McKee NicoleNICOLE McKEE (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. On behalf of the ACT Party I will be speaking to this third reading of the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill—again supporting the bill in its entirety. In my first reading speech I outlined how this bill works how this bill is about supervisory rehabilitation and reintegration for those that come from overseas to New Zealand having committed a crime there and serving what would be administrative parole-type conditions. I see this as a sort of support mechanism for those that have come especially when you look at many of those that have been returned from Australia who know nobody here in New Zealand who have no one. Instead of just letting them get off a plane and try and fight for themselves we actually put a system around them which helps to reintegrate them back into society. The reality of all of this though is that these people have committed crimes and some of them are more serious than others. Because of that some of the conditions imposed upon some of those people include having electronic monitoring put on them. That is for the safety of them for the immediate community and for our society as a whole. In my second reading speech I outlined the difficulties that had been mentioned not only by the New Zealand Law Society but also by the Justice Committee back in 2019 and the New Zealand Criminal Law Review also pointed out a number of areas that deserve some contemplation. I'm very pleased that the Minister of Justice and the Attorney-General as well as the chair of the Justice Committee have accepted that we should have a form of inquiry to address some of those issues that I have raised and it would be a good idea to do that. I do appreciate the ability of the Government to actually say Yes this is an issue and we should be looking at it at some stage in the future." So I thank the Government for that.Now in my third reading speech I want to just again acknowledge the support but also outline why ACT is supporting retrospective legislation which is something that we don't usually do. I know that there are countries around the world that send people back. We may not have that information-sharing arrangement with them and may not know when they come but effectively 80 percent of those that are returned to New Zealand do come from Australia and are coming under section 501 of their Migration Act 1958 legislation. The reason why ACT is supporting this is because we see that law and order in New Zealand is not what it used to be. We now have a system where victims are often treated worse than the criminals and it doesn't help when the Government ignores or denies that it's happening resulting in the good people of this country finding themselves often victimised several times over.When we speak to retrospectivity in legislation ACT usually recoils from supporting such things. However this instance is different and the reasoning behind it is valid in our opinion. There are currently 265 people being managed by Corrections that have returned from overseas; 41 of them have convictions pre - November 2015 when the parent legislation came in and 21 of those are considered high risk and are on electronic management by Corrections. Should this bill not go through then 21 serious offenders will be let loose without management rehabilitation conditions or proper reintegration into New Zealand society and that's not a recipe that we want to mix into our communities.I just want to point out a couple of things—another stat for example: we've had between 2017 and 2018 85 child sex offenders returned to New Zealand. That's 10 percent of those that were returned that year. Having the monitoring ability of these offenders and reintegrating them back into society is essential in ACT's view. We also know that out of the number of returnees 5 percent of them are known gang members and the police have actually highlighted how much of an impact these returnees have had on our gang situation. We would like to get that under control. Another couple of examples was one of a man who was deported from Australia for a long list of crimes including drug trafficking stalking intimidation weapons offences family violence as well as two assaults—one against a police officer. These are the sorts of people that are being sent back here. Another one is a 23-year-old sportsman who repeatedly bit his then partner during fits of jealousy. He spat in her face and apparently accidentally cut her abdomen while he was cutting her hair something that she did not want to happen—the cutting of the hair or the abdomen. So these are just a couple of examples of some of the people that have been sent back here to New Zealand and some of them are often with no family or no connection to any person within this country.Being able to retrospectively go back pre-2015 to ensure that everybody is captured we think is essential because it's not about punitive punishment; it's about support and it's about reintegration as well as rehabilitation. With that we do support this bill."