Roche Denise: Sentencing (Protection of Children from Criminal Offending) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Sentencing (Protection of Children from Criminal Offending) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 03 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1119. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green):I rise to take a short call on the Sentencing (Protection of Children from Criminal Offending) Amendment Bill. This bill is an excellent example of the democratic process—how our Parliament should develop our legislation—and I just want to acknowledge the people who are in the gallery today the young people who have come along to witness democracy in action. This is where the laws are made. Thank you for coming.I also want to congratulate the member who brought this bill to the House in her name Asenati Lole-Taylor and acknowledge her work on the bill in bringing it through the first reading and into the select committee. I also acknowledge Mr Pita Paraone and congratulate him on shepherding it through this part of the process. It is without doubt a well-intentioned member’s bill.We supported this bill to the select committee as did most parties in this House because we wanted the people of New Zealand to have a say on a potential addition to the law around sentencing criminals who have committed crimes around children while they were present. I was not on the select committee but I have reviewed the advice from the officials the 10 written submissions and of course the report back to the House. It is obvious from reviewing that information that there has been a lot of care and attention and discussion that has gone into weighing up the pros and cons of this bill.That is how our legislative process should work because frequently it is not until a bill has got the full weight of parliamentary services to investigate it where the public and experts have an opportunity to examine the bill and where MPs can pick it to pieces during the select committee process that you actually get to scrutinise our legislation and what we are doing—and what we are proposing to do—in great detail. Just by the way that is one of the reasons why the Greens love democracy so much and also why we are frequently opposed to the use of urgency as a short cut in the legislative process.But back to this bill. We come back to the recommendation put to the House from the Law and Order Committee. Basically it has recommended that this bill not go any further and we will be supporting that recommendation. Essentially we acknowledge that this bill is and was well-intentioned and we agree of course that children should be protected from the harm of being present when crimes are committed. This was a unanimous response from all the submitters on the bill. But we do not think that this bill will do that. By the time the sentence is imposed on the offender the harm to the child is already done and we must find ways of preventing that harm—be the ambulance at the top of the cliff not at the bottom.I was heartened by the submission from the Salvation Army which did look at how we sentence offenders. I was struck by the wisdom of some of the comments and I would like to refer to some of its submission where it said: “If we seek to protect vulnerable children a concentrated preventative approach to reducing offending and reoffending is required. Therefore we submit that protecting vulnerable children from harm in these situations is not always achieved by an increase in punishment. Whilst we support the removal of risk … from a child’s environment longer sentences and the separation of children from their parents through prison has also itself been identified as a risk factor for intergenerational criminal activity.” I would add that there is really no evidence that longer sentences act as a deterrent to crime.There have been no gaps in the current sentencing practice and the current sentencing law identified by any of the Ministry of Justice officials so this bill basically does nothing to prevent the harm to children or to fill any kind of legislative gap. For that reason though we acknowledge the good intentions of it we will be opposing this bill. Thank you.