Barnett Tim: Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee 
Barnett Tim: Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee 
[Volume:618;Page:14143] 
TIM BARNETT (Labour—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 I am very pleased to speak briefly in this debate as chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee which dealt with this bill. The committee— 
Darren Hughes 
: A very fine committee. 
TIM BARNETT 
: I thank the member. The much admired select committee— 
Richard Worth 
: I’d like to endorse the comments of the junior whip from Labour. It’s a very fine committee and he is a very good chairman. 
TIM BARNETT 
: I stand luxuriating in this but I shall come back to the topic. The committee had the bill for 6 months and in that time I think we did some quite thorough work on it. I wanted to mention five points very quickly. The first is that electronic monitoring is cutting-edge technology. It obviously raises issues about privacy and about the use of information that may be collected in the course of monitoring and therefore it was important to examine and amend the legislation with that in mind. Secondly we had lengthy discussions in the committee about whether what would be applied through electronic monitoring was actually punishment. In my view it certainly is a punishment but I also accept that for some people it is a sentence of liberation if they are high-risk child sex offenders because they will know that with their electronic monitoring the State is monitoring what they are doing and they have a very clear regime to follow. They know that if they step outside that regime they will be breaking the bounds and may end up back in prison. The retrospectivity issue relates to that in the sense that again it is about balancing rights and possibilities in society. 
The third issue I want to put on record is that this legislation provides for only a 10-year regime. Certainly the Justice and Electoral Committee wanted to make it clear that we saw that there would be a need to review its operation after maybe 6 or 7 years to ensure that if after 10 years it was working well it could be extended beyond that which would require an amendment to the legislation. 
Fourthly we were particularly keen to ensure that victims’ rights were enhanced through the legislation. Victim participation in a number of aspects of the regime was added in as detailed in our report on the bill. 
Lastly as the Minister mentioned there is a very exciting pilot scheme in Dunedin that involves all the key agencies in managing sex offenders in the community. The problem raised by that scheme was outside the boundaries of this bill but concerned the exchange of information between those agencies as a Privacy Act issue. The Minister has a Supplementary Order Paper that thanks to the work between the parties and the committee I understand will be accepted even though it is outside the bounds of the bill. On that basis I would like to thank the committee members the committee staff and advisers from the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Corrections for their excellent work on the bill.