Goff Phil: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Goff Phil: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 20 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8821. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) 
: 
 The Labour Party supported this bill the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill on its first reading. We worked constructively on the bill at the Law and Order Committee and we are supporting the second reading of this bill. I think that shows that when you get substantive legislation—and in this case the legislation is dealing with relatively small changes—that is properly thought through and is genuinely motivated to get our justice system and our corrections system to work better you will get unanimity surrounding it on the select committee. 
I have to say regretfully that not all justice legislation is like this. Law and order in this country has for a long time been a political football. It is not like that in every country. In countries like Finland you actually do get bipartisan approaches. Those bipartisan approaches are based on what works rather than what superficial appeals to public emotion about some of the pretty awful criminals—and they are—in our community. Too much of our legislation is simply strong on rhetoric and short on having any actual substance that makes a difference to making people safer. That is what we should be trying to do in this House—pass justice and corrections legislation that does make people safer. This legislation was formulated within the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Corrections—not in the National Party research unit—so it made it somewhat easier for people looking objectively at the bill to say: “Yes this is a piece of legislation worth supporting.” 
The bill amends four pieces of legislation: the Bail Act 2000 the Sentencing Act 2002 the Parole Act 2002 and the Bail Amendment Act 2011. I actually had the privilege of being the Minister who passed the first three of those pieces of legislation. They are landmark pieces of legislation. They literally and figuratively brought our justice and corrections system into the 21st century—they modernised it. The work that went into those pieces of legislation was extraordinary. I had a very good deputy secretary at that time by the name of Warren Young who was previously a professor of criminology. We consulted widely we worked hard on the legislation and that legislation I am very proud to say has stood the test of time. The Minister of Corrections acknowledged in I think both her first and her second reading speeches that by and large this legislation has worked well and is administering corrections in the way it should. If we look at a corrections system that is working better today than it has historically in part that is because it has decent legislation to operate under. Having said that there is always room to make improvements. 
What this legislation does is actually introduce—and it describes them as this—minor policy changes to improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of home detention of community-based sentences and of the electronic monitoring regime. It also makes minor drafting amendments to clarify operational procedures. Before I get into just some of the practical things that it does—and I will not go into them in detail because they are not important—I want to contemplate for just a moment the effectiveness of the sentences of home detention which we introduced in 2007. I want to do that at this time because there are members who are still members of this House now sitting on the Government benches who decried the whole concept of home detention—it was soft on crime it would make people unsafe and it was evidence of a Government that did not stand tough on law and order. You know those members will not get up in this House now and contribute to this debate because now the evidence is there of how absolutely wrong they were. 
The Government did a review on the sentence of home detention and this is what it found. It found that the proportion of offenders sentenced to home detention in 2007-08 and in the following year 2008-09 that were reconvicted in the following 12 months was 21.5 percent and 23 percent respectively. Although that was higher than what we might want it was less than half of those who served the same length of time on short prison sentences which was 50.3 percent and 52.6 percent. So what we have there is very clear evidence that if you are interested in actually changing the behaviour of people who have been offenders against the law home detention is far more effective in doing that than is the alternative of a short prison sentence. It is not hard to work out why. When you are put in prison you are in prison with a peer group of people who have committed much worse offences than you might have been in for on a relatively short sentence and you take the cue for your behaviour from the peer group that you are living with. 
The other advantage of home detention was of course the cost to the taxpayer. It does cost money to keep people on home detention. It is about $58 a day. But if you look at what it costs to keep a person imprisoned it is $250 a day. It is just slightly less actually—it is $249. It costs $250 a day to keep them imprisoned on a short prison sentence that may be 3 to 6 months and they come out more likely to reoffend than when you put them in. The other good reason for home detention is this: the offender is still in the community—and it is usually his responsibilities to his family—and is still meeting his responsibilities to the community by going out to work supporting his family and paying tax on the income that he earns. So I hope that people who were so vehemently opposed to this and who gave outrageous speeches in the House about what home detention might do—and I am thinking I suppose of people like Mr Ryall—might reflect on their rhetoric then and reflect on the reality of the fact that this sentence has in fact been very effective. So that reinforces the point I started making that when we pass legislation in this House on justice and on corrections let us make sure it is evidence-based. Let us make sure it is rational. Let us make sure it actually does work to make our community safer. And let us forget the race to the bottom on who can flex their muscles and show that they are tougher on law and order when unfortunately that so-called toughness often leaves the community worse protected rather than better protected. 
It is good to see the National Party when it is in Government being more responsible on these issues than when it is in Opposition. Just very briefly on some of the provisions made by the legislation—[ 
Interruption 
] I am sorry? 
Dr Paul Hutchison 
: I was just saying a very responsible Government. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: No no it is a very poor Government but forced to be more responsible on justice policy when it has to bear the consequences of what it says than when it is in Opposition when it makes outrageous and dishonest statements. 
Some of the changes that are being made—I am not going to go through all of them—to the Sentencing Act and things like requiring pre-sentence reports before the offender is sentenced to home detention or community work sentences make sense. You could not be opposed to that—clarifying the maximum number of hours that they may be required to work under community work sentences clarifying the situation when an offender who is serving a home detention or community-based sentence is subsequently sentenced to another home detention or community-based sentence and electronic monitoring where you actually align the sentence to what the electronic surveillance equipment allows because the two were not in alignment and that was producing a silly situation. 
We also looked at some changes that the Minister put forward in her Supplementary Order Paper with community magistrates being able to alter or cancel sentences previously imposed by community magistrates allowing the Chief Executive of the Department of Corrections to approve changes of address for home or community detention and allowing probation officers rather than the court to direct that 20 percent of a community work sentence of at least 80 hours be spent in training in basic work and living skills. They are sensible changes they have been supported by the Opposition on the select committee and we will always support things that are sensible. We will oppose things that are not evidence-based things that are simply designed for political purposes things that are dishonest in what they claim for the public and things that are counter-productive in what they actually produce in terms of community safety.