Goff Phil: Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 27 August 2013. Volume:693;Page:13083. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): Labour will be supporting the Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill but I have got to say that we do so with some serious reservations. Kate Wilkinson touched on one of them and that was the issue of the threshold. When I read the regulatory impact statement I read that this bill was motivated by the case of a young woman in Invercargill who found that the person who had been convicted of her rape had moved in next door to her. Everybody in this House would understand the absolute trauma that a rape victim would suffer confronting each day the person who had been responsible for her rape and there was nothing that couldbe done in that case apparently. I thought well fair enough. The Government has admitted it has got a gap in its system and it has moved to address it.Then I went back and read theSouthland Times and what did theSouthland Timessay about the person who was convicted of the rape? TheSouthland Timessaid that that person was sentenced to 4 years for the rape. Hang on in this bill it says that this protection applies only if you have been sentenced to more than 5 years. So the very case that provoked this legislation would exclude the victim that the Associate Minister of Justice was crying crocodile tears about and saying that there was no legislation to help her. Minister there is still no legislation that would help her in that case. So well should Kate Wilkinson come into the House and say that the threshold level might be too high—absolutely. Victim Support the Shine organisation—JaneDrumm the person who is the chief executive of that organisation and who worked in this field for a long time asked why the hell the Government was bringing in legislation that would deny the protection to so many of the people who are victims of the crime that it claims the legislation is about.I do not want to respond to Kate Wilkinson’s long litany of self-praise for what the Government has done by saying that the Government has done everything wrong. You know all Governments I hope have a focus on the rights of victims and on protecting the rights of victims. But I have got to say that there are some much more fundamental things that need to be done in this area than what this scrappy little piece of legislation provides. I read Kate Wilkinson and Chester Borrows in the regulatory impact statement that this bill will apply to 10 cases—10 cases—a year. Well look for each of those cases that might be important; I am not knocking it solely on that basis. But what I am saying is do not come into the House full of self-praise about a piece of legislation that will help 10 victims when there are thousands of victims out there.I want to go back to what Alfred Ngaro said in his speech on this bill. He said: “We’re bringing down the crime rates.” Well I did a little bit of research. Members might be interested to know that in 2009 the Ministry of Women’s Affairs reported on the whole issue of women who suffer from sexual violation. What it said about that was that only 9 percent or less than one in 10 of all sexual offences were ever reported to the police—9 percent. Only 9 percent of all of those dreadful crimes against women were reported to the police but it does not even end there. Of the 9 percent that were reported and taken to the police only 13 percent of those actually resulted in a conviction. So we are talking probably about the four in 100 victims of sexual violation who achieve justice under our current system.If the Minister of Justice was really serious about the question of sexual violation of women and about how they can achieve justice and how they can be helped to recover from that she might like to consider a couple of things and I say this in all genuineness because these are things that we need to consider. The first thing is to ask whether our adversarial system is helpful for the hearing of cases of sexual violation and sexual assault. I would put it to the House that most women who have been traumatised by sexual violation would not want to be re-traumatised by having an adversarial system where their word is thrown into doubt. When women were asked why they did not report they said that they did not want to suffer the trauma of sexual violation only to go to court and be disbelieved as to whether they were making it up because in most of these instances there is no independent witness. I am not saying that people will never falsely report rape. Unfortunately—tragically—that happens. But in the vast majority of cases the women who have suffered that trauma will not see satisfaction through our adversarial system; they will not be believed because they do not have independent witnesses.Carol Beaumont: And why would they put up with that?Hon PHIL GOFF: So why would they go through that as my colleague has just said?I want to talk about restorative justice because Kate Wilkinson said that more money has gone into restorative justice and I truly welcome that. When as the Minister of Justice I talked to a group of rape survivors they said to me: “You know it’s not about wanting to see the offender jailed for a long period of time.” and I was quite astounded by this. Many times these were people who were suffering from sexual violation by strangers—sometimes the so-called date rape—but it was not about revenge. The main thing they wanted was an admission by the offender that he had offended against them. Surely that is not too much to ask. And they wanted to see remorse from the offender. Some of them said to me and I was astounded by this—and by their personal generosity having been through that trauma—“You know we don’t want to see that person locked up for 14 years in prison. We do want to see their admission publicly that they have wronged me and we do want to see that they are remorseful about what they’ve done.”So you know we are dealing with a piece of legislation in the House today that is about 10 of the thousands of people who are subject to sexual assault and violation and maybe Minister we should be looking at something more fundamental than that about how we can change the nature of the wider system to help prevent this sort of abuse and to deal with it in the majority of the cases not 5 percent of the cases. I say that not judgmentally of the Government but as a genuine expression of the problem that we have got and the failure of the system to address that.I want to come back to what is in the bill. The need for this bill is apparently because there was a person who was the victim in this case where the rapist moved in next door and changed the nature of her life which made it far harder for her to recover from the trauma she had originally suffered. A protection order does not help the victim in this case because she was not the subject of domestic violence. A restraining order would not help in this case because she was not the subject of further direct harassment by the offender. So there is a gap. I accept there is a gap in the system and I think the victim does have to come first. I listened carefully to David Clendon and I think he was making some reasonable points in a reasonable way but the victim must always be put first.What we have got is a bill that we have real problems with which I want to address in the Law and Order Committee. The threshold is too high. Five years would not have helped the victim that this legislation is purportedly about and would not have helped hundreds of other victims who are automatically excluded. I ask the Government where this figure came from. Was it just arbitrarily plucked out of the air or was it based on cost? That is what I really fear—“Well if we limit it to 10 it won’t cost us much.” I am sorry but if the victims come first cost is the secondary consideration. Secondly there is a real concern about the time between the release of the offender and the acceptance of a non-contact order application. There should be the ability to apply for non-contact orders before the release of the offender so that the victim is not suffering from a long period of trauma until the application is heard. That is a change that I think we should look at as well.Thirdly I think Andrew Little is right. This places the burden on the victim both to take the initiative to seek the order and also to pay for it. If we are trying to relieve the pressures on victims do not put the costs on victims for what they are rightly entitled to. That is the third change we need to make. The fourth change is the limited application which I mentioned before. There are 250 offenders of serious violent and sexual offences released a year and this will help just 10 victims. So OK maybe there is agood intent here but it does not make much difference. I think the select committee has got a lot of work to do if we are truly to put the interests of victims first.