Faafoi Kris: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Faafoi Kris: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 10 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:2193. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana) 
: 
 Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on the Bail Amendment Bill. It is nice to follow Ian McKelvie a fellow member of the Law and Order Committee and I look forward to thrashing out the issues that we have highlighted during this debate in the Law and Order Committee. I know that I and the Hon Phil Goff are going to raise a number of issues at the select committee. He has already raised a number of them.  
I do want to just point to one thing that the Attorney-General said on behalf of the Minister of Justice when he introduced this bill. He said that we needed to get the balance right with this bill. I am just wondering which balance we are talking about—whether it be the political balance or the real balance. This is a serious piece of legislation. This is a serious piece of legislation and I will cede some ground in the fact that with anything that goes through this House you have to have a certain degree of a political win. So we will cede a little bit of ground but we do not think that this is really going to address the issues that the aim of the bill wants to address. 
 There is nothing wrong with the aim of the bill which “makes changes to the Bail Act … to improve public safety and ensure the overall integrity of New Zealand’s bail system. The changes will make it harder for those accused of serious offences to get bail.” I have got no problem with tougher bail laws. As Mr McKelvie mentioned in his contribution in which he talked about his own community I do not want people who are in my community certainly who have committed serious offences and who are at risk of committing again while they are out on bail out there to potentially put law-abiding people in my communities at risk. But we do not believe that this bill has necessarily got the balance right in terms of the real and the political balance. As I have said I will personally cede some ground on the political stakes.  
This bill is going to go to the Law and Order Committee and as Mr Goff mentioned we will be supporting its going to the select committee but there are a number of concerns that we will raise and a number of significant changes that we will look at. We hope that this will not be a lost opportunity and that members on the Law and Order Committee might be able to see some of the merit in what we may propose in terms of what changes might be needed.  
I just wanted to pick up another point that Mr McKelvie made in terms of communities and his being a grandparent. In terms of what we as a House will be facing soon we have got a convergence of issues and the Hon Lianne Dalziel pointed this out. We have got the Alcohol Reform Bill coming through at the moment. We have got a raft of law and order issues coming through the House at the moment. Outside of the House we have got issues related to poverty and child poverty and I think in terms of what Lianne Dalziel mentioned on the drivers of crime we have got a real opportunity to put a stake in the ground not just as a Government but also as a Parliament to try to address some of these issues not just for the good of the political need that needs to be addressed now but in terms of our children and our grandchildren as Mr McKelvie mentioned earlier on.  
I am going to try to use my contribution to the Bail Amendment Bill debate to try to encourage as many people as possible who might be interested in submitting to the Law and Order Committee to raise some of the issues that we will highlight. I think one of the great things about the select committee process is that sometimes someone comes along and makes a submission and highlights an issue that you or another party had not thought of so I encourage those who might be watching or listening—those political junkies who are interested in the debate—to make their submissions known to the Law and Order Committee.  
This Bail Amendment Bill sets out to do a number of things and they have been well traversed but I will go through them quickly in terms of what we see that it is going to achieve. It will reverse the burden of proof for bail for those who are charged with murder. I will get to that later but that of course is going to be a very emotive issue but one that we need to look at in terms of what the evidence is there too. It also reverses the burden of proof for those with convictions of specified offences and adds new offences: sexual violation which includes against minors; murder which I have already mentioned; and manslaughter; but also robbery aggravated robbery and wounding or injuring with intent. It also gives more power to the District Court over the granting of bail for defendants with previous drug-dealing offences which previously only the High Court had jurisdiction over. It also aligns policy around police bail and brings it into line with what the District Court has within its powers at the moment so that essentially means that there are no more monetary bonds or sureties that can be offered under police bail. Police can also arrest those aged under 17 for breaching bail conditions—and I will come back to that later on—and the Youth Court can have the power to detain.  
The bill also legislates electronically monitored bail and one thing that Mr O’Rourke did mention earlier is that this will codify electronic monitoring of bail. But one thing that I think is good and that Mr O’Rourke did highlight is that it will make it an offence to deny access on to a property for someone who is coming in to monitor someone who is on electronically monitored bail. I think that is a good thing and I think that is a common-sense measure that is within the bill.  
But there are some things that I did want to point out in terms of the context of this bill. One thing is that because in terms of bail of the significant number of people who are prosecuted or defendants who were offered bail in 2009 of just under 128000 defendants 91497 had a bail decision as part of their procedure. We just need to put some of this in context especially in terms of people who are suspected of scarpering or not answering their bail. Written questions that we have asked have found that in 2009 only 4 percent of people who were on bail failed to answer bail and that 5 percent of the people between the ages of 17 to 19 failed to answer their bail. So we think that there are not necessarily the right motivations in terms of addressing some of the issues in this bill in terms of the reality of what is happening on the ground.  
There will be the opportunity at the Law and Order Committee to raise some of those concerns and I talked earlier about how this will be an emotive issue. A lot of people out in our communities will be looking for serious peace of mind and they will be looking to see us take action especially against some of the more serious offenders who get bail. I do acknowledge the case that Jami-Lee Ross mentioned about the dairy owner who was killed and one of those people involved in that crime—not necessarily convicted of murder—was out on bail. That is the kind of thing on which people will certainly want to see some action from us and that will obviously be raised at the select committee.  
I think there are concerns and opportunities within this bill. On reversing the burden of proof around bail with class A drugs I think that is an opportunity and someone mentioned earlier the war on P. Between the years of 2004 and 2009 I understand there were nearly 3000 defendants given bail when they were facing class A drug offences. Twenty-three percent of them were remanded in custody 31 percent were bailed and nearly half 46 percent had a combination of custody and bail at large. But in that period 34 percent—nearly a third of them—reoffended on bail and that I consider is a relatively large proportion of people reoffending while they are on bail. I would like to hopefully see the Law and Order Committee have a very very good look at that.  
As I mentioned earlier Labour will be supporting this bill going to the select committee. We do it with a number of concerns some of them significant and some of them hopefully that we might be able to iron out relatively quickly. But there are concerns and we hope that the Law and Order Committee deliberations will give us an opportunity to address a number of those concerns so that we might be able to support it further than just the select committee stage.