Prasad Rajen: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Prasad Rajen: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:9336] 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD (Labour) 
: 
 In coming to Parliament after doing most things that I had wanted to do I expected and looked for those rare opportunities when I could sit down and really work across parties on solutions to fundamental problems of concern to our society. I liken it to having spent most of my professional life pulling bodies out of the river but one day deciding to go upstream and work with people to build fences so that people did not fall into the river. This Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill was an opportunity to begin to address some of the concerns that Government members had and for all members to try to work our way through the legislation to address those questions and come up with a set of solutions with which we could engage in a productive kind of way. My sadness is that that opportunity has been missed because members on only one side have been trying to do that. When members on the other side are constantly trying to focus on political capital—making political capital out of the situation—it becomes very hard. I will talk about that more as I go on. 
Labour by its record since the change in Government has always supported reasonable legislation to address fundamental problems. Labour members have always taken an optimistic view on that but when I came from the select committee and into the legislative process that is almost at an end now the feeling I had was that here was a Government juggernaut that had already made up its mind and that was disregarding any advice that could be put before it. It was determined to go down a particular track; I likened that to a punitive approach. Somehow in the process leading up the election—the pre-election campaign—there was this notion that the only response was to be much harder on crime through every level. Of course there was the action of 100 days which came into the select committee hearings as well but the juggernaut prevented us from taking the opportunity to develop this set of proposals in a far more constructive way. 
I have a lot of respect for every member of the select committee. The committee was very ably chaired and every member of the select committee really struggled to engage with the issues and with the submitters. But in the end I had the impression that National committee members were prevailed upon not to follow what the select committee was being advised but to deliver on what was a punitive approach to the legislation. Chester Borrows as well has talked about how an opportunity was missed. 
The bit that Labour members have major difficulties with in this particular bill is the ideology driving it. That ideology is a punitive ideology and it automatically leads us somewhere. No matter what safeguards we write into the bill over time those who interpret the provisions will begin to internalise that particular ideology. There is a lot of legislation where that is the case. 
Two days ago Unicef New Zealand put out a press statement. That organisation is a group of people who are concerned about young people and who think about New Zealand society quite a bit. The organisation makes reasoned statements from time to time. Its New Zealand executive director says: “The Bill is a backward step in the treatment of children who commit serious crimes.” Indeed that is Labour’s view but this is a large credible organisation that is making these comments. Its statement continues: “Lowering the age at which children can enter into the realm of criminal jurisdiction takes New Zealand in the opposite direction to that proposed by international and national experts on criminality and human rights.” My good friend Pita Sharples has articulated that far more comprehensively than I could ever imagine and I tell the Minister that he is absolutely right. Indeed all of the advice that he has talked about advises us to go in the other direction. 
The select committee was going in the opposite direction. It is no wonder that the debate in the second reading the Committee stage and this third reading has been quite tetchy. It is because the opportunity has been missed and the advice has not been taken at all. The bill really is about lost opportunities for the Government to address what it saw as problems with young offenders. It is almost as if the kind of bravado that the Minister displays from time to time in the House has driven the thing this far but members of the Government in the select committee have not been able to let loose and begin to think their way through it. They are all honourable members and they all have good brains they could have used to come up with much better amendments than the ones here. 
On this side of the House I say that some provisions in the bill have our support. Extending orders and giving the Youth Court more orders are not things we dispute at all. However the way is also opened up for orders that have been known to fail elsewhere. There is any amount of evidence on that. I have not heard the Minister or speakers from the Government side tell us the evidence on which they have built their set of proposals. An ideological position has led the provisions not substantive research or examples from national or international experiences that say: “This was achieved.” I refer of course to boot camps which come in under the “Supervision with activity order” substituted in clause 25. 
Where is the evidence for the camps’ success? Why was the evidence not put before us? The signal given was that the Government’s analysis is that all that is missing in the lives of these young people is discipline and once we give them discipline through military-style boot camps and activities then we set them with wraparound services on the right path. But there is no evidence to suggest that that will come through boot camps. Members have heard the Hon Pita Sharples tell us very clearly that a whole series of complex factors work in consort one with the other—many around family many around community and many to do with age and other things—and need to be put together. Proper services that brought all those factors together would have been much more effective. So those are the lost opportunities which is why this bill is disappointing for me. 
Perhaps the one aspect that has bothered us more than anything else has been the sending of children to the jurisdiction of the Youth Court because that also signals and is consistent with the Government’s ideological position on punitive treatments. The problem with that I say to the Minister is the question of what happens when the issue is about 11 year-olds. What will happen when it is about 10 year-olds? Pressure will come on us but I do not see that this legislation will produce dramatic change over the time of this particular Government. It will not. We will still be talking about the cases we have heard about today; members opposite have been talking about very recent ones. In the end we will force ourselves to become more punitive and to push the age of criminal responsibility further back but those positions are really unprincipled. It was really important for us to hear from the Minister what her deeply held philosophical belief was around children. It was really important for us to hear that and for her to put that on the record of the House. But that has been missing. At least if we had heard that there might have been a difference in the discussions. But the Government has been arrogant and has not listened to experts and the legislation is disappointing and a lost opportunity. 
Perhaps the final point is that it is surprising that Government members who have spoken have really demonstrated the limits of their understanding of the complex issues around this particular— 
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: I am sorry to interrupt the member; his time has expired.