched—then it enables the New Zealand authorities to go to the courts here and say “Well actually in this case we think it is made out” and would they look at it. It does not apply automatically but there is that provision if they were subject to an ongoing monitoring regime.The other point I just wanted to pick up on was Grant Robertson’s contribution just immediately before I rose to my feet talking about issues like health and education and housing. And actually it feeds back to Kelvin Davis’ points as well around reintegration and the difficulties that some of these offenders are likely to have reintegrating given that some of them—not all of them—have very few if any ties to New Zealand. That is a very valid concern. That is the concern that we have been raising actively with Australia all throughout this process. We have not got it to change its view on this but this is one of the two key concerns that we are raising time and again with Australia: deporting people back to New Zealand who other than their DNA are really not New Zealanders. They were born here they have citizenship—and with that go a whole lot of protections—but actually for a number of them that is the extent of their connection.We absolutely agree that that creates additional difficulties with reintegration of some of these offenders and I think creates a very valid ground as to whether the moral view of whether they should be sent back has been properly applied. But as everyone in this Committee has acknowledged we can all have views on that we can all express them and I think many of us share them but none the less Australia has made the decision and there is a certain extent of also having to deal with it.So the bill is looking at the justice aspects of that. That is not to say that there are not really important issues around things like health and education and welfare support and employment and financial assistance. I can tell members in the Committee that agencies and Ministers in those areas are actively working to make sure that we have the right framework and advice and support in place. Once these offenders land in New Zealand they are New Zealand citizens and they have access to exactly the same support entitlements and assistance needs as their case warrants. We all know that the Ministry of Social Development and the like work through that on a case by case basis. None the less they have a particular piece of work to try to work through those issues. I do not purport to have provided for all that in this bill. This bill is about picking up the parole oversight part of the puzzle. I am not saying that the rest is not critical; it is. I have not seen anything that suggests legislative change is required though. That piece is also going alongside it.The final comment I just want to make in this contribution on this part—because it is obviously the very reasonably functionary part of the bill; the next part is far more where the substance is and so I want to save our time for that. But the other comment I am just going to make is that it does seem somewhat incongruous that on the one hand this is being called rushed and it is all being rushed and crammed through and on the other hand we have taken far too long. You know you cannot have it both ways—you cannot have it both ways.The one point I would make is that when Mr Goff asked why this legislation was not in the House a year ago Australia had not changed its law a year ago. We found out on 12 February. We started work immediately. We have not stopped work on since 12 February. This is the process it takes to get into this place. I am very proud that that process has worked well. Officials have had one hand tied behind their back trying to get information out of Australia. Frankly people who think that you can just have an idea one night and then get it into legislation in the House for something this complex are revealing I think the fact that they have not had ministerial roles dealing with issues of this complexity.And that does not even take into account—even Jacinda Ardern mentioned it in her second reading contribution—that Labour could never have done this because it did not have the information-sharing agreement in place. Well exactly. We had to have the information. We now have that information and we have acted. So we started as soon as we found out. We have not stopped. It is in the House quickly because it needs to be passed quickly. But to suggest that somehow nothing has happened and it could have happened a year ago is wrong and frankly belittles the debate that we should be having on this pretty important issue.DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): I just want to pick up where we last left off. I do not agree with the Minister in the chair the Hon Amy Adams. This is the Official Information Act response I received from the Ministry of Justice. Yes she got a memo on this on 12 February but this actually went through on 14 December in Australia. It was brought to the ministry’s attention by a media outlet at the end of January. Prime Ministers Abbott and Key talked about it at their ministerial meeting in February and yet it has taken until now 17 November with 2 weeks of Parliament left to go effectively that we are actually rushing this through under urgency.I do not buy the argument that we had to have the information-sharing agreement absolutely nailed down because right now we still do not have good information coming out of Australia. Pretty much everybody knows that Australia because of its complex federal and state system is not providing the information that we need to be able to process in good time the people who are coming back from Australia. But what we do need and what obviously the Labour Party will be supporting is clearly to have the sorts of provisions that we would have for New Zealanders in a similar situation. I think that is a principle that I can certainly accept and that we can all accept. But to say that somehow that had to wait until 2 weeks in the middle of October before we started drafting this legislation is absolute nonsense. We could have had this in place some time ago.We could also have been making a much firmer demand on Australia to provide that information. We had Prime Minister Turnbull come here just over a month ago. I do not know what happened in the meeting between Mr Key and Mr Turnbull but I can tell you that from our side that was the only thing we talked about—the rights of people coming back and being sent back and also the information that we had when we were in Government to make sure that we were able to protect ourselves. It really actually grates that last week in an extraordinary sort of outburst from the Prime Minister he pointed the finger across the Chamber and said to us that somehow we do not care about the safety of New Zealanders or about the possibility that rapists and murderers and whatever are coming back to New Zealand. Of course we do—that is why we are standing up and agreeing with this legislation. But to accuse us of that when this legislation had not even hit the House when we already have 200-odd people who have come back under a regime where there are absolutely no protections is absolutely wrong.I think the issue here is what the objective is of this legislation in the first part of the bill which is to provide for similar management for offenders whether a sentence is served in New Zealand or elsewhere. Obviously that pertains mostly to Australia when they are coming back. It is about protecting the public from reoffending and providing greater support for the reintegration of returning offenders. I am reading from the national interest statement here which makes the obvious point that the two are very closely linked together—that if you are going to be protecting people from reoffending then the process of reintegration is essential to making sure that that actually happens.Let us just remind ourselves what we are looking at here in terms of reoffending. The police in the reports that are put out recommend that 43 percent of the people who are sent back under the current conditions will require some sort of ongoing surveillance. That is a significant number of people. I recognise what the Minister was saying before about the numbers who are coming. Some of the numbers are now going to be including a larger group who will have more minor offences. But certainly since 2013 70 percent of offenders have been convicted of serious offences including 30 percent for assault; 20 percent for armed robbery and burglary; 15 percent for rape or sexual assault including child sexual offences; and 5 percent for manslaughter or murder. In 2013 48 percent of those people coming back under the old regime and reoffended within 2 years. So half of the people coming back under the old regime reoffended within 2 years and here we have a situation where Australia is firstly sending people back. I completely agree with the Minister that the moral case for doing that which is for the benefit of Australia—leaving people without a spouse a father or a mother on that side and secondly bringing somebody over here without any connection to New Zealand—is actually bad for both countries quite apart from the people concerned. You begin to wonder whether Australia has lost its moral compass somewhere along the line.The point is that with those people coming back we have to make sure that they are looked after properly. Although I accept what the Minister says about this legislation being narrow and only looking at the justice part of the equation what we are hearing out there is that there are offenders who have come back who are ending up in the doorways of Work and Income waiting for it to open who do not have jobs. We are hearing of people being sent back looking to commit crimes. Crimes have already been committed by these people who have come back as well already. There is no plan in place to make sure that those people are reintegrated properly so they do not reoffend. Although I accept that this is not a central part of this legislation for God’s sake it has to go alongside it surely. It absolutely has to go to alongside the legislation to make sure that the two things are together. I do not see any evidence of that at the moment with the reports that I am hearing of people ending up on the street and actually not being met at the airport and just being told to get into a taxi.I just want to finish by saying that although we accept the purpose of this bill the objectives of this bill I do not believe that the way it is being put through the way it has been introduced to the House and the speed with which it is being done will do New Zealand any favours whatsoever. Thank you.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.Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): There are two issues I want to raise in this call. First of all the purpose of this legislation is in part for the New Zealand Police to gather information on returning criminals. We have been told in earlier stages in this debate that some of the offenders who have been returned or deported from Australia to New Zealand have come without particulars being known to the New Zealand authorities and that is one of the reasons why we need to be able to stop those people—so we can get that information from them.I would like to know from the Minister of Justice whether that is correct and whether in respect of the intervening period from earlier in the year when increased numbers of people were being deported from Australia to New Zealand there were any instances where people arrived in New Zealand and the New Zealand authorities on their arrival did not know the offences of which they had been convicted particularly in serious cases. If that is the case then that seems to me to be irresponsible on the part of the Australian authorities and we in this House have got a right to know whether that is the case. If that was the case it seems to me that there are only two possible explanations for it: either the Australian authorities were not willing to provide the information or if they were willing the New Zealand authorities did not seek it. So I would like to know whether there were any cases between the start of the year and now where people have been deported following serious offences and where the particulars of their offending were not known. I think that is a reasonable question to ask the Minister and I would ask that she respond to that point.The second point I want to make is a point that has not yet been made in respect of the interpretation clause clause 4. Clause 4 sets out the meaning of “determination notice” and “returning prisoner”. This is necessary because the legislation says that where the Commissioner of Police determines that the nature of the returning prisoner’s prior convictions and penalties passes a threshold then that person is said to be a returning prisoner within the later provisions in Part 2 subpart 2 of the bill and the definition is given effect to through clause 4 of the bill. I in an earlier contribution—and I do not know whether the Minister was in the Chamber at the time—asked the question as to whether the effect of clause 28 on those definitions means that the jurisdiction of the court to consider whether indeed the Commissioner of Police has made a valid determination notice to catch people within the provisions of the Act as being a returning prisoner is ousted. My reason for that question arises from the words that are in clause 28(2). If a determination notice is made by the police it seems that a court cannot discharge or vary the terms of a standard notice that has been imposed under this legislation and that the jurisdiction of the court is being ousted. I would like the Minister to comment on that.In terms of the issue that I started with which is the estimated 157 people who have been deported to New Zealand between May and September this year—which I think was the figure that was used by my colleague Phil Goff—I want to know whether on arrival the New Zealand authorities had instances where they did not have information. That goes to the question as to whether this legislation goes far enough because my understanding is that the legislation is not of retrospective effect and that we will still have a lacuna in the New Zealand information if that information was not collected at the time and was not provided by the Australian authorities.I would hope the advice that we have had in this Committee today on that point to date is wrong because I would find it almost unbelievable that the Australian authorities would deport from Australia to New Zealand people who have lived there all of their lives; who are from their point of view Australians; who have no support networks back here; and on whom the New Zealand Government may have absolutely no records. If these people have been living in Australia for 30 years—effectively all of their adult lives; often since they were very small children—the New Zealand authorities will have no records of their own in respect of these people because they have never been in New Zealand. They might have been born here they could have left New Zealand as a baby and there will be no records here of their offending while they were in Australia. There will be no records of any of their other interaction with governmental authorities because they have had none. Therefore the New Zealand system is blind to their history and the risk that they pose except to the extent that that information later comes to the New Zealand authorities.Who holds that information? Actually the organisations that hold that information in respect of the people who have been living in Australia are the Australian authorities. I would be very surprised if the Australian authorities had been deporting more people with serious offences between May and September without providing to the New Zealand authorities details of the offending the sentences and also other information if it had been requested by the New Zealand Government. If the Minister could answer that question that would be appreciated.Secondly what requests were made for information in respect of that group of people from earlier this year until the passage of this legislation? If in fact people have been arriving without information I would expect the Australians to provide that information voluntarily but if they have not I would also expect the New Zealand Government to be seeking it. I would have thought that if a similar request were made of New Zealand authorities in respect of people whom we were deporting to Australia the New Zealand authorities would cooperate with Australia and I would hope that that sort of cooperation would be reciprocated. Thank you.JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki): I move That the question be now put.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): I want to just take a reasonably short call on Part 1 of the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill in part to respond to a comment that the Minister of Justice made in her contribution from a few minutes ago and also in part to look closely at the writing the drafting of some of the clauses in this part and one clause in particular. But first I want to address a comment made by the Minister and I think it was in response to Phil Goff and others who raised questions around the timing of this legislation.The Minister said that raising the issue of timing was somehow belittling this debate and belittling this issue. I say to the Minister that there is only one person who has belittled this issue and that is the Prime Minister. The only person who has actually engaged in undignified action around this legislation is the Prime Minister so if anybody is belittling this debate it is him.I think the issue of timing is a fair one because the Minister was aware of this in February at the latest. That means that the Minister had February March April May June July August September October and half of November to get this legislation drafted and brought to the House. In fact this legislation would have been better prepared if the Minister had actually moved more quickly and brought it to the House in a timely fashion so that it could have gone to a select committee so that we could have had proper consideration of this legislation. So it is not in any way belittling to say that the Minister has had time to deal with this legislation and is now rushing it through because she knows that there is a plane-load of detainees heading back to New Zealand. It is exactly the type of issue that needs to be raised on a matter that is being considered by the House under urgency where we have not had the benefit of the select committee process to make sure that this legislation is drafted appropriately to make it fit for purpose.I do want to look at just one matter of drafting and it may not be the most significant. I know that some of my colleagues want to look at other matters of drafting. In the interpretation clause we have the meaning of “returning prisoner”. It says that “ ‘returning prisoner’ has the meaning given to it in section 16”. That is actually a perfectly normal thing to find in an interpretation clause. So we go to clause 16 which is entitled “Who is returning prisoner”. It states: “A ‘returning prisoner’ is a person who has been determined by the Commissioner to be a returning prisoner in accordance with the criteria set out in section 17.”The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): This is in Part 2.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: This is to do with the interpretation Mr Chairman—the interpretation clause which is in Part 1. In Part 1 the interpretation clause it says that that is set out in section 16. Clause 16 tells us nothing. You read the interpretation clause and you refer to clause 16 and the interpretation clause actually does not give us a meaning for “returning prisoner”. We have to go to clause 17 for that. Why is the wording in clause 16 not in the interpretation clause? That seems to be the most logical place to put it and then clause 17 or maybe clause 16 in this case could set out the criteria for determination that the commissioner has to use.It appears to me to be one example of weak drafting in this legislation. It is the kind of weak drafting that you get when a bill is rushed and the kind of weak drafting that could be sorted out at a select committee if the Minister back in February when she knew this was an issue had actually moved with the speed that was necessary to bring the legislation to the House in a timely fashion and give Parliament and the public the opportunity to scrutinise it appropriately. As it is we are pushing through legislation that does curtail some people’s rights and we are doing that without public scrutiny. That is a very unfortunate situation to be in and it is a situation that we are in because of the Minister’s lacklustre response to something that the Australians informed her about at the latest in February. There is some evidence that the Minister should have known about it before then.So that is a simple question for the Minister. Why is that particular bit of the legislation drafted in that fashion? Why is the interpretation clause weak in that fashion? I know that other colleagues will be raising drafting matters in respect of other clauses as well.Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): I want to start off by asking the Minister of Justice again to clarify when she first knew that there was a problem and started working on it. She said in answer to a question from Jacinda Ardern in the House this afternoon and again when she took the call that nothing was being considered until February of this year. I have on my computer screen here Stuff news dated 25 January 2015 and the former Minister—this Minister’s predecessor; somebody called Judith Collins—said that this was an issue that the Government had been aware of and was intending to make changes on and it was looking at a monitoring system in order to protect the community. Is it not the truth Minister that the Government has been aware of this for years? In the last year the Government was aware that there was five times the number of deported people coming back to New Zealand. That is new—the quantum is new but the issue is rather older than that.Again I ask the Minister what there is in this bill that to achieve the purpose set out in clause 1 could not have seen this bill introduced years ago if not months ago. One of the problems I have—and it is a genuine problem—is that we know that the purpose of this bill is to try to ensure the safety of the community but how do we know the bill will achieve that purpose? You know Mr Chairman that what would normally happen—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Oh.Hon PHIL GOFF: Everybody in the Committee knows Mr Chairman that what would normally happen is that this bill would go to a select committee and we would hear from people with specialist knowledge in this area. We would hear from the experts. We would hear from the people who have been dealing with offenders with these sorts of criminal records in the past and we could have subjected this bill to particular scrutiny—if only it had been introduced months ago or years ago when the Government knew that this problem was pending. So I want to know why it is that we are rushing this bill through the House without public input without expert input and without proper consideration so that we would know we could achieve the purpose of it. Why has the Minister left this to the thirteenth hour?I want to come back to the regulatory impact statement because this gets to the heart of the purpose that clause 3 talks about. It says: “Returning offenders pose a risk to public safety …”. It goes back to 2013 which again raises questions about how long this Minister has been aware of it. It says that since 2013 70 percent of returning offenders have been convicted of serious offences—30 percent of assaults; 20 percent of armed robbery or burglary; 15 percent of rape or sexual assault; 5 percent of murder and manslaughter. Then the regulatory impact statement goes on to say that over a third—35 percent actually—of these returning offenders had reoffended within 12 months and 48 percent or nearly half had reoffended within 2 years. So here we have the regulatory impact statement setting out that the purpose of this bill is to achieve safety. There is a real risk to safety. Some of these people have offended seriously. Nearly half of them will reoffend again within 2 years and yet the Government sat on its chuff and did nothing.I think the Committee is owed an explanation of why the Government did not act. Why are we debating this after 157 new offenders have come here since May? I want to know from the Minister what the offences are that those 157 have committed. Are they serious offenders? Are they likely to be recidivist offenders? What level of risk do they pose to the community? What has this Minister and this Prime Minister done to protect New Zealand? This Prime Minister got up on his hind legs and said that the Opposition was doing nothing to protect us against rapists and murderers. Actually the Opposition does not have power. The Government has power and for 12 months this Government this Prime Minister and that Minister have done precisely nothing.ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): I move That the question be now put.MARAMA FOX (Co-Leader—Māori Party): I have been sitting here listening to the debate about the purpose of this bill. I find it a bit rich actually that the Opposition is pointing to the past 1 year. We could go back decades—decades actually—when successive Governments have done nothing about this. We have had people being deported out of Australia and back to New Zealand for decades.The major impact on increasing that number happened in 2001 under the Labour Government. I do not want to say “Oh it’s your fault and it’s your fault.” but actually a whole lot of impacts have happened on Australians—they consider themselves Australians but they are Kiwis who live there—since that immigration law change. Yes that has been ramped up since December last year when this new threshold came into force in Australia sending a whole lot of people back across the Tasman. But for the 1 year I have been in Parliament we have been talking about this since the time we walked into this Government. I know that the Māori Party has been raising this in the years it has been here but these issues go back a long long time and I am grateful actually that we are here doing something about it because we do need to protect the citizens of this country.One of the things—and there are many things—that I was very clear with the Minister about is that the Minister under this piece of legislation does not have the extraordinary powers that the immigration Minister in Australia has. He can deport people under the questionable character provisions and seal that record. He does not have to share that record with the Australian court or with the prosecutors or even with the person they are deporting back to New Zealand. So they may actually have some serious concerns that we are not even going to know about because that Government does not even share them with its own people let alone us. I find that abhorrent and I am grateful that we are doing something about it and that the Minister of Justice has not through this draft legislation—because frankly I would not agree to it otherwise—given herself extraordinary powers to further impact on the lives of these men and women who are coming back to us. We are picking up the pieces of their lives and we know that the purpose of this bill is narrow so that we can deal with the immediate concern now. And it may have been yes a year since it was implemented in Australia but it has been decades in this country that people have been deported back to us and successive Governments have done nothing.So I am grateful that we are doing something and that actually we have taken up with the Government that those other supports are going to be put in place and we have assurances that they are happening. We have examples of where that is already happening and that is the question here because we have tried for many years to ensure through programmes like the ones that are happening in prisons around the country now—Māori focus units and such—to ensure recidivism is reduced. We want to make sure that they come back into our society and we help them pick up the pieces of their lives that are further damaged by the Australian Government’s ignorance and their blatant disrespect for our country by imposing these laws on those Kiwis who are living there and we are picking up the pieces of those things.So I am over listening to those people talk about the length of time that it has taken because they did nothing when they were the Government and it is a bit rich to listen to that now. We are doing something now and I support the Minister in making this happen. And in fact those extraordinary powers of the immigration Minister in Australia to seal a record—it could be something but it could actually be nothing and we do not even get to know that. That is the disrespect that they pay to us and I am glad that we are going to deal with just the people who have committed those offences who in New Zealand would have conditions put around them to ensure the safety of our community.So yes although there are minor offences being caught up in this regime at the lower end of the threshold we have not excused the fact and the point that there are actually serious offenders who are coming back to New Zealand and we need to protect our country and our people and our society from the risk of reoffending. I want to get assurances and we have sought those assurances from the Government that other programmes will be put in place. But let us deal with the issue and the issue right now is to ensure that those parole conditions can continue in New Zealand because until this goes through they can come back here and we have no say. We had no monitoring before. We had no ability to ensure that a paedophile was not living in a home with children and not living—Jacinda Ardern: That’s actually not true. That’s not true.MARAMA FOX: Well you had the opportunity actually. You had the opportunity.CHRIS BISHOP (National): I move That the question be now put.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Yes we have had an extensive debate on these four clauses so I am going to put the question.A party vote was called for on the question That the question be now put.Ayes 63New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 57New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 13; New Zealand First 12.Motion agreed to.Part 1 agreed to.Part 2 Returning offenders: management and informationMETIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): One of the issues I raised with the Minister of Justice late last week was the definition of a returning offender in clause 7. The whole point of the returning offender clauses in this bill is to capture personal information—name address date of birth fingerprints—of people who have committed offences in Australia and have been deported. In the description of this the rationale is that they have been convicted of an offence in Australia that would be an imprisonable offence here and have been deported because of that offence but that is not what the definition says. So I would like to just get some clarity from the Minister about how this definition of a returning offender came about and particularly the extent to which it captures people who really there should be very little public concern about—so people who do not pose a risk of any kind and so therefore it is unjust to require this additional information from them by the police.A “returning offender” is defined as including a returning prisoner but that is irrelevant for this discussion and as “a person who has been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction of an offence … that constitutes an imprisonable offence in New Zealand” so it is a similar offence to what we would have in New Zealand that would lead to imprisonment or at least has a sentence of imprisonment. Then it goes on to say “and being liable for deportation or removal as a result of that conviction has returned to New Zealand;”. It says “being liable for deportation or removal as a result of that conviction” not being deported or removed as a result of that conviction.So I just want to get some clarity around those cases. There may well be people who are being deported from Australia because they fail a different part of the good character test and there are lots of examples of that—for whatever reason the Minister over there decides that they do not like them and they want them to be sent back here. And it has got nothing to do with any previous convictions. They may well have been convicted of an offence 20 years ago 25 years ago—Marama Fox: Forty.METIRIA TUREI: —10 years ago or 40 years ago. They could be convictions that actually do not have any genuine relevance and do not pose any risk to New Zealanders. The person might not have been convicted of anything in the ensuing 40 20 or 10 years and there might be no evidence that they propose any genuine risk here but because they have a conviction in Australia it makes them liable for deportation and so therefore they are caught by this bill. I ask the Minister whether we could find some ways to constrain this definition more so that those people who commit minor historical offences—where it is pretty clear that this is a person who has been kicked out under the ridiculous rules of Australia as opposed to an actually sensible reason—are not caught by this legislation. There is no need for them to be caught because they do not pose any risk to New Zealand society.There is a degree of discretion in clauses 8 and 9 allowed the police in seeking identifying information but as we know there is not always a great deal of trust in the police and its ability to use this kind of discretion wisely. For those of us who have been involved with the Māori community for many years we know that Māori tend to be targeted and so we want to be able to protect particularly those who may not have a relevant conviction in the sense that it poses any kind of genuine risk and is very minor and very historical but may be subject to other kinds of profiling by the New Zealand Police and who are then subject to this law. And there is no protection for them here.This definition of returning offender captures practically everybody who will be deported if they have any kind of conviction in Australia no matter how historical. The key part of this key point is that it then means that this definition of a returning offender is largely dependent on the criteria that Australia sets for deportation. They are not independent criteria that we have set here based on our own assessment of what constitutes a genuine risk of recidivism or a potential threat; the law is premised on Australia’s definition of what a qualifying offence is. And frankly I have no interest in Australia’s definition. Its law is a disgrace. It is contrary to human rights. Its law explicitly says that all rights of natural justice do not apply. So I would like some of this addressed if that is possible.JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I just want to begin because it is relevant to Part 2 by just reflecting briefly on the contribution made by Marama Fox. She finished her speech by saying that until now there had been no way of monitoring for instance child sex offenders or sex offenders who were deported back to New Zealand. That is actually not the case.The Minister of Justice knows because she was the Minister who was in the role of Minister of Justice when this piece of legislation came through and that is the Parole (Extended Supervision Orders) Amendment Act. The interesting thing about this Act which demonstrates that actually we are not being contradictory when Labour on the one hand says that this bill should have had due consideration because it could have gone through earlier—the point is made by the extended supervision Act.This Act began its life in April 2014 when we still did not have our information-sharing arrangement with Australia. We knew however that that was on the cards. The Minister was working hard to try to get officials and counterparts on board. That piece of legislation—and this is relevant to Part 2 because it talks about the similar regime that has been used here as has been used in Part 2—talks about the meaning of an eligible offender and this language will be familiar.It says here that a person who is eligible “… has arrived in New Zealand within 6 months”—again that 6-month timeline—“of ceasing to be subject to any sentence supervision conditions or order imposed on the person for a relevant offence by an overseas court; and (ii) has since that arrival been in New Zealand for less than 6 months; and (iii) resides or intends to reside in New Zealand.” Those are the criteria for an extended supervision order to apply to someone who has committed an offence at a high enough level.We know that we already have offenders who fulfil those criteria. This is relevant because in Part 2 we are covering them off again. There is a definition in there that allows for someone who has committed a serious offence to be covered by this bill but we already have a regime. We know that since 2013 approximately 70 percent of returning offenders have been convicted overseas for serious offences: assault 30 percent; armed robbery or burglary 20 percent; rape or sexual assault including child sex offenders 15 percent; and murder or manslaughter 5 percent.Yet it is my understanding that extended supervision orders have not been used once. That is my understanding. I would be very interested to hear from the Minister why that is the case. The reason I would be interested in hearing that is because in Part 2 we have two regimes set out. One is a default regime; the other is a regime that must be triggered through an application through the courts by corrections.If we already have a regime like that set up through the extended supervision orders but it has not been used why is that? Was the threshold test not met? Were corrections not spry enough to make the applications? Was the definition of the offenders captured incorrect? This is really critical information because if there has been some kind of drafting error in the extended supervision orders—given it mirrors what we are doing in Part 2—we need to know that. Why has it not been used? You need to also know it because the Department of Corrections plays a critical role in enacting part of this Part 2.Let us go through this because I want to just explore potentially whether there may be two gaps where we are exposed by the two definitions in Part 2 of who is covered under this legislation. Under clause 17 we have the criteria for determination that a person is a returning prisoner. Keeping in mind that the definition applies we have a returning prisoner and we have a returning offender. One is more immediate than the other. The returning prisoner—“The Commissioner must determine that a person is a returning prisoner if the Commissioner is satisfied that the person—(a) has”—and as we have traversed already—“been convicted [of a relevant offence]…of more than 1 year…and (c) is returning…within 6 months”.The important point here and I want the Minister to confirm whether or not I am correct is if they come back to New Zealand and a determination notice is not issued within 6 months of that return is it correct that that opportunity is completely lost for any kind of monitoring regime? So they could fulfil the criteria for a determination order as set out in Part 2 but if corrections drops the ball and if for some reason the determination notice is not offered or if there is no opportunity for a determination notice to be issued in writing then that opportunity is lost.The reason I raise that is because in clause 19 it sets out that “The Commissioner must serve a written notice on a person”—we are now calling them “p”. I do not know if this is a new drafting thing but for the rest of them they are just called “p”. I find that confusing. In the criminal world there is another reference for “p” but that means person. So if I read out “p” it means person. “The Commissioner must serve a written notice on a person (P) who has been determined to be a returning prisoner. (2) The notice must be served—(a) if practicable on P’s return to New Zealand; or (b) if service on P’s return to New Zealand is not practicable as soon as is reasonably practicable …in any event not later than 6 months after P’s return to New Zealand.”I know that we have difficulty serving protection orders in this country. It is a massive task and the police do not even always do that job even if we know that the person that the order needs to be served on has committed assault on a victim. The police then are not always the ones serving the notice. So how do we know who is serving these notices? Who is serving them? Is it the police? Because I am very sceptical of their ability to make sure that every single person who is covered in this bill will be able to be found in a practicable time by police.I would be interested in clarification. Who is doing that job? Essentially if someone arrives and disappears and we do not find them in 6 months it is game over no matter how serious their offence. It is a point I want to make to this Committee.This bill is not based on the seriousness of offence. It is not. That is not what determines whether or not you will be covered by monitoring conditions. What is determined is how quickly you are deported after you are released. That is what determines whether you will be monitored. That seems to me to be a flaw in the principle of what we are trying to do here. For instance someone who has had low-level offending done prison for a year or more they come out they are detained straight away in a facility for 6 months brought back to New Zealand and they will be monitored. By default they will be monitored.Someone however who for instance may be on a life sentence but has been free in Australia for 6 months is not covered by default. If they come back into New Zealand we are then reliant on the next definition. I will find it in the bill. The next definition is for the returning offender who returns to New Zealand more than 6 months after release from custody. For these offenders we are absolutely reliant on the court imposing conditions on that returning offender as set out in this bill.So again that is reliant on the application of the chief executive to impose any conditions on a returning offender to whom this subpart applies—and the subpart of course being the definition around their having spent 6 months or more free but having some conditions imposed on them. Again that happens if you have got a serious offence. So this seems to be a big hole. The default stuff seems to potentially cover a lower level but potentially the more immediate but we are reliant on corrections being spry for those areas where they might have a set of conditions that are being imposed by Australia that probably should continue to be imposed here.I come back to my original point. If we are to have faith in corrections being able to do that sufficiently why when we know the seriousness of offenders who have already found themselves in New Zealand have we still not used extended supervision orders? Does that demonstrate that we should not have faith in corrections that it is necessarily going to apply this subclause correctly and in a timely manner? That is my concern.We have merged together two definitions around who is being captured and we may end up being more punitive to the lower-level offenders than we necessarily might be on those who might have a wider set of conditions. I accept that the Minister I think has identified this issue herself with the new clause I think that is 27(1) which reverses the onus that the court basically for a certain level of offending has to impose conditions. But that actually was about making sure that where we had incomplete information we were doing something quickly and effectively.I have concerns that we are leaving too much up to officials who have already demonstrated to us that they are stretched and may not apply their discretion appropriately.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare mō tēnei pō. I just really want to take a call because I think it is quite rare for the Greens to abstain on a bill. We do not like abstaining and I think one of the reasons we are abstaining particularly with relation to Part 2 was outlined very clearly by the previous speaker Jacinda Ardern because it is not fit for purpose and what we believe is that there is a law that needs to happen. There is somebody out there who needs to be monitored and there are groups of people whose offences are always going to be of concern and should be monitored but there has to be rigorous consistent clarity and this bill is not rigorous consistent or clear. So that is why we are abstaining because we believe there is a bill that needs to be done needs to be created but this ain’t it.So instead of Australia calling the shots we would really like to see our Government say to Australia “Before you start sending people back through your completely Draconian and mad incoherent system of punitive political lack of judgment.”—which is what the Australians are doing at the moment in a random way because of their xenophobic approach to all kinds of issues—let us say to them “We will be ready to deal with you and we don’t want these people”—many of whom were brought up in Australia and spent their lives in Australia—“sent back here until we’re ready to cope with it.” And in order to be ready to cope with it we need through a select committee process to hear from human rights experts and the judiciary and the police and the citizens who engage with these issues so that we get it right.We agree with the Minister Amy Adams that there are people who need this monitoring—we do not disagree with that. But I would like to support my co-leader in her issue around Part 2 around the definition of “returning offender” and address my remarks to those parts of Part 2 that talk about this returning offender. Again we are in the hands of the Australians. They are deciding whom we are going to categorise as requiring monitoring and that does not seem right because if anyone here has been following the way in which people in detention are treated the arbitrary nature in which the Australian law is being applied in section 501 etc. we cannot rely on them. We need to be clear ourselves about what we are trying to do.I am taking a call tonight because I want to speak for political dissidents. In any law that affects people’s human rights and affects anybody who is involved with the criminal justice system somebody needs to get up and say political dissidents can be captured by these kinds of laws. So a crime that is deemed to be an offence overseas and that can also be an imprisonable offence in New Zealand—and be liable for deportation—could be a political crime. So you could have somebody who is found guilty in Australia of a political crime that is also on the books in New Zealand but the way they were convicted and the reasons for their conviction under Australian law could be quite different from what we would decide was right. But who makes that determination? So we are leaving that to the police force to decide and some of us have concerns about that because we know that political dissidents could be sent home and be of concern to the legal authorities in this country simply because they are political dissidents.So we are cautious. We are very cautious about anything that smacks of that kind of broad-brush gathering into the net of all kinds of people. So it is not only the issue of people who have committed offences at the lesser end; it is also people who might commit offences that actually under the light of sanity and reason such as we might have here are not requiring this level of monitoring and this level of direction from the courts for the 6 months after they are returned etc. But we would not be able to determine that because we are adopting the Australian decision. So if we go to Part 2 subpart 3 it says that if an offender was in detention immediately before his or her return to New Zealand then these sections apply to this person and the court may impose conditions on them. So being in detention is not the test. Getting into detention in Australia does not mean you are a serious offender; it means you got caught up in the net and you may or may not be a serious offender. That is our concern and that is why we really had to abstain because urgency has led to some of the most ineffectual and—CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: I will just take a brief call Mr Chair because I am not a legal expert and this is certainly a complex legal issue. But what I would say is that complex and broad-brush approaches to what is actually quite a narrowly defined problem are problematic and we have seen with urgency in this House before when the House does things that are potentially a breach of the Human Rights Act that it can be a real problem and they have to be rectified. And again if we look at the conditions around taking bodily samples in clause 14 the Criminal Investigations (Bodily Samples) Act 1995 applies to certain returning offenders. In fact a constable can issue a databank compulsion notice requiring the offender to give a bodily sample.I am actually myself quite offended by the word “offender”. I think some people have committed offences where they will probably be tagged all their lives with being a risk to the public but some people after they have served their time do not deserve to be called an offender for the rest of their lives. I think with regard to the distinction in the law here around criminals and offenders I would prefer to see language that makes it clear what we are actually talking about because people who have done their time who have not committed serious crimes—how many times are they going to be re-criminalised by language like this? So we have real concerns about this kind of language and about clause 14 and we would be interested to hear from human rights organisations about this kind of issue.So Part 2 does raise many issues for us. We are concerned about the broadness of it the powers of the police—the contradictions that were raised by the previous speaker Jacinda Ardern about the extended supervision Act not being used which suggests that we are doing this because there is a panic on created by the Draconian Australian legal process but not because this has been thought through and this has been planned.I think another Labour Party speaker earlier talked about the powers of the police which would be stronger than the powers of the courts. We have to—especially after Roast Busters—refuse a romantic view of what can happen when we give powers to the police to make judgments that rightly belong in the courts. That is an important issue for us which we would have liked to explore. I myself would be happy to be proved wrong about this bill not through urgency but through a select committee process that laid out clearly who should be on this register who is an offender and needs constant monitoring and who is not. If we could make that bill clear and if we could actually create some clarity in that bill then I think there would be wholehearted support. But until that time we are unable to do that because it is too broad a net.Also those of us who work with political dissidents in Australia are concerned about the direction of Australian politics and law and the impact that is having on people who are likely to be—if not now then in the future—detainees for what is actually their right to dissent. We will stand for the right to dissent being excluded from this kind of monitoring and this kind of lifelong branding as an offender because that is what keeps us safe. If we do not make these distinctions—if we make our law broad-brush—then we will fail to protect the democratic right to dissent and the democratic right of people to cease to be a criminal offender and to actually be a citizen again who has done their time. If we want to create a society where everybody stays an offender for ever that is not a society where we actually create healing. There are people who need to be monitored; there are people who do not. Thank you.CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): I have got a few different queries about Part 2 of this bill. I am going to start right at the beginning here where it says: “A ‘returning offender’—(a) is a person who has been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction …” and I will not even continue with that because I would just like clarification from the Minister of Justice about what constitutes an overseas jurisdiction. I notice in Part 1 it is defined. It says “ ‘overseas jurisdiction’—(a) excludes the islands and territories within the Realm of New Zealand; but (b) includes the self-governing state of the Cook Islands the self-governing state of Niue Tokelau and the Ross Dependency”.I am just a little bit confused because I thought that those were the only islands that made up the Realm of New Zealand. So I am wondering whether the Minister of Justice can clarify that for us. So just again to repeat “overseas jurisdiction”—that definition is a bit confusing because clause 4(1) says “(a) excludes the islands and territories within the Realm of New Zealand; but (b) includes the self-governing state of”—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): We are on Part 2.CARMEL SEPULONI: Yes Mr Chair. I am relating it to the fact that a person who is a “returning offender” in Part 2 is someone “who has been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction” and so I am just talking about what the definition of “overseas jurisdiction” is there. But I will leave that to the Minister to ponder and it would be great if she could respond because as I am sure she can imagine we are all a little bit confused by that.I just want to get clarity around what happens with these offenders when they are returned to New Zealand. It does say that a returning offender “is a person who has been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction of an offence for conduct that constitutes an imprisonable offence in New Zealand and being liable for deportation or removal as a result of that conviction”. So looking at that initially I am thinking that they have been deported but are we saying here that they might not necessarily have been deported they may just have been liable for deportation? Because if they had been deported then I would assume that they would be met at the airport by someone here to take over from whomever has escorted them back to New Zealand and in that instance I would think that the identifying particulars that are also talked about in Part 2 could then be gathered at that point rather than leaving it to potentially some time within the first 6 months that they are back in New Zealand.On that subject just in terms of being able to gather those identifying particulars within the first 6 months after the offender has returned to New Zealand I just want clarification from the Minister around the circumstances in which it would be appropriate for the police to detain that returning offender. So would that be because they have been taken in under some other charges or they have come under the watch or notice of the police because of some other potential criminal activity or could the police just be informed of the fact that this person is a returning offender and then just show up to their house or their place of work or a mall on the street where they perhaps were and then detain them at that point? I guess I am just trying to work out what the appropriateness of detaining these people within the first 6 months of them returning to New Zealand might be.Looking further down where we see “Storage etc on Police information recording system of identifying particulars” there is one bit that is a little bit concerning. It says: “However photographs or visual images of a returning offender and impressions of that person’s fingerprints palm-prints or footprints that are provided in response to a request under section 9 or obtained under section 11 in error must be destroyed as soon as practicable.” I want to know what situations the Minister envisages where someone’s identifying particulars might be taken in error because this is really specific to returning offenders. Are we saying that there is the potential here for someone to be identified as a returning offender and that actually being mistaken identity—in which case that is why this particular clause is in here: to cover off that particular scenario?I guess I would just like to know from the Minister whether or not there have been situations in the past where these types of things have arisen or whether she can envisage that as being a potential problem down the track. I guess especially in light of the fact that there is a 6-month period to gather that information are we going to potentially see people who are not returning offenders—DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): As I have said in previous speeches New Zealand First does support all of the various parts of this bill for the reasons that I then gave. We do want to see a comprehensive and practical way of dealing with people who are returned especially from Australia in the current circumstances and who perhaps need—in fact definitely need—supervision or monitoring. But there are some parts of the bill that if this had been a select committee process rather than what we have got here tonight—a much more restricted process—I would be seeking to improve or change.One of those would be clause 7(a) and I think Metiria Turei has already pointed out the fact that this is a very very wide provision indeed. It does refer to the “person who has been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction” at any time and for an offence that if it was in New Zealand would be an imprisonable offence. Some quite minor things would fit that description of “imprisonable offence” so we could be talking about very minor things indeed for the purposes of this clause. Then it goes on to refer to “being liable for deportation or removal as a result of that conviction”. How would we know what a person is liable for in Australia or in Iran or in Timbuctoo or wherever? We would not. So this clause I think is problematic. It may well lead to difficulties in the future and if this was a select committee process I would be asking for it to be tightened up and improved for those reasons. That is something perhaps that we will have to tend to when eventually this bill is reviewed.When I turn over the page I see in clause 10(2) that “A constable may detain an offender … only for a period that is no longer than is reasonably necessary …”. What is reasonably necessary for the purpose of getting somebody’s particulars? How long is that? Is that 80 years 8 minutes or what? I guess you could take a practical approach and simply say that what it really means is that the police can hold somebody for as long as they like until they get the information they want. In actual fact what this section should be doing is specifying a specific period of time for which the police can hold a person and no more because it is too open as it is there.Then when I look a bit further in clause 11(a) and (b) I see again that we have this “reasonable” test and the police are to do what is “reasonable”. I do not think that they are well-equipped to do that. What does it really mean when it says that a police officer can “take identifying particulars … but—(a) must do so in a manner that is reasonable in the circumstances”? What is reasonable? Is holding a person’s head underwater for 3 minutes reasonable until they give up the information? I do not know; neither do the police I do not think either. Could we not be a little bit more specific and a little bit more professional in the way that these things are drafted? I am not so concerned about the use of the term “reasonable force” because that is actually defined in other cases and probably in other legislation. The point I am making is that if this was a select committee process we would be getting stuck into some of these terms and some of those provisions because they are really I think pretty sloppy.These faults are not enough for New Zealand First to vote against the bill but I would certainly prefer to see some of those things attended to. Moving over to clause 26 concerning returning prisoners complying with special conditions imposed by the court I think that that is all fine except for one point which is subclause (3)(c) where: “A court may not impose a special condition unless it is designed to—(c) provide for the reasonable concerns of victims of the returning prisoner.” What on earth does that mean? What is a reasonable concern of a victim? I cannot understand how a court will deal with that and it is another part of the bill that really should be improved.Again just over the page in clause 27 where I see that in terms of interim special conditions—and those are the ones that I would have thought that you would need to be particularly careful of because they can be imposed immediately—it says in subclause (3) that this can happen even if the court does not have the complete information available to it or it is still being sought. I do not understand why that is there because one would have thought that a court must be trusted to make a decision only when it has got enough information to make that decision on. It should not be empowered to make decisions where it has not got information—that just does not make sense. That needs attention and that is going to cause problems.Again in clause 27(5): “The application may be made without notice and a court must not require that notice be given.” There is a bit of a problem with that. It should perhaps refer to the possibility that that notice may not be possible in which case that would be reasonable but not just a bland declaration that this can be done without notice. There should be some limiting words on that. In the following subclause (6) I am glad to see that at least the clause expires after 30 working days because that is actually a hell of a long time. It is a month and probably it is too long. I would have liked to discuss that in a select committee and will not get the opportunity to do so.I could go on and on really in scrutinising the bill in this way. The point I am making is that it is a real shame that it is not going to a select committee because we would all have had the opportunity to make some really constructive improvements to this bill to avoid some of the problems that I think we are going to get and that we will now have to wait 2 years for a review for. I would like to express to the Minister my disappointment that we have not had a select committee process because I think that that little bit more extra time would really have resulted in better legislation. I will leave it at that.Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I want to talk to the Supplementary Order Paper that I have filed and explain why I think it is necessary. Minister Adams at clause 9 of the bill the legislation provides that the police may when an offender returns from overseas “as soon as is reasonably practicable request a returning offender to provide identifying particulars”. “Identifying particulars” are defined as having the meaning set out in section 32(5) of the Policing Act. Section 32(5) has a list of “identifying particulars” and I will read it. It means “any or all of the following: (a) the person’s biographical details (for example the person’s name address and date of birth): (b) the person’s photograph or visual image: (c) impressions of the person’s fingerprints palm-prints or footprints”. It all goes to identification of the individual and facts that go to that end not to the convictions or penalties that that person has had overseas.It is understandable why identifying particulars are that narrow in New Zealand because of course—Jacinda Ardern: The police already know.Hon DAVID PARKER: The police already know those particulars of their prior convictions and their offences from the New Zealand governmental records that the police have access to. What we do not know in respect of overseas offenders—unless we have been provided that information by an overseas jurisdiction which we will not always have been provided—is actually the nature of the offence and the sentence that the person has had in that overseas jurisdiction. Maybe that is not a problem with Australia; I am not sure. We have not had answers to the question as to whether that—[Interruption] There have been gaps in the Australian situation—well you should be able to ask the offender what was the offence that they were convicted of and what was the penalty and they should cooperate with the New Zealand authorities in providing that information. It is even more clear in respect of some other jurisdictions where we do not have those close relationships but none the less this legislation applies to—because this does not apply just to Australia; it applies to other overseas jurisdictions as I am sure the Minister understands.My suggestion Minister is that we in this Committee amend that clause to make it clear that in addition to the identifying particulars that are as defined in section 32(5)—which I think clearly has to be read eiusdem generis and really relates to identifying particulars of the offender rather than their record of criminal offending which is a different thing—the obligation of the person is to disclose the details of any overseas conviction and overseas penalty for any such conviction of the returning offender. Without that I do not understand how you are going to be able to get from the offenders by right of law the information that the authorities need to determine whether the other provisions that kick in under this legislation apply or do not apply because the tests that you have later in the legislation relate to the seriousness of the offence and the convictions. I do not see any way that you have got the right to require that information of an overseas jurisdiction. You might have cooperative relationships that normally provide that information that we in New Zealand do not have jurisdiction to require Russia or India or China to provide that information to us. What we could do through this legislation is require the returning offender to provide that detail of information or at least cooperate with you in a way that enables you to get that information and if they do not well they suffer the consequences of not getting the liberty that they probably want.Hopefully this matter is not a matter that you are going to have to take an instant decision on before 10 o’clock. If you are then you are going to have to—with respect—take a decision in the chair as to whether you think that my analysis of that is correct. [Interruption] Sorry Mr Chairman. The Minister in the chair will have to take a decision as to whether there is a gap in the legislation because in my understanding one of the things that the Government wants to achieve in respect of this is gathering the information that is needed at the border to assess whether these other flow-on consequences should apply to the person and if you have not got the information as to what is the nature of the conviction and what is the nature of the penalty I do not see how that can be done properly.This actually raises the other question as to whether the review provision at clause 37 is adequate. I for reasons that I have said previously but I have not had a response from the Minister while I have been in the House—I have not been in the House the whole time so the Minister may have given an explanation previously. But this is another instance of why the review after 2 years by the Justice and Electoral Committee is no substitute for the process that the Labour Party Opposition was suggesting and you know I like to think that I approach these matters from the point of principle. I agree that urgency is necessary—we are critical of why it is necessary but we do not have to agree on that to agree that we should be doing this in the best possible way given that we are in urgency. I still think it would be desirable to have a companion bill going to the select committee now with a sunset date in this legislation that was a reasonable period out. We had suggested a year—it could be 2 years. You could at the same time have a bill in front of the select committee that was hearing submissions upon it which would have turned up issues such as the one that I have identified and some of them such as Denis O’Rourke and other members have identified which could be resolved at the select committee process in the year so that the legislation that went forward from that period forward after the initial legislation lapsed could take into account all of those issues.Another issue that I still await a response to is arising from clause 28(2) which appears to oust the jurisdiction of the court to consider the validity of a decision made by the Commissioner of Police that triggered the imposition of standard release conditions. It appears to me that clause 28(2) is an attempt to oust the jurisdiction of the court. I think it would be helpful to the courts if the Minister has a contrary view that that be expressed. I am not sure what the intention of clause 28(2) is but it appears pretty plain on its wording to say that “A court must not discharge a standard release condition with effect from a date that is less than 6 months after the date of service of the determination notice.” I am not clear whether that is intended to oust the jurisdiction of someone to go to court to say that the Commissioner of Police was ultra vires the preconditions to the issue of—sorry I have forgotten the name—the determination notice that the Commissioner of Police issues. I would request that the Minister particularly consider this issue as to whether you are going to get all the information you need from an offender once they arrive back on the border. Perhaps that could be considered overnight.Hon AMY ADAMS (Minister of Justice): I have again listened to the contributions thus far on Part 2 and have tried to jot down for myself issues where I have felt that there has been a genuine issue raised by someone who has taken the time to try to understand the bill and is seeking clarity. I want to try to respond to each of those in the time we have left this evening.The first one I am going to start with is one that has come up from a few speakers which is around who is caught by the requirement to give identifying particulars and the information involved in that and whether that is too wide. Metiria Turei raised the point earlier and I did want to respond to that. That comes into the definition of who is a returning offender and therefore how wide that goes and how that works. So the first point is that the wording in the definition talks about as I have made clear someone who has been convicted of an offence that is an imprisonable offence in New Zealand. Just as a comparator under the Policing Act the requirement to provide identifying particulars—which as we have discussed is the same scope of information—applies to anybody who is being lawfully held in custody by the police; so much much wider. For any offence at all that is arrestable in New Zealand you have to provide that information and once it is provided the system has it.So what we are saying with returning offenders is the bar is actually higher. It is only when the conviction relates to an imprisonable offence. So in that sense not only is the bill about putting society in the same position it would be in if these offenders had served their time in New Zealand in terms of the supervision regime you could say it is about putting the system in the same position it would have been in had these people been through the system here. But in fact it is actually even narrower than that because it cuts out anyone who was arrested or charged or convicted of a lesser offence. So I hope that assuages the member’s concerns somewhat. That is what I went back and had a look at after we had had a discussion.The other point which I think Miss Ardern raised was the words around being liable for return as a result of that conviction. Again the point that we are trying to pick up here is that there is a distinction between a New Zealand citizen who is travelling or has lived abroad who may well have had a conviction overseas but who is just coming home. There is no intervention of the other jurisdiction there has been no suggestion their visa is going to be cancelled or is being cancelled—they are just coming back. There is no suggestion in any way that this legislation should therefore require them to provide returning particulars. So the wording here is making it very clear that their return to New Zealand is part of them being liable for removal because of that conviction not that the conviction is there and they are otherwise liable for removal. Their liability for removal has to be as a result of that conviction. So the member’s scenario where it might be some long-forgotten historic thing that has nothing to do with their removal would not pass that threshold test.The second thing though in that wording the other thing we had to be careful of is exactly the situation with the offenders who are returning back this week. You can be liable for removal you can have had your visa cancelled you can be going through a review process or you may just have decided you are not going to fight it and you are going to go back voluntarily. So what we did want to make sure we captured is where these offenders whom we are looking to capture are being returned to New Zealand that the legislation covers them whether or not they voluntarily elect to waive their rights and get on a plane once that process has started or whether they fight it all the way and get deported under operation of law. So that is the wording but with those two safeguards: of the type of offence that is caught and that the removal is as a result of that conviction. So I hope that addresses that in some way.I want to come to David Parker’s comment about clause 28 which I think you raised in Part 1. I did not respond then because I knew it would come up more appropriately in Part 2. I can assure the member that my reading my advice and my understanding are absolutely that it does not oust the jurisdiction of the court. What it is reviewing of course is whether once a standard condition is in place it should be varied. If of course it was ultra vires and it is in position then a standard condition has never been in place but to make it even clearer we have got clause 22(5) which makes it very clear that the court has a jurisdiction still to review the determination notice. Nothing in that clause changes that so yes I think that does make that point clear.Mr Parker I also wanted to touch briefly on your typescript amendment that you have just put in front of us. I think you are quite right—I do not think there is going to be a need to make a decision on it tonight so I am happy to keep talking to you about it. But what I will say is that I do not personally see at this stage that it is necessary. I think it runs the risk of being circular in that you have to know the person’s criminal offending record to be able to declare them a returning offender to be able to compel them. So if you are then relying on what they tell you as the justification for that process I think it becomes circular. The advice I have had from the police is that they do have the ability through their international counterparts through Interpol—quite outside the new information-sharing regime we have with Australia—to seek that information. They raised no concerns with me that there is any inability to get that and as I said I think you would end up creating a circular argument. So at this stage I am not of a view that it is needed but I am certainly happy to keep having a discussion if you want to to address that slightly differently.Mr O’Rourke raised some issues and I think Carmel Sepuloni might have as well around the detaining of offenders with a purpose of serving a notice and getting the identifying particulars. It is not at all uncommon to provide that the police have the power to detain for that purpose. Detaining simply means “Just sit here in this room while we work you through this notice and take your fingerprints.” otherwise you are detaining them unlawfully. So it is not some “At will as long as we like whenever we feel like it we can lock these people up.” It is simply staying in the rules.Denis O’Rourke: That’s what it says though.Hon AMY ADAMS: No because what you have is very long-established case law on exactly this sort of wording which makes very clear what “detaining for such time as is reasonable to carry out the function” means and nobody who operates in this area of law is under any illusion that it means anything other than a sensible amount of time to do what you need to do without putting the police foul of the law. So believe me we have considered that and I think in the light of case law we can be quite comfortable.Finally let me just come back to the final comment Mr Parker made around the review clause. I have addressed it. You may have missed it but I accept the view that the Labour members put up. My view was that rather than having two parallel processes happening at the same time the review should occur once we have a period of operation of the legislation. I have indicated that I am quite willing to talk with members if they think the structure of it should be set up differently in terms of who carries out the review or the period under which it is set to go. But I am of the view that that review will be a far more useful mechanism.Now of course there is nothing that stops a select committee or of course myself or whoever the Minister is reviewing it prior to that. But the point is to assure this House that the legislation will be compelled to be reviewed and returned to this House once there is a period of operation under it. I did consider the Labour members’ proposal. In my view it is unnecessary and that the review proposal we have put in the bill is a better outcome. I accept that Labour members do not agree with that but none the less I certainly did consider it and respond to Labour members on that basis. I think that is really all I wanted to respond to in respect of the discussion tonight.The only final point I would make is in respect of Mr O’Rourke’s comments that there are things he would have liked to test. That is why I did offer you many opportunities to contact me with any queries and we could have discussed them and worked through them. You did not take that up which of course is your right. In terms of what you have said in the House I am comfortable that you have not raised anything that has not been thought of in drafting but the offer is still there Mr O’Rourke. If you think there are things that you think you would like to see changed you are welcome to contact me over the course of this evening or in the morning. My door is still open. If issues can be identified I certainly want to hear them and work with you on them. I may not agree but we can at least have that discussion.KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): I have got just a couple of questions for the Minister around again clause 9 “Police may request returning offender to provide identifying particulars”. My colleague David Parker has gone through those particulars namely—I will start from the second point—photograph or visual image impressions of a person’s fingertips palm-prints footprints. All of those things are something that can exist along with the person’s name and date of birth but my concern is the address. What happens to these people who turn up and they do not have an address to go to? I believe that for the first 5 days they will be put up in a motel or hotel. What happens to those people after those 5 days when they do not have an address to go to?I ask the question because it is an offence not to provide that address. The offence is that they are liable on conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months to a fine not exceeding $5000 or to both and I would hate to think that just because they are people who have been deported to no fixed abode in New Zealand and do not have an address to provide the details of to a policeman they would in fact be in breach of that particular part of this bill. So that is something that I would like to have cleared up.What happens to these people who do turn up? They do not have an address. They are put in a motel for a couple of days and then after that what happens to them? They are given I believe only a couple of hundred dollars in their back pocket. That will not pay rent for particularly long and after that they are on their own. That is the question that I would really like the Minister to answer. I think it would just be totally unfair for these people to be in breach of the clauses.The other issue that I have is just around the wording in a number of the clauses. It is the word “may” that is scattered around.Debate interrupted.