Delahunty Catherine: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4237. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare ko tēnei pō. I would like to take a short call on this and acknowledge the other speakers. I think there have been some really interesting contributions. The last speaker Jacqui Dean asked what flaws there could possibly be in the bill. I think one of the issues is the fact that this is relatively new technology and although we are supporting the bill to the select committee and looking forward to it being a constructive enabling tool for a better justice system there is evidence from other jurisdictions and from the use of technologies of these things not always being followed through and having problems with surveillance. So I think it is not good to become romantic about technology and think that simply because we put the system in place it will automatically work the way it is intended. So I think those are the kinds of issues that will probably come up during this debate.I have also been thinking a lot as our human rights spokesperson about the human rights aspects of the bill and that is the human rights of everybody including the human rights of victims who are often terrified by the return to the community of people who caused them serious harm. So if there is a flexible but firm boundary around that person which means they cannot return to stalk their victims then that is a very good thing. That is something we would support and we recognise that anything particularly for women in the community who are feeling unsafe that makes it safer in that way is a good thing. But the human rights issues as highlighted by section 7 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act report do have to be taken seriously and we will be as my colleague David Clendon said looking at those at the select committee. We can never lightly set aside any concerns around human rights.In fact at the World Congress on Probation that was held in Europe a number of issues were raised. I would just like to quote from some of its findings: “Over the years many understandable fears have been expressed by European probation services and civil libertarians more generally in relation to the surveillance implications of tagging and tracking technologies. European experience to date has shown that EM can indeed be a useful form of offender supervision within a framework in which other programmes may also be applied. The key question is; is this how it will remain in the future?”. So it said it is really important that there must be “a debate about best practice and … an understanding of what must be done to ensure that the worst does not come to the worst as it so easily could with this technology.” That was a quote from the findings of the World Congress on Probation last year because the issues of human rights and civil liberties are not simple and technology does not solve them automatically.Technology is not as my colleague and others have said the solution to reoffending recidivism or risk to the community or indeed risk to the person who has come out of prison. It is actually really important that we not only invest in rehabilitation within the prison system for everyone but also rehabilitate our society and its attitudes towards crime and people who have committed offences. I am thinking here of the late Celia Lashlie and her extraordinary work in this regard and I am also thinking of Kim Workman—people who have actually dedicated their lives to thinking about how we make things safer for all of us. It never really works when there are severe restrictions on human rights to the point at which the person becomes dedicated to overcoming the rules to find an opportunity to further offend. It is much more effective when there is buy-in. What is clear about electronic monitoring is that there does have to be a level of buy-in because people have to charge up the electronic monitors.So monitoring is important and technology should be of service to justice but we also need to keep thinking about the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and what it is that we mean by “human rights”. We need to make sure that actually this is enabling and makes people feel they have a reason to stick within those boundaries rather than to try to circumvent them. We will be looking at this very carefully and making sure there are no unintended consequences because one of the things about the surveillance State that we are now developing in this country for many other people not just criminals—I myself have been a victim of the surveillance State and I know just how random inefficient badly managed and sometimes prejudicial the surveillance State is towards people who dissent. So we want to make sure that it is applied in the right place to the right people and in the right way so that it betters everybody. Thank you.