Roy Heather: Young Offenders (Serious Crimes) Bill — First Reading 
Roy Heather: Young Offenders (Serious Crimes) Bill — First Reading 
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HEATHER ROY (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of ACT New Zealand to speak to the Young Offenders (Serious Crimes) Bill. ACT will be supporting this bill going to select committee. If passed it will put in place many of the things that ACT has campaigned hard on during many elections and it will help the police by giving them powers that at present they do not have when dealing with juvenile offending. 
 As ACT’s new national security spokesperson I recently spent some time with the police. I spent a night shift with the Wellington police and a day shift with the Porirua police. When I asked them what the greatest difficulty was that confronted them they said it was their inability and powerlessness to do anything productive with juvenile offenders. Anybody under the age of 17 presented them with severe difficulties. The only exception to that situation was where the juvenile was known to the police and to the Youth Court and had breached bail provisions that were in place. In those circumstances the police were able to take young offenders who were in breach of their conditions of bail to try to deal with the situations and some of the situations we encountered were quite nasty. 
I think we should be under no illusions that we are talking about children but they are children who know their rights and who are very well acquainted with the law. We are not talking just about first offenders. When I was out with the police we came across several young offenders who according to the police computer system had a string of charges but nothing had been able to be done about them. Several of those young offenders had been before the Youth Court many times and had been given any number of chances yet their behaviour had continued to deteriorate and their offending continued to worsen as time went on. 
There are three difficulties all of which are addressed in Ron Mark’s bill and I applaud the initiative he has put forward. The first difficulty is the inability of the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act to deal adequately with this situation which is preventing the police from doing their job adequately. So the amendments in Part 1 of this bill to amend that Act are long overdue. Part 2 obviously amends the Crimes Act and Part 3 amends the Sentencing Act in relation to offenders under 17 years. These are important initiatives that must be discussed at the select committee. 
I do not know whether what Ron Mark has put forward in his bill is the full answer but the bill is a great opportunity to actually deal with youth offending in this country and to try to help those young people where we can. It is important that we send it to a select committee get expert advice from a wide range of places and discuss its initiatives properly. ACT is very pleased to support this great opportunity to do that. Youth offending is a great problem. Certainly it is an escalating one and the police are recognising this. 
I do take what the Maori Party speaker said to heart though. He made some very valid points and I think this bill does not preclude the opportunities that can exist for various communities to help deal with members of their own communities. 
Ron Mark 
: We welcome that. 
HEATHER ROY 
: As Mr Mark said we should welcome that. We should invite it and welcome it in the spirit in which it is intended. Frequently in this House I stand up and lament the loss of the private prison the Auckland Central Remand Prison. It did great things particularly for Maori and Pacific Island communities. Now that the State has taken over that prison again we hear there are difficulties there. That is a great shame because very good work was happening there. I think we have much to learn from the memorandum of understanding that was developed between the Maori iwi groups and the Pacific Island community and from the very good work that went on there. That good work was allowed to happen because people took off their ideological blinkers and saw beyond the notion that the area of corrections could be dealt with only by the State. There is much to learn from our rich diversity of cultures and it is now well known and well established that it is the communities themselves—the whanau and the Pacific Island communities—that are often best able to deal with those problems. 
I think this bill will go to a select committee and I welcome that but I would like to see as part of the discussions a broad range of submissions coming forward from all communities in New Zealand. So ACT will be supporting this bill and we look forward to its progress through the House.