Radhakrishnan Priyanca; Williams PotoPRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. I rise to take a call on the Social Security (Stopping Benefit Payments for Offenders who Repeatedly Fail to Comply with Community Sentences) Amendment Bill a bill that I absolutely cannot even begin to support because it's so unbelievably punitive for one and secondly will not even achieve what it purports to achieve. I'll begin by outlining for those who may be watching what this bill aims to do. I'll speak to maybe the heart of what it wants to achieve and then outline based on submissions that the select committee heard—and I am part of the select committee that considered this bill. I'm not even sure that we had one submission that was in support in any way. Overwhelmingly submitters were incredibly opposed to this bill.So to begin what does this bill do? It basically enables the Department of Corrections to instruct the Ministry of Social Development to withhold all or part of a person's benefit where that person has repeatedly failed to comply with a community-based sentence. According to members on the opposite side of the House this is a new tool that corrections can use because these people who are on a community-based sentence just don't turn up and don't do what they're supposed to do and somehow cutting the money that they get—and this is money for people who already can't afford to pay. As the member Darroch Ball rightly pointed out these are people who can't afford to pay the fine that has gotten them into this position in the first place. Somehow members opposite think that taking away even more money from them is going to magically motivate them to comply.Who's on these community-based sentences? What are they? They're sentences of community work supervision intensive supervision and community detention. One of the reasons—or I guess the main reason—that I'm so incredibly opposed to this bill as I suspect members on this side of the House are is because it strikes at the very heart of the values that we stand for: values about social security; values that say for example that everyone regardless of who they are deserves to live with dignity and this strips them of that.Members opposite will stand up and continue to say But of course they're really bad people and they should be motivated or encouraged to do what they're supposed to be doing in the first place." I don't think anyone will disagree that people should comply. Those who are on a community-based sentence should comply but as the member Jan Logie pointed out as well perhaps we should be looking at why people don't comply. How do we define compliance and non-compliance? Those are some of the substantive issues that I would have wished members opposite would have looked at instead of beneficiary bashing. Really that's what this bill is about. That's the crux of this bill because it doesn't apply to someone who's not on a benefit.So basically what it's saying—and we've heard some of the numbers as well: 27078 offenders were serving a community-based sentence over half of them in community work; 5 percent of offenders serving a community-based sentence are prosecuted each month for a breach. Putting on a policy analyst hat from my previous life if you were tweaking the law or you were developing policy you'd look at the scale and severity arguments. Really this bill kind of falls down on both those calls as well because firstly in terms of scale we're looking at a very small number of people. In terms of severity it's even worse because you're talking about people who are on a community-based sentence who don't have money and therefore are on a benefit and who are doubly penalised as a result.Now let's go into some of the issues as to why this bill's not going to stack up from a workability point of view either. One of the submitters talked about the fact that this will actually increase the potential for crime. I want to read a couple of quotes which were quite powerful. So this was I believe a submission by Kim Workman—Institute of Criminology Victoria University. He says quite apart from the fact that this is a punitive bill and I quote "What is an offender likely to do to survive financially once deprived of a benefit? [I've] discussed this Bill with a group of consumers from that group. Apart from [the] disgust that the state would take food from the mouths of their children their responses were two-fold. First that their confidence in the criminal justice [system] and the social welfare systems would deteriorate considerably and second that there will be people within that group who will engage in unlawful activity in order to feed themselves and their children."This leads me to a second point that submitters have raised a very valid point which is what is the effect that this bill if it passes will have on children and families? It penalises young people. It penalises children and families for something that their parents or their caregiver has done. Over half of submitters on this bill raised that as a massive concern—the concern about whānau well-being. In fact cutting—and this is what it's going to do; in reality this is how it's going to impact people—the sole parent benefit by half would reduce a family's income by about half the average weekly rent and less than the average weekly food bill. So basically what this bill does in its claim to motivate people to comply to their sentences is to cut down what they have for rent and for food which is basically what you need to lead a life of any semblance of dignity.So what is that going to lead us to? An increase in homelessness like we've seen over the last nine years; more people on the streets; more people living in their cars or in their garages; children studying in the back of cars; and people not able to feed themselves and their families as a result. And this is going to make people more compliant? I somehow don't think so.Further harm was another issue that was raised and the member Jan Logie touched on this as well. Basically what about beneficiaries who are affected by this bill—if it were to pass which hopefully it won't—who have a significant impairment like brain injury or mental illness? A large number—in fact 40 percent—of specifically young offenders on the community-based sentences have foetal alcohol syndrome 20 percent have head injuries and 40 percent have a mental health illness. What about them? Is cutting food and rent money from them going to motivate them to comply as well? What are the root causes?That is the crux of this whole thing. We stand here discussing this bill that will cut benefits. Just before earlier this evening we talked about a bill—again a member's bill from the opposite side of the House—that talked about increasing a penalty from two years to five years. That was their example—they lauded that example as them being tough on crime. That was going to fix everything. It was going to solve all our criminal justice issues. Just as that bill didn't look at the root causes of crime—it didn't take a holistic approach of all the things the mess that we have to fix to actually get people out of the situations that they're in—this bill does the same. It doesn't address the root causes of anything really. It doesn't address the root causes of those who are committing any crimes. It doesn't look at why they're non-complying in the first place and I remember reading in some of the advice—I can't exactly remember where—there are issues like transport—just really simple things where people can't get to where they're supposed to be serving their community-based sentence. And then what? So we don't actually address that but we'll cut all their money because that's going to fix it!Address the root causes. Increase the likelihood of people getting caught—this is going back to the previous bill so in terms of community policing. Fix the social safety net. Fix the housing crisis and the health crisis. Then perhaps people will feel supported to actually firstly not commit an offence in the first place and then once they do to comply with whatever punishment that they're supposed to go through. Let's actually support people to get there instead of just punishing them and kicking them when they're down. That's absolutely why none of us on this side of the House will be able to with any semblance of conscience stand here and support a bill that will punish people at a time in their lives when they absolutely should not be punished but should be supported to get to where they need to get to and that also will not achieve what this bill wants to do which was a fine aim which was to try and get people to comply to a sentence. Sadly this bill is not going to achieve that and for that reason I cannot support it.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I understand this is a split call. Simon O'Connor—five minutes."