Ball DarrochDARROCH BALL (NZ First): It is a pleasure to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the Children Young Persons and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) Legislation Bill. New Zealand First will not be supporting it. There are a couple of reasons why. The first one—I will just mention it briefly—has already been covered quite a bit in the House by the Opposition. I think Louisa Wall stated it—that in general there is quite a lot of ambiguity about the way that the legislation is written and how it can be interpreted especially on the ground. What the Government needs to understand is that what is written in the legislation here when it boils down to it is just a bunch of words. Unless that gets translated into what happens on the ground to ensure obviously that it is quite clear to a case worker or someone who is working with children on the ground what the priorities need to be then it just will not work. It is going to be an especially interesting process as we go through the Committee stage and look at those different paragraphs and clauses in the legislation and see exactly how the Government will attempt to change those with amendments.The second point that I wanted to make which I want to spend the majority of my time on is something that does not actually get debated often in this House especially through the process of this legislation. I believe that is because New Zealand First stands alone on this and that is that we oppose any move of the youth justice system to include 17-year-olds. Unfortunately that is actually included in this legislation and because it is not mentioned often or at all—I noticed that the Minister for Children did not mention it at all and I think only Joanne Hayes mentioned it once—I believe that it gets missed but it is quite important and it is essential that we speak about the reasoning behind why the Government wants to change it and why that reasoning is flawed.I just wanted to point out something. It is quite an interesting fact that in 2008 when the National Party was in Opposition the change to the youth justice system to include 17-year-olds was already on the table in the House here and it was put there by the Labour Government. National Party members stood up and said that if they supported this change to the youth justice age to include 17-year-olds people would think that National members were a bunch of wusses. They stood up and said that 16- and 17-year-olds should be treated like the adults that they are because of the adult crimes that they commit. What a flip-flop we have. In fact in 2008 John Key campaigned on being tough on crime and especially on youth crime. Look at how far the National Party has come from where it was—this bill shows that as an actual demonstrable and tangible fact.The fact is that this legislation will introduce 17-year-olds—more young people—into a failing youth justice system. What we hear is really pie-in-the-sky rhetoric from both sides of the House now about how the youth justice system is the best in the world how the youth justice system is working how the youth justice system benefits young people and how it is a lot better than the adult system. That is demonstrably not true. What we hear from the Minister every time I ask her a question and what we hear from all of the submitters including the Children's Commissioner is that they have got evidence and proof that the youth justice system will be better for 17-year-olds—and that is just not true at all.Talking about just the court system this legislation wants to have the lower end of the 17-year-olds who offend move into the youth justice system and the Youth Court. If we talk about just the Youth Court we know that the Youth Court currently has an 80 to 90 percent reoffending rate—an 80 to 90 percent reoffending rate—and that is not even talking about how those young people got to the Youth Court in the first place and how that is failing them with the Police Alternative Action. Now what this Government wants to do is include more young people in that. The Youth Crime Action Plan a couple of years ago came out and said that it was going to steer away from building more youth residence beds. What did this Government just say it was going to do this year? Add 54 more. This youth justice system is not working. It is failing those young people.The most important part is that for some strange reason the Government is portraying the 17-year-olds who will be included in the youth justice system as the one-time offenders the 17-year-olds who make mistakes. That is just simply not true. The majority of the 17-year-olds who will be dealt with in the Youth Court are the ones who have been recidivist high-level offenders when they were 14 15 and 16. The Police Association in its submission said as much. That is what it said. I asked the Police Association whether if this change was to be implemented it would reduce youth crime. There was only a one-word answer and that was No". The Police Association said no it would not. Now we have had Mr Nash standing up on this side of the House through question time over the last couple of days and talking about the Police Association and about all of the surveys and why the Minister is not listening. Well the Police Association survey showed that front-line police 75 percent of them did not want the Youth Court age to change—75 percent of them. But the Labour Party backs this change in the Youth Court jurisdiction. Fifty-five percent—the majority—of the police officers who are youth aid officers and work with young offenders can see that this change will not make a difference for them and in fact will make it worse.I just want to spend a couple of minutes going through the evidence—the evidence that this National Government and the Minister gave me through Official Information Act requests and written questions and through the submission process. I asked a simple question. The Minister stood up in this House and said there is evidence and proof that 17-year-olds would be better off in the youth justice system and I said: "Well give me the proof." These papers I am holding are the stuff that the National Government and the ministries have given me as the justification for why they have changed it. This is their evidence. By the way the majority of it if not all of it is American. This is all based on American studies with the American justice system—what a comparison. All of the data that is in here comes from the 1980s and 1990s and some of the actual research was printed in 2007 or earlier. Members opposite when in Opposition did not want to change the situation when they had this evidence. When they read through this evidence they did not want change. Now National Government members are using the same evidence to change it. It is utter lunacy. It is just lunacy.The first bit of evidence is about arrest and its effects on juveniles and I have highlighted a few points. This is the evidence that the Minister has given me to justify the change in the youth justice area. It was found that between the group of youth for whom there was a police decision to charge and a match-controlled group there was no significant difference in the prevalence of frequency of subsequent serious delinquency. That was one of the points.The second is from a study on the effects on violence of laws and policies facilitating the transfer of youth to the adult system. It says that over the longer term there was reduced recidivism for some juveniles and increased recidivism for others. That means the transferred youth sometimes decreased in their recidivism and sometimes it was up. There are inconsistencies with which this Government is using its research.It shows here that they found that the transfer of juveniles initially arrested for property crimes was associated with a decrease in recidivism. Moving up to the adult court ended up in a decrease in recidivism. Another study a meta-analysis of restorative diversion systems says that while the first study found that youth diversion programmes were more effective than traditional judicial intervention at reducing recidivism the second found no effects of diversion programmes on recidivism.This is all of the evidence that was given to me to prove and justify the Government's reasoning for reducing the youth justice age. At best this information and these studies are mixed. They are non-comparable with the New Zealand judicial system and they simply cannot be used as proof or evidence but that is what this Government has been trying to do.It is going to be interesting to see this legislation progress through the different stages in the House especially through the Committee stage. I would just like to reiterate that New Zealand First will not be supporting this bill for the reasons that I have covered. Thank you."