Goldsmith Paul; McKee NicolePart 2 Amendments to other legislationCHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Members we come now to Part 2. This is the debate on clauses 11 to 32 Amendments to other legislation". The question is that Part 2 stand part.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Chair. We come to Part 2 of this legislation. This is the repeal of the three-strikes legislation. For those just tuning into this debate this three-strikes legislation was introduced 10 years ago to toughen up the consequences for repeat serious offenders.Now there's examples of this all around the world in the United States and popular mythology. It's meant that somebody in the back streets of L.A. getting a traffic offence for a third time being sent away to prison for life. Those examples are sometimes hinted at on the other side.That's not how it's operated in this country; it has been only in relation to specified violent crimes. Section 21 of the principal Act—to run through some of them sexual violation attempted sexual violation very serious crimes of murder and so forth.So it's only when repeated convictions have occurred. The idea of the legislation was to ensure at the third strike that the full maximum sentence is served with the point that there would be a disproportionate outcome that rather than receiving the heavily reduced shortened sentences—which are often the case in our criminal justice system—that a third-strike offender would get a much longer sentence with a couple of objects in mind.First potentially to act as a deterrent—and there's a lot of debate about whether that indeed is the case. The only point I'd make on that is well that there was 13000 with the first strike after 10 years only 640 with a second strike and after the same period only 21 on a third strike. So it's not as if everybody is ignoring the consequences and carrying on to third strikes.But the second goal of course was to keep the community safe. This part here refers to victims and amendments to the victims' orders against violent criminals and deals with how they'd be impacted by this.Of course we heard many submissions during the select committee process. One from Nick Tuitasi for example—a former policeman I understand from up in Northland; highly respected former policeman. He made the point that third-strike people have around 70 offences each; they are not garden-variety small-time crooks. They are some of the worst repeat offenders in New Zealand who have caused mayhem and created many many victims. His point was: the law was designed to take them out of circulation to reduce the number of victims; to give victims a break so that they're not going to be faced with the same person that terrorised them and their family three or four years ago in short order to find them coming back.So he talked of victims of crime still being scared to go out at night as a result of what they have experienced. So the job of Parliament Mr Tuitasi said was to keep our citizens safe when it comes to hard recidivist offenders. So the primary sort of purpose is to reduce the number of victims of crime. So my question to the Minister is: how does repealing this legislation—and Part 2 amending the victims' orders against violent offenders—reduce the number of victims of crime? I'd like to hear the answer to that.NICOLE McKEE (ACT): Thank you Madam Chair. I'm hoping the Minister can clarify this—and I acknowledge I might be wrong so perhaps we can just get some clarification.Part 2 section 12 says that section 22H will be amended—it's the persons disqualified from holding a firearms licence—and it's going to replace 22H(a)(ii) with a new subsection 2 which is a specified violence offence as defined in section 4 of the Victims' Orders Against Violent Offenders Act 2014. That section 4 actually refers back to section 86—so under violent offence has the meaning given to serious violent offence by section 86A of the Sentencing Act.My question to the Minister there is that the actual amendment is removing section 86A and replacing it with what looks like section 86A. I could be wrong there but I'm just wondering if the Minister could clarify: are we repealing in order to actually put that same piece of legislation in or what's happening there? Hopefully I've just misunderstood and you can clarify that."