McLellan TraceyDr TRACEY McLELLAN (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. Thank you for the chance to make a contribution as one does to the Sentencing (Reinstating Three Strikes) Amendment Bill. I'm surprised by the previous contribution daring to bring up the concept of law and order on the North Shore when it was only a couple of days ago—didn't we learn?—that the harbour cops are being moved to the CBD to bolster the police presence there. But good on you for standing up for your communities!As has been previously said and we don't need to go over it in too much detail this bill simply isn't needed. It's not needed because the law already says as my colleague the Hon Dr Duncan Webb said earlier a judge must impose the maximum penalty prescribed for the offence if the offending is within the most serious of cases for which the penalty is prescribed obviously unless circumstances relating to the offender make that inappropriate. That is part of the Sentencing Act. So this rhetoric that somehow this Government who is very light on evidence and very big on big noting and rhetoric is somehow reinventing and rewriting the Sentencing Act is just nonsense. This is simply another means by which to introduce something that essentially does nothing.But in this case not only does it not do what it says on the tin it actually does harm. It's reintroducing a reheated policy that has already failed. I note as my colleague the Hon Ginny Andersen has just said now that we acknowledge the fact that the first three-strike bill was terrible and as was the Act. This is less rubbish but it's not much less rubbish. Therefore it kind of feels like it's a little bit of a waste of our time.We know that there is absolutely no evidence that three strikes reduces reoffending and that should be the Government's goal. If the Government's going to talk a big talk about being tough on crime the only way you can be tough on crime is to reduce crime. Doing things that don't reduce crime is a waste of our time. It doesn't reduce reoffending. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that it actually makes rehabilitation worse. It certainly doesn't act as a deterrent. So if the goal in the long run is to not make things better this is a step in the right direction.As has already previously been also discussed it removes judicial discretion which I think is a slippery slope and that is not something that we should be doing. Also when I suggested that it does harm we know that it does disproportionately impact on Māori on people with cognitive diversity or people with cognitive impairments they absolutely bear the brunt of these knee-jerk reactions so that the Government can appear tough on crime.Ultimately it's just part of that ideology—which the Government always claims it doesn't have any which is a misnomer in itself—that punishment leads to change. That doesn't happen. The regulatory impact statement and several other sources have explicitly stated through cost-benefit analyses and various other evidence-based methodologies that we haven't been able to see any significant quantifiable benefit in this policy.Importantly the provision stating—this is the part that I find quite interesting—that the courts must not take into account the additional consequences of the three-strikes regime when determining the sentence therefore makes it unenforceable and meaningless. What I mean by that is that lawyers and judges can't unknow what they know. If they know there's going to be a loss of parole eligibility at strike two it's going to change the way that they act. They will have that in their mind when considering sentences and judges will as well. Judges will also know the impact of imposing a 24-month sentence as opposed to imposing a 23-month sentence. So ultimately it's going to change those thresholds and it's going to mean there's some perverse sort of outcomes as people skirt their way around this—not to mention the fact that the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act obviously prohibits severely disproportionate sentences and we know that this has the ability to do so.So at the end of the day it's a big price to pay considering all the extra people in prison and all the extra costs that that incur for the National Government to talk about the fact that they're tough on crime. It has zero impact on crime. It has zero impact on reducing victims of crime. It's a cheap and nasty way of the Government trying to send a message out there for people who don't know any better.