Collins Judith: Children Young Persons and Their Families Amendment Bill (No 4) — First Reading 
Collins Judith: Children Young Persons and Their Families Amendment Bill (No 4) — First Reading 
[Volume:618;Page:14454] 
JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon) 
: 
 It has been very interesting to listen to the contributions from the House on this bill tonight. There is a great deal of common ground. Members clearly have slightly different views on issues but there is certainly common ground for dealing effectively with youth offending. 
I think this bill is a band-aid bill. Unfortunately it has lots of good intentions and purposes but I really do not think it will go tremendously far towards resolving some of the issues of youth justice. I commend the Minister for Social Development and Employment for wanting to deal with the issues but wanting and doing are two different things. 
There has been a lot of talk around the place about family group conferences. One of the things Mr Tanczos mentioned that really annoys people who are victims is the fact that family group conferences tend to go on and on—there is one after another—but there does not seem to be any result. Someone says: “Yes I agree; I’m a bad boy and I’ve done wrong.” and the next thing is that that person is doing it all again. That is one of the things that very much annoys not only the victims but the police the social workers and all the people involved. It makes a mockery of the family group conference. However my having said that on a positive note we do know that family group conferences do work for the vast majority of offenders and victims. We as a House should give a tick to family group conferences and say that we accept that for most instances they do work. 
But there is a small proportion—something like 5 to 10 percent—where clearly the family group conference will never get anywhere and that is because the family group conference relies on a couple of things. It relies on the goodwill of the family. Not all families are created equal and occasionally there are unfortunately families who are criminal families—who always have been and always will be. Expecting them to be supportive of measures to stop their children from committing more crimes is utterly ridiculous and we need to accept that. It also relies on the young offender’s genuine wish to change. One of the things that clearly comes out from the research and from the anecdotal evidence of those who know a lot about this area is that one of the most important factors in youth offending is the friends and associates of the young person. As parents should know if their children are hanging out with young people who are always in trouble the chances are pretty good that their children will always be in trouble too. So the family group conference does not necessarily deal with that situation. If a family is dysfunctional if it is split apart if the parents are not talking and cousins whanau or whatever are not functioning properly as a family unit the chances are a family group conference is not going to do an awful lot of good. 
There has been quite a lot of talk—and very good talk—about victims’ rights tonight. Of course the victims are always the poor people who go along with a genuine wish to have their issues addressed. They want to see the offender sorry for and doing something about the crime. Quite often of course youth crime consists of something like graffiti. Certainly in Papakura in my electorate—I knew I would come to personal circumstances here because Mr Franks invited me to—graffiti is a major issue in youth crime. We might ask whether it really hurts anyone. Well yes it does actually. It creates a feeling of victimisation for the people whose property is damaged in that way. One of the things the Papakura police instituted a while ago which I was very supportive of was having the young offenders with their parents’ consent clean up the graffiti. I thought that was a fantastic measure as did the parents of the young offenders. Then what happened? Some do-gooder whom I happen to know being a lawyer— 
Dail Jones 
: Not a lawyer? 
JUDITH COLLINS 
: Yes she is a lawyer and I do know her. She is a nice person but unfortunately she does not live in our electorate and does not have to deal with the issue. She made a complaint and a newspaper the  
Sunday Star-Times 
 
got hold of it and all hell broke loose. The poor old Papakura police who were doing such a fantastic job in getting these young toerags as some of us would call them to clean up the mess and in giving the parents a bit of support in showing these kids a bit of discipline were suddenly told to stop that now. It was working and they were told not to do it. Now what has happened is that graffiti has gone up again in Papakura. That is an instance where the police were doing the right thing and unfortunately their Minister did not support them. Unfortunately the hierarchy did not support those on the ground who were actually doing something who were helping the parents and who were taking the situation out of the justice system as such. No social workers were needed in that case so it could not have been any good! 
I think that is one of the areas that maybe the select committee could look at. We could look at those sorts of measures for getting young people to understand that there are consequences to their offending—consequences not only to the victims but also to themselves and that is an important thing. The National Party has undertaken that when we are in Government after the next election we will reduce the age of criminal responsibility and there is a very good reason for that. We have young offenders in the community aged 12 or 13 years who are being run by older offenders—those who are aged 16 and over. Those people get the young people to go and do their dirty work for them knowing that they would escape any particular criminal responsibility. That is what they do; they run youth gangs within my electorate and many other electorates in this country. That is where the vast majority of new offending is coming from. 
We need to be able to deal with that sort of behaviour and we need to be able to make those kids more scared of the justice system than they are of their mates. They have to understand that we are not being kind by letting them get away with it; what we are doing is setting them up for a life of crime—that is what we are doing. By being too soft on kids when they are young we are letting them get away with thinking there are no consequences until they are so far into a criminal system that they cannot get out because they are so scared. They are more scared of losing the gang’s friendship the gang relationship than they are of losing their families—which often are split anyway—and certainly they are more scared of that than they are of the justice system or of the police. 
There are some things in this bill that we are quite supportive of so it will be very interesting to see it at the select committee. I hope it is going to the Social Services Committee— 
Dail Jones 
: Law and Order? 
JUDITH COLLINS 
: The Law and Order Committee? Which one is it going to? No one in the Government knows which select committee it is going to. 
Dail Jones 
: Is there a Minister in the House? 
JUDITH COLLINS 
: There is supposedly one here. Having said that I point out that we have some grave concerns about many aspects of this bill. It certainly will not fix anything much in its current state. It will be good though whichever select committee it goes to to have an opportunity to put a little bit of backbone into it and a little bit of good National Party policy.