King Annette: Policing (Storage of Youth Identifying Particulars) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
King Annette: Policing (Storage of Youth Identifying Particulars) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
[Sitting date: 16 August 2011. Volume:675;Page:20849. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour) 
: 
 The Labour Opposition will be supporting the Policing (Storage of Youth Identifying Particulars) Amendment Bill through all stages and I thank the Minister of Police for the information that has been provided.  
The Policing Act 2008 was a bill passed by the previous Labour Government and I was the Minister of Police at the time. It was a bill I have to say that followed a very long and careful consultative process. It took 2 years in the making. It was a bill to rewrite a 50-year-old Act and over those years there had been incremental changes. The actual Act looked more like a patchwork quilt than good legislation. So over those 2 years there had been wide input from many individuals from organisations and from the Law Commission. We even had a public research project undertaken about this bill and we had very good involvement from the Law Commission.  
I think one of the most important things about this bill was that we had across-this-Parliament work done on the Policing Act because it involved the New Zealand Police which is independent of any political party. So for the Labour Government of the time it was important that we got wide buy-in to a new Policing Act which we did. In fact at the time I commended members of this House for the work that was done on bringing together legislation that really only had one contentious part to it and that was whether we should allow police officers to also stand for local government. At that time we had what was called the “Ron Mark amendment”. Ron Mark was part of our coalition at that time and he was very adamant that we should not allow police officers to stand for local government. He had seen a police officer who had been elected to a particular local authority park his police car outside the council chamber and attend council meetings throughout the day when he should have been policing. Well that was the only contentious part of the bill at that time. But when we have a bill that makes so many changes it is possible that we can make mistakes.  
This is the second amendment to this Act. The first amendment was in October 2009 when we had to validate the oaths that were taken by police officers. That was done in this House in a very cordial way and we passed that through. We are now making another amendment and it too concerns an inadvertent mistake. It was never intended not to carry through the clause that existed within the old 1958 Act that enabled the police to hold and store identifying particulars of young people who had committed a crime had appeared before the Youth Court and had not been referred to the District Court for sentence but an order had been made against them under the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act. There are a number of orders that could be made and are made under that Act and they range from an order brought for supervision with residence to supervision with activity etc.  
It was never intended that the police should not continue to be able to hold that information. We are not talking about young people who had not done anything; we are talking about young people who had committed a crime. The idea was to hold the information in order to help reduce reoffending. That was why the information was being held. It was not being held inappropriately. As far as I can recall there have not been issues raised about such information being held. My understanding from the Minister is that it relates to about 1200 youths each year. I think this Parliament ought to accept that that was an error it was not carried over and that we need to amend it. We also accept that it needs to be done under urgency and it needs to be retrospective. We will talk more about that when we get to the clause by clause analysis.  
The Labour Opposition will support this bill. It could be said that we need to be much more careful when we are drafting legislation but I have not yet found any political party in Government that has not had to amend legislation at some stage. Although we are pretty good in this place we are not perfect. We are not perfect even when a bill goes before a select committee and we have numerous submissions. In fact the original bill had something like five position papers written on it. Every part of it was looked at examined and consulted on. However errors can still be made. The best thing we can do as a Parliament is rectify an error and move on to allow the police to carry out their role. We will support this bill and I hope it receives the support of this Parliament.