Hughes Darren: Criminal Records (Clean Slate) Bill — Second Reading 
Hughes Darren: Criminal Records (Clean Slate) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:614;Page:10340] 
DARREN HUGHES (Labour—Otaki) 
: 
 I rise to strongly support the second reading of the Criminal Records (Clean Slate) Bill. The legislation that has come back to the House after diligent consideration by the Justice and Electoral Committee is excellent. The committee was well served by three officials who worked very hard on this bill. They were Melanie Gudsell and Susan Roberts from the Ministry of Justice and Brian Hesketh from the Department for Courts who worked with us to try to improve this bill. 
In the end the bill’s message is that when a crime occurs there should be a punishment for it. No one on the committee disputed that. However the reason we have punishment in our system is so that the crime does not occur again—that once people have committed an offence under the law they recognise that their behaviour was not appropriate at that time and do not go on to lead a life of criminal offending. That is why we have a punishment system. 
Stephen Franks 
: This is a new theory. 
DARREN HUGHES 
: Mr Franks interjects but he should realise that this bill is not new. It was introduced into the House by his leader Richard Prebble who came to Parliament and said that we should have a clean-slate regime. Once upon a time Richard Prebble from the ACT party supported this bill. Today for political reasons ACT members do not and they screech at the Government on a law and order issue. What we are trying to say is that there are some crimes that are very minor and do not carry a custodial sentence for which people serve the court requirements—a punishment or a fine—at the time and people should be allowed to move on from that crime provided they do not reoffend. 
All sorts of things are being yelled around the Chamber but members need to think about certain things. They need to think about whether a conviction for under-age drinking needs to be carried by people all their lives. I suspect that there are members of this House who bought and consumed alcohol before they were over the age of 20. I defy many members of the House to stand up today and say that they did not consume alcohol before they were 20 which was the legal drinking age. All of a sudden there is silence in the House. Mr Franks was very keen to interject before. [ 
Interruption 
] Dail Jones interjects that the legal age was 70 when he was a boy. Crimes like that mean that people who are otherwise law-abiding citizens carry a criminal record all their lives. That is why we believe that we need to give people the opportunity to move on from that—provided they do not reoffend. 
Mr Worth said the slate is not entirely cleaned; it is only concealed. That is true in terms of the mechanism by which the law will work. The law will work every single time the question is asked about whether a person has a criminal record. The system will be activated and will look back over the previous 7 years of that person’s life to see whether he or she has been convicted of an offence that was non-custodial and whether the retribution for the offence has been paid. That means that if after 10 years of non-offending a person reoffends he or she does not enjoy any of the benefits of the clean-slate scheme. That is a tough measure in the bill rather than a weak one as the Opposition spokesperson on justice tried to portray. 
According to the figures very few people reoffend after 7 years of non-offending because we are talking about very minor one-off crimes that people have been caught committing. A lot of the crimes covered by this bill are committed by people who are never caught and I am talking only about people who are apprehended for those offences. The offences listed in the bill are very minor indeed and we believe that people need to move on. If we are to get tough on very serious crime we need to give people the incentive to not reoffend in terms of some of the minor offences. I support the bill. I think it is a very important bill. 
Stephen Franks 
: Where is the evidence that this bill will do one element of that? 
DARREN HUGHES 
: The member asks me what evidence there is. If he looks at the report of the select committee—of which he is the deputy chairperson and for which he is paid extra salary—he will see that people do not reoffend in large numbers after 7 years of non-offending. This bill is not about people who lead criminal lives. 
Stephen Franks 
: It didn’t say that. 
DARREN HUGHES 
: It absolutely does. The member should go back and look at the Ministry of Justice figures. They show very clearly that people who do not commit a crime after 7 years of non-offending are very unlikely to commit further crime in their lives. There is a very high threshold for that. I support the bill and look forward to seeing it progress though the House.