Wong Pansy: Criminal Justice Amendment Bill (No 7) — In Committee 
Wong Pansy: Criminal Justice Amendment Bill (No 7) — In Committee 
[Volume:612;Page:9540] 
PANSY WONG (National) 
: 
 Labour should not rush to try to shut down this debate. The issue that various members of the Opposition have raised is very serious. 
I want to highlight to the Committee the unacceptability of a Supplementary Order Paper of 44 pages being introduced like this; we do not have the time to scrutinise it in the way that a select committee might do. One of the important changes that is introduced by the Supplementary Order Paper as stated there is to “remove the current requirement that persons found unfit to stand trial or who are acquitted on account of insanity must be remanded to a hospital or facility while inquiries are made to determine how they should be dealt with. Instead of the mandatory remand provision the Supplementary Order Paper gives the courts the option of remanding such persons on bail.” When I inquired of the Minister of Justice and officials last night for a full 10 minutes they could not point me to the place where that provision is. Why should the minority Labour Government be surprised at the outrage when it cannot even tell us where in the Supplementary Order Paper that significant change is? 
I am sure the Minister was well meaning when he said that these changes are all technical changes and they aim only to rearrange the original bill. But we have heard that approach being taken in the House too many times. Whenever we have been told there are technical changes or reformatting we find out that invariably some important changes have been introduced or some wording has been changed that on the surface does not seem to cause a great change but upon close scrutiny by the select committee turns out to change the legislation significantly. 
Let me come back to this controversial provision that has been introduced that gives the court the discretion to remand an individual who has been found unfit to stand trial. The new provisions say that the court has to take into account when making that discretion that the public interest is Parliament’s primary consideration. We have no doubt that the court always tries to take into account the public interest. Unfortunately we are putting the court and the judges in a position where they will have to act like a person who has medical skill. 
This is a very serious issue. Yesterday we had the Ellis inquiry report. So many times we hear of people who because of mental impairment are not responsible for their actions yet have committed a crime. To introduce such discretion no matter how well meaning it is will cause problems for individuals who are mentally impaired because whenever a tragedy or problem occurs the public tends to blame those individuals in the first instance rather than the system. People will start to say: “Well put those people in secure places.” These individuals need protection from themselves most of the time and others also need to be protected from them. We should not once again try to put these hard decisions back on the judges. The law should be clear: in terms of people with a mental impairment who might be a risk to themselves and to other people Parliament as a whole should give a clear direction rather than our once again giving a difficult decision to the court.