Worth Richard: Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Worth Richard: Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:618;Page:14184] 
RICHARD WORTH (National—Epsom) 
: 
 Madam Chair I am just looking at raising a point of order before commencing my speech but perhaps I will come back to it in a moment. It relates to the last vote. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Shall we deal with it now? 
RICHARD WORTH 
: Yes. I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. It relates to the last vote and whether it was appropriate that the question was put on schedule 1 as well as schedule 2. I am just looking at it quickly as the vote took me by surprise. Madam Chair I thought schedule 1 was concerned with Part 1—I am just seeing whether that is so—yet you took a vote on schedule 1. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: I shall just clarify the matter. That is how the schedules are dealt with now. They are put separately with no debate. The actual debate is included with the debate on the parts of the bill. 
RICHARD WORTH 
: Right. 
Hon Rick Barker 
: Has the member not read the Standing Orders report? 
RICHARD WORTH 
: I am well aware of the Standing Orders. It is excellent that that Minister is in the chair. He has had an easy ride tonight because he has chosen to stay out of the arguments. I will substantially confine myself to the title clause and commencement date although of course as the Standing Orders make clear the debate can be more wide ranging. I am sure the Minister is aware of that. 
This legislation is called the Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill. I would argue that it is the purpose of a title first of all accurately to capture what the content of the bill is and also correctly to describe it in legal terms. This title is right in that parole supervision provisions are extended in Part 1 and sentencing amendments are contained in Part 2. But Part 2 goes far beyond that. It makes amendments to a number of pieces of substantive legislation: the Misuse of Drugs Act the Bail Act and also subordinate legislation—the Sentencing Regulations. So we have a case here—and it may not be a matter of great moment except to those archivists who later come to research the history of these legislative changes—that the title of the bill does not accurately reflect what its true content is. 
The commencement provision is contained in clause 2. The plan is for the Act to come into force on the day after the date on which it receives the royal assent. That certainly is one of the legislative drafting possibilities. I think it is a pity however that given the retrospective nature of some of the legislation it was seen by the drafters as the best mechanism for its commencement. 
I would like to talk briefly in the time that remains about the issue of electronic monitoring. The reason for that is it relates quite directly to the certificate that the Attorney-General gave on the breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Electronic monitoring has been with us for a while. It started off in New Zealand in about 1999 when it was picked up by the Department of Corrections to monitor offenders on home detention. We have in this bill a special condition requiring an offender to submit to electronic compliance with conditions relating to where he or she is. It usually involves an offender being fitted with a transmitter that continuously sends signals to a receiver. We have seen in recent times with technological advances the development of the Global Positioning System technology and other technologies that offer a tool for monitoring offenders in the community. The Global Positioning System has some distance to go. It is fitted to taxicabs with no great degree of reliability. I entertain similar doubts that in trying to precisely pinpoint the location of offenders there will be shortcomings in that process. 
The relevance of it though is directly related to the Attorney-General’s report because there were two issues expressed by the Attorney-General that were apparently of concern to her in the context of compliance with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. The first related to the issue of search and seizure as contained in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. The argument is that in terms of search and seizure there is a need for additional information about the proposed method of electronic monitoring.