Robertson Grant: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8077. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): I do want to pick up on the points that Metiria Turei was making in her contribution. I too want to refer to the regulatory impact statement which as the previous speakers have outlined gives us what the Government’s objectives are for the legislation. It is on the basis of these objectives that the Labour Party is supporting this legislation because we too agree with the idea of protecting the public from reoffending and providing greater support for the reintegration of returning offenders. I would venture to suggest that everybody in the House shares those objectives.So when we follow those objectives through to the purpose clause things start to go slightly astray in terms of meeting the objectives. It states: “The purpose of this Act is to obtain information from returning offenders and establish release conditions for offenders returning to New Zealand following a prison sentence of more than 1 year in an overseas jurisdiction.” Well it certainly could be argued that that represents some steps towards objective 18.1 in the regulatory impact statement: “protecting the public from reoffending;”. Getting the necessary information is an important part of that.What I want to focus on in this part of my contribution is that I think it fails completely to talk about objective 18.2: “providing greater support for the reintegration of returning offenders.” I do that on the basis of looking at the options that the Government considered when deciding what to do in this area. As best as I can tell having read the regulatory impact statement and the bill but not having had the benefit of a select committee process where this would have been discussed in some detail and where submissions would have been sought from the likes of the Law Society for instance which probably would have provided some very good advice right at this point on whether or not the actual drafted legislation meets the objectives of the Government and whether the purpose clause fulfils its role—so having had a look at that it is fairly clear that what are options 3 and 4 in the regulatory impact statement a “Mandatory supervision regime” and a “Discretionary supervision regime” elements of both of those is what we have ended up with in the legislation in front of us.If we then go to those two parts of the regulatory impact statement and see what the officials thought those two options did for the principle of reintegration which should be core to the purpose of this piece of legislation under the mandatory supervision regime the officials concluded that there would be good support for reintegration. However they highlighted the risk that a mandatory system “will treat all returning offenders as a homogenous group with similar reintegration needs. Offenders will be returning for a broad range of offences … [and] a formal system of supervision for a significant proportion of the offenders does mean that there would be a significantly higher level of support to reintegrate than the status quo.” That will work for those people if they get on to the conveyor belt of support in terms of what is defined in this part of the bill as a standard release condition.Where things get more concerning is when we do move into the area of a discretionary supervision regime. The concern I have here—and this is written quite well by the officials I think—is: “A discretionary order means that many returning offenders would not be subject to it and would therefore not receive the benefits the order may provide in terms of support for reintegration.” That is an area of grave concern for us because what we are looking for when we talk about reintegration are issues like employment prospects accommodation health needs and community support which Kelvin Davis outlined in his contribution. If we do not have a consistent regime in place here a regime that is appropriate for each person who is returning then we run the risk that a number of those core elements of reintegration will not be picked up. This is the danger in this clause looking at the purpose of the bill—that we actually in a rushed hasty process have not got in front of us enough advice in my view as to whether those concerns raised by officials in the regulatory impact statement are met by the bill. We have got the statement that “special conditions” can apply. Maybe—maybe—they will apply but we do not know that for sure. So I lack the confidence standing here today having not seen a select committee process and having not got further advice on this matter as to whether or not those core issues about employment accommodation health and community support are dealt with.What we do know is that the people coming back—