Ghahraman Golriz; Williams PotoGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Whilst I do congratulate the member Alastair Scott who has brought this bill to the House for his work on it it is a curious bill and that's largely because of the three premises that it comes to us with. In looking at this bill I had a look at the previous file we have on it. The previous Green Party member dealing with this issue had on file a response from the previous Minister of Justice to an Official Information Act request in which the senior ministry official responding said Our original assessment of the bill is that the bill is not outside the range of comparable offences." So the first premise of this bill—that the sentences for this type of offending need to go up to be in line with comparable offences—was actually rejected initially by the previous Ministry of Justice itself. Then the letter goes on to say that section 202 of the Crimes Act which the member referenced broadly defines "offensive weapons" to include explosives. So in fact this type of offending can be charged to have the higher sentences applied to it in any case. As others have pointed out here if terrorism is what's being committed using explosives or if murder is being committed then those are also offences with much much higher penalties—in fact life imprisonment—available already within our criminal justice regime. So the initial practical premise of the bill in terms of consistency seems to be missing when we look at this bill more closely. The second premise of course is that this type of offending is somehow on the rise or is of concern to us outside of you know terror murder and that type of thing which are already crimes as I've already just said. It doesn't seem to be on the rise at all—I mean we've already heard that there have only been two cases of this type of offending before our courts. So that seems curious as well in terms of why this bill has come so far. But of course the third premise and the one that concerns the Green Party—and this new Government I happily note—is also largely refuted now by pretty sound evidence. That premise is that raising sentences in response to crime—even very serious crime that might actually be of concern within our criminal justice system—actually will reduce that type of offending. It will actually keep our communities safe. We now know and we've known for about 15 years—it's been 15 years since the first substantive study into deterrent effects of sentences was conducted—it's just not true. It doesn't work. Luckily we stand today at the start of a new era in responses to criminal justice issues. After nine long years of justice policy of penal policy being focused solely on making politicians look tough we now get to adopt policy that actually works that actually reduces crime and that actually keeps communities safe. We will not do that by adopting the same old policies—by telling the victims of crimes and by telling our communities that raising prison sentences is going to keep them safe. That has now become callous. As policy makers as lawmakers we have a responsibility to respond to the evidence. We know that every time we've raised sentences in any area of criminal justice or in crimes of any nature that type of offending has actually increased. Over the last nine years—and this was a policy initiated by Mike Sabin the ex - member for Northland for the National Party—we raised sentences mostly in serious drug offending. We now know based on evidence that in terms of methamphetamine offending every single year since we made that type of drug a class A controlled drug and raised the sentence to life imprisonment—every year—the instances of supply and manufacture of methamphetamine in our courts went up to the point that right now this year methamphetamine offending is about to overtake cannabis in its prevalence before our courts. A class A - type drug since we made it a class A - type drug—since we started imposing sentences of 18 to 20 years regularly—is about to overtake cannabis. That's frightening and it is a testament to the total failure of this policy. We should be embarrassed as policy makers if in the face of that evidence we continue to do the same thing. Last week the Green Party was very happy to welcome the report by the Prime Minister's chief scientist Sir Peter Gluckman that said that in fact imprisonment has failed to keep us safe in all the broad spectrum of criminal offending that our justice system is in fact broken and that doing the same thing over and over again is not going to fix it. It's damaging to our communities. It diverts billions of dollars away from initiatives and from remedies that can actually stop crime and that can rehabilitate prisoners once we actually do lock them up. I know from personal experience from over a decade working in criminal justice that our prisons are now not really well-equipped enough or staffed enough. Some of those are Serco corporation - run prisons not equipped enough to run programmes like drug and alcohol counselling or even literacy programmes or anger management programmes. We can't parole people—which is actually their legal right—based solely on how under-resourced these institutions are. So once they serve their lengthy sentences and we put them back out into the community we've not invested anything. We've lost this invaluable opportunity to rehabilitate people to help them to rejoin their communities and to help them not to return. So recidivism is on the rise filling our prisons again and again because we've diverted money—resource—away from remedies that we know will actually keep us safe. As politicians we have chosen—or the previous Government has chosen to make itself look tough and that is callous. So this new Government isn't going to keep doing the same thing in the face of overwhelming evidence that it will not work. We are going to invest in people whether that's in housing whether that's in creating jobs or whether that's in mental health care. We're not going to use prisons as mental health institutions any more as we've been doing unfortunately—sadly heartbreakingly—in New Zealand for a decade now. We're going to invest in people so that we actually stop crime and so that we actually keep our communities safe. This will be a new era. Our focus in justice policy is going to be on stopping crime not on making ourselves look tough. That is why the Green Party will not be supporting this bill today. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I understand this is a split call. Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi—you have five minutes."