Delahunty Catherine: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8092. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare mō tēnei pō. I just really want to take a call because I think it is quite rare for the Greens to abstain on a bill. We do not like abstaining and I think one of the reasons we are abstaining particularly with relation to Part 2 was outlined very clearly by the previous speaker Jacinda Ardern because it is not fit for purpose and what we believe is that there is a law that needs to happen. There is somebody out there who needs to be monitored and there are groups of people whose offences are always going to be of concern and should be monitored but there has to be rigorous consistent clarity and this bill is not rigorous consistent or clear. So that is why we are abstaining because we believe there is a bill that needs to be done needs to be created but this ain’t it.So instead of Australia calling the shots we would really like to see our Government say to Australia “Before you start sending people back through your completely Draconian and mad incoherent system of punitive political lack of judgment.”—which is what the Australians are doing at the moment in a random way because of their xenophobic approach to all kinds of issues—let us say to them “We will be ready to deal with you and we don’t want these people”—many of whom were brought up in Australia and spent their lives in Australia—“sent back here until we’re ready to cope with it.” And in order to be ready to cope with it we need through a select committee process to hear from human rights experts and the judiciary and the police and the citizens who engage with these issues so that we get it right.We agree with the Minister Amy Adams that there are people who need this monitoring—we do not disagree with that. But I would like to support my co-leader in her issue around Part 2 around the definition of “returning offender” and address my remarks to those parts of Part 2 that talk about this returning offender. Again we are in the hands of the Australians. They are deciding whom we are going to categorise as requiring monitoring and that does not seem right because if anyone here has been following the way in which people in detention are treated the arbitrary nature in which the Australian law is being applied in section 501 etc. we cannot rely on them. We need to be clear ourselves about what we are trying to do.I am taking a call tonight because I want to speak for political dissidents. In any law that affects people’s human rights and affects anybody who is involved with the criminal justice system somebody needs to get up and say political dissidents can be captured by these kinds of laws. So a crime that is deemed to be an offence overseas and that can also be an imprisonable offence in New Zealand—and be liable for deportation—could be a political crime. So you could have somebody who is found guilty in Australia of a political crime that is also on the books in New Zealand but the way they were convicted and the reasons for their conviction under Australian law could be quite different from what we would decide was right. But who makes that determination? So we are leaving that to the police force to decide and some of us have concerns about that because we know that political dissidents could be sent home and be of concern to the legal authorities in this country simply because they are political dissidents.So we are cautious. We are very cautious about anything that smacks of that kind of broad-brush gathering into the net of all kinds of people. So it is not only the issue of people who have committed offences at the lesser end; it is also people who might commit offences that actually under the light of sanity and reason such as we might have here are not requiring this level of monitoring and this level of direction from the courts for the 6 months after they are returned etc. But we would not be able to determine that because we are adopting the Australian decision. So if we go to Part 2 subpart 3 it says that if an offender was in detention immediately before his or her return to New Zealand then these sections apply to this person and the court may impose conditions on them. So being in detention is not the test. Getting into detention in Australia does not mean you are a serious offender; it means you got caught up in the net and you may or may not be a serious offender. That is our concern and that is why we really had to abstain because urgency has led to some of the most ineffectual and—CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: I will just take a brief call Mr Chair because I am not a legal expert and this is certainly a complex legal issue. But what I would say is that complex and broad-brush approaches to what is actually quite a narrowly defined problem are problematic and we have seen with urgency in this House before when the House does things that are potentially a breach of the Human Rights Act that it can be a real problem and they have to be rectified. And again if we look at the conditions around taking bodily samples in clause 14 the Criminal Investigations (Bodily Samples) Act 1995 applies to certain returning offenders. In fact a constable can issue a databank compulsion notice requiring the offender to give a bodily sample.I am actually myself quite offended by the word “offender”. I think some people have committed offences where they will probably be tagged all their lives with being a risk to the public but some people after they have served their time do not deserve to be called an offender for the rest of their lives. I think with regard to the distinction in the law here around criminals and offenders I would prefer to see language that makes it clear what we are actually talking about because people who have done their time who have not committed serious crimes—how many times are they going to be re-criminalised by language like this? So we have real concerns about this kind of language and about clause 14 and we would be interested to hear from human rights organisations about this kind of issue.So Part 2 does raise many issues for us. We are concerned about the broadness of it the powers of the police—the contradictions that were raised by the previous speaker Jacinda Ardern about the extended supervision Act not being used which suggests that we are doing this because there is a panic on created by the Draconian Australian legal process but not because this has been thought through and this has been planned.I think another Labour Party speaker earlier talked about the powers of the police which would be stronger than the powers of the courts. We have to—especially after Roast Busters—refuse a romantic view of what can happen when we give powers to the police to make judgments that rightly belong in the courts. That is an important issue for us which we would have liked to explore. I myself would be happy to be proved wrong about this bill not through urgency but through a select committee process that laid out clearly who should be on this register who is an offender and needs constant monitoring and who is not. If we could make that bill clear and if we could actually create some clarity in that bill then I think there would be wholehearted support. But until that time we are unable to do that because it is too broad a net.Also those of us who work with political dissidents in Australia are concerned about the direction of Australian politics and law and the impact that is having on people who are likely to be—if not now then in the future—detainees for what is actually their right to dissent. We will stand for the right to dissent being excluded from this kind of monitoring and this kind of lifelong branding as an offender because that is what keeps us safe. If we do not make these distinctions—if we make our law broad-brush—then we will fail to protect the democratic right to dissent and the democratic right of people to cease to be a criminal offender and to actually be a citizen again who has done their time. If we want to create a society where everybody stays an offender for ever that is not a society where we actually create healing. There are people who need to be monitored; there are people who do not. Thank you.