Ardern Jacinda: Parole Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Parole Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 26 November 2014. Volume:702;Page:883. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour):It is my pleasure to speak briefly on the Parole Amendment Bill. I had the pleasure of sitting on the Law and Order Committee which considered this bill. Obviously as would have been set out by previous speakers this is an amendment to the Parole Act 2002 which by and large I think was an extremely good piece of legislation. It was introduced by Phil Goff. The primary foundation of this legislation is that when the Parole Board considers any offender for parole its primary consideration is the safety of the community when determining really the reintegration of a prisoner back into society. That is the board’s primary driver. Of course in order to assess whether or not that is the case for an offender there will be a series of points at which the Parole Board will meet with an offender will have someone from the corrections service alongside them and will assess their suitability for parole. They will receive a significant amount of information when considering parole although as we have learnt not necessarily all the information that they need and I will come to that later on.But that does mean that if an offender comes up for eligibility it does not necessarily mean they are ready for release. You could say that someone like Phillip Smith may have been an example. He had come before the Parole Board and it had determined that he was not ready for release. That happens frequently. Someone who has a life sentence may come before the Parole Board many times. So what this bill tries to address is the fact that an offender who is not ready for parole who is coming back before the Parole Board frequently can actually re-traumatise a victim. If they are on a victims’ register in order to be notified of Parole Board hearings they basically can find themselves in constant preparation for Parole Board meetings and that is a significant driving force behind this piece of legislation. There is the ability to defer Parole Board hearings already but what this bill does is allow that deferral period to go from 3 to 5 years for offenders who have an indeterminate sentence or a sentence of 10 years or more those who are on preventive detention and those who have life sentences because that is indicative of the severity of their crime and the fact that there may be longer periods between those meetings and that might be appropriate. But it also allows the Parole Board to make a recommendation that a maximum time between parole hearings moves from 12 months to 2 years.There are some things that the select committee considered that I want to raise in the House. Actually it was my assumption that every offender would want the opportunity to go to a hearing and have their opportunity to make the case for them to be released. That is actually not the case. I have visited a number of prisons and actually sat in on Parole Board hearings where in one case an offender actually said: “I do not want to be considered for parole. I am not ready.” They were working through a release-to-work programme they wanted to make sure that they finished a rehabilitation programme they were in and they themselves determined they were not ready for release. That might be an example of where a deferral of 2 years from their previous meeting may have been a good thing to do. So that was one assumption that I had challenged during this process.The other is that the Parole Board does not play just one role. It is not there just to determine whether someone is ready for release. It sets out guidelines for what it would like to see the corrections service do to prepare an offender for release. This is a bit of a concern because if we remove that check and balance who then is assessing whether corrections is ensuring that the programmes that its Parole Board has recommended are being fulfilled? That is an issue that came up a number of times. The Parole Board will often make recommendations around rehabilitation programmes it wants in place or work that it wants done that corrections is not always fulfilling. We discussed ways and mechanisms to ensure that that would happen and that is something I would like to ask the Minister to address in her next speech to the House: how she can ensure that if that Parole Board is not acting as that mechanism there is another way to ensure that come the next meeting if it is 2 years away corrections is fulfilling the requirements of the Parole Board. I think that is really important.Otherwise I will use my other opportunities in the House to traverse some of the other recommendations made by the select committee because they were numerous. Otherwise this is a bill we support. We do think it will better support victims and ultimately could be beneficial to offenders in their rehabilitation also.