Ardern Jacinda: Domestic Violence (Enhancing Safety) Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Ardern Jacinda: Domestic Violence (Enhancing Safety) Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 20 October 2009. Volume:658;Page:7356. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JACINDA ARDERN (Labour) 
: 
 I am pleased to speak on Part 2 of the Domestic Violence (Enhancing Safety) Bill. Part 2 focuses on the amendments made to the Sentencing Act and the Minister in the chair Simon Power has already rightly pointed out the most significant changes that were made by the Justice and Electoral Committee. When considering this part I want to expand a little bit on the process that the select committee went through in determining those changes. 
I think at the heart of this bill is the overall objective to streamline the process that a victim in particular may go through when using our justice system to obtain a protection order. There was one thing that I think came through quite clearly during the submission process. 
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. 
JACINDA ARDERN 
: Before the break I was talking about one of the primary objectives of this bill which is to improve access by victims to such things as protection orders. When the Justice and Electoral Committee was considering one of the clauses in Part 2 it occurred to us that we could improve that objective if we allowed a court to order a protection order when it was considering a case even if it was not the court to which a particular application had been made. In the end we considered that a sentencing court should not be precluded from making a protection order if it considered that the protection order was necessary for the protection of the victim of the offence. We made that change after careful consideration and after hearing submissions made by for instance Family Court judges. It was a well considered and appropriate change to make. 
There are only two other aspects of Part 2 that I wish to draw attention to. One is new section 123D which requires that after the issuing of a protection order a judge or registrar must explain to the offender the effect of that order. That change was based on submissions made by the Family Court which pointed out the rate of non-compliance with some of these orders. It was the view of the select committee that we should do everything we can to ensure that orders for individuals to attend programmes to stop violence for instance should be enhanced in any way available to us. I think there is still more we can do in that particular area. It struck me during our consideration of the bill that although we were using all the tools available through legislation the surrounding areas—the support programmes and community networks aimed both at victims and at turning round the behaviour of offenders—perhaps needed the greater attention of the House. 
The final point I will briefly talk to relates to consent for protection orders. The select committee had some discussion about the issue of consent in issuing a protection order. We had considered that very same issue in relation to the awarding of police safety orders. The committee decided rightly so that these were quite different tools. A police safety order is a short-term order that is intended to diffuse very heated situations and prevent violence from occurring. Women’s Refuge after seeing how those orders work in Australia agreed that applying them without consent appeared to be of value to victims who would acknowledge that after the fact. Of course the reason then that we thought police safety orders should be able to be applied without consent was that it gave victims time and space to consider whether they wished to apply for a full protection order. A protection order has many larger longer-term ramifications than a police safety order. In order for protection orders to work in the long term I believe they require the buy-in of victims which is why we have in the end rightly differentiated between those two forms of protection for victims or potential victims of domestic violence. 
Those are the main aspects of the amendments to the Sentencing Act that I wish to draw the Committee’s attention to. I look forward to discussing further in the Committee stage the amendments to the Bail Act and to the third reading.