Pham Lan; Goldsmith PaulLAN PHAM (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Chair. I really want to thank you for letting me take this call tonight particularly for those of us who you mentioned earlier have not been part of the select committee process. I'm particularly happy to be part of questioning the Minister in this case because as far as I'm aware in looking at the evidence and research around the issue of gangs in this country of Aotearoa it seems like we've come a really long way in terms of understanding what actually drives people to join these gangs to stay in them and how they leave or how it's very very hard to leave. We know that that is a very complex web of historic trauma including abuse in State care which has been so clearly spelt out today and in the past week. We know it's poverty. We know it's cycles of incarceration.Now I'm really concerned—and I'd love to hear from the Minister—about how this bill is not actually going to unravel the really positive progress that has been made over the past few years and actually addressing the intimidating behaviour and organised crime by gangs that we don't want to see across the House. We've heard that there's been really positive collaboration between gang leaders between police leadership and between Government leaders in terms of finding meaningful solutions to address this.So I really want to get to the pragmatics of the bill. Clause 3 in the bill which sets out the purpose is the most glaring start of where the pragmatics are not clear. I want to pick up firstly—and I'd love to hear from the Minister—in clause 3(b) we're noting that it's saying that we want to reduce the ability of gangs to operate and cause fear intimidation and disruption but the methods of how and what that will actually look like on the ground are unclear. So I want to pick up firstly on paragraph (b) where it says providing for the issue of dispersal notices to stop gang members from gathering in public places". I'd love to hear what feedback the Minister has actually had from police about their ability to prevent gang members from gathering in public places what do the police have to say and how has that fed into the bill here.I'd also love to hear what feedback he's had from police again about how they might be able to implement the non-consorting orders to prevent gang members from associating or communicating with each other. Now this leads to the paragraph (c) part of it because there's this what seems quite an arbitrary time period here where they will provide "for the making of non-consorting orders to prevent specified gang offenders from associating or communicating with each other for 3 years." Firstly: why the three years? This seems incredibly arbitrary. How on earth would this actually be monitored and how would this be implemented? I'd love to be enlightened about that from the Minister. Thank you.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (Minister of Justice): There are details that we will come to in further parts in the debate that we have. But it did strike me as odd that the member referred to progress that we've made over the past few years in terms of gangs. She is obviously not aware that there has been a 50 percent increase in gang membership over the last six years and that's not the progress we want to see. We've also seen an increase in violent crime in our community by 30 percent and that is not an increase we want to see. So I think she might be overestimating the progress that has been made. So we're concerned about the significant increase in gang membership. This legislation in part is set out to try and rectify that.In terms of the non-consorting orders: well I'll come to that detail when we come to that."