Bindra Mahesh: Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBindra Mahesh: Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8353. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MAHESH BINDRA (NZ First): I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill. This bill rightly amends three Acts of Parliament in an effort to reduce crime to improve public safety and hopefully to reduce reoffending. The majority of crimes are committed while the offender is under the influence of drugs or alcohol—and most times both.Drug and alcohol abuse is more prevalent in our society than we would like to think. Tens of thousands of families are broken and children are taken away by Child Youth and Family. Although youth facilities are a safer place than our streets they are not the ideal place for our youth to grow up. Foster-care homes are only next-best and in the absence of parental care our youth turn to drug and alcohol abuse when they are most vulnerable. Drug and alcohol abuse has also been identified as a major factor and a driver behind violent and sexual crimes. So we need to change the behaviour of these offenders and we need to break the cycle of drug abuse and crime. This bill to a good extent aims at changing the behaviour and that is the reason we will support this bill at the Committee stage.But we would also like to point out that this bill is not perfect—like most other things. The issue we have with this bill is that there is inadequate sharing of information between the two vital departments of our law and order machinery: namely the Department of Corrections and the police. A very glaring example and a very live example of that was the Phillip John Smith escape case where a criminal managed to make use of that lack of exchange of information and made his way all the way to Brazil causing huge embarrassment to us. Had the Department of Corrections and the police been in greater sync with each other this escape we feel could have been avoided and so would the embarrassment caused to our nation.There is an expectation in this bill that the chief executive of the Department of Corrections and the Commissioner of Police will work together to work out the modalities of this bill as to how these offenders and bailees would be monitored in terms of their drug and alcohol abuse while they are in the community. So there is a wee bit of ambiguity between the two departments. One department at the moment does not seem to know what the other one is doing and they are too shy to share that information also which can be vital to manage these offenders in the community and of course those who are on bail.So our expectation is that it should be a requirement that these two departments work together and not an expectation as it is in this bill. So we want to change that wording from “expectation” to “requirement” because in the absence of that requirement there is room for ambiguity and there is room for confusion between the two departments. This is not fair on the bailees and the offenders who will be managed under this legislation and it is definitely not fair on the victims of their crimes. Any room for ambiguity should be removed and there should be clear guidelines for both the Department of Corrections and the police to work together to make this effective. We have seen this lack of communication between these two critical departments in the past and we do not want to be the laughing stock of the world if the case of Phillip John Smith is repeated.There is a human rights element to this piece of legislation also and we must not forget that. The victims’ rights are paramount but the offenders’ rights also have to be respected. Being shoved from pillar to post is not fair on those offenders who are chucked out of jail put in the communities and then they do not know what to do with themselves.We have some concerns around the modalities of how it is going to work—whether the police are going to be managing only bailees and the Department of Corrections will manage the offenders in the community is it going to be vice versa or is there going to be some kind of distinction between the two? The taxpayer pays for the testing and treatment of offenders and there has to be value for money for the taxpayer also. In addition to that we feel that when the classification takes place for high-risk offenders those offenders who have offended against children women or the elderly should be classified as high-risk offenders and they should be managed in the communities accordingly. Thank you.