Davis Kelvin: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDavis Kelvin: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8135. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): I have very few problems with what the intent of this legislation is—that is to collect information so that these deportees when they return to New Zealand can be monitored by the probation service by the parole services or by whoever needs to monitor them. That is not really the point. We have objections around the time it has taken to get this bill to the House and the shoddy drafting of the legislation.Let me give you an example. On 25 January in the Northern Advocate which is not exactly the world’s most widely read newspaper there was a report about a woman who was deported from Australia. She had participated in a murder in Australia and was sentenced to a number of years in jail. She was deported back to Kaikohe. I will not name the woman because she has to get on with her life. But she is not going to be much of a problem to the Kaikohe community. Murderers do not tend to go on and murder over and over again except of course serial murderers I must admit. That woman is very little risk to the Kaikohe community.The point of the story is that in that newspaper report on 25 January the former Minister of Justice Judith Collins said that the deportation of prisoners was an issue that the Government was aware of and that needed to be changed. She then went on to say that the Government was looking into a monitoring scheme for serious offenders deported to New Zealand. That was in January. We had an admission by the former justice Minister the predecessor of our current justice Minister saying the Government was well aware of this issue and that it was looking into a monitoring system for serious offenders deported to New Zealand. And now 11 months later we are going through this whole process based on legislation that has taken 12 days to draft. There is something seriously wrong with the story that the country has been told in terms of the genesis of this legislation.The Minister who has just finished speaking Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga talked about the primary goal being public safety. We have no problems with that but my question is: how does the bill protect public safety when we are deporting people from Australia and dumping them here in New Zealand with a couple of hundred dollars in their back pocket with vouchers for 5 days in a motel and then telling them they are on their own? How is it protecting public safety when they do not have the support systems around them? They do not have their family networks around them—they are back in Australia—and they do not have legal representation here in New Zealand because their lawyer is back in Australia. How is New Zealand going to be a safer place if they do not have their support systems and do not have the proper networks and social services wrapping around them to the extent they should?The Prime Minister stands up and says he is the only person who is speaking for victims in New Zealand. That is rubbish. If these guys are not supported to the extent they should be what the Prime Minister is going to do with this regime is create more victims here in New Zealand and that is what we are trying to prevent at all costs. That is why we say that this legislation although it is good to look at the information-gathering side of things and all that is missing something in the fact that there is little mention of the support services that need to be wrapped around these guys. Once their 5-day motel voucher has run out where do they stay? What is going to be put in place for them? That is why I suggested some 5 or 6 weeks ago that the Government should fund a marae—and let us face it; many of these people are Māori—to look after these people to cater for them to accommodate them for 4 or 5 weeks while services can come in and provide some comprehensive wraparound get them on their feet and help them to get a job and an IRD number and all those sorts of things that they probably do not have.As I said in the Committee stage many of these people have no connection to New Zealand. One person I met on Christmas Island a young man by the name of Ronald Neilson was born in Australia. He has no connection to New Zealand. He said to me: “If they are going to deport me deport me to Bali.” He knows more about Bali than he does about New Zealand. Despite the fact that his parents were born here he has no connection.The Minister has made out like she is the only person running around doing things and that the Government has set up this information sharing about criminal risk. That is great. All this information sharing is fine but the information that the Australian Government has not shared with us is the number of people who are on the plane that is meant to be arriving tomorrow where that plane is going to land or what the names of those people are—the most basic things. It has not shared that information with us. So it is fine for the Minister to get on her high horse and start talking about the great system they have set up for sharing information but when it comes to what is happening on the ground and what is going to happen to tomorrow with the arrival of a planeload of deportees they have not shared the most basic bits of information.So how do we support these people? We do not know who they are. We do not know their criminal record. We do not know where they are going to go. I wonder whether those people know which motel they are going to be put up in. None of these questions have been answered. That means these people are bound to be dumped on our streets and if they do not have the support systems that they require and they run out of food and they run out of clothes and they are cold at night and they have no money chances are they are going to have to resort to crime to get by. They are being set up to fail. All the monitoring in the world by the probation service does not put food in someone’s stomach does not get them money and does not give them a job. These are the issues that we have concerns about.Some of these people have not even committed crimes in Australia; they are being deported because they fail a character test. And let me tell you about something that I believe is extremely frightening and that is an operation by the Australian authorities its Border Force—that is the immigration people and the police. It is Operation Fortitude. Just google it. It is an operation that was meant to go ahead in October of this year where the Australian Police and the Australian Border Force were going to randomly check people’s visas on the streets of Melbourne. So basically they were going to be racially profiling or profiling people and checking their visas. If their visas were not up to scratch then they could have been detained and deported. And those people could well have ended up here in New Zealand for nothing more than just not having their visas up to scratch or completing that process properly.That means we could have more people uplifted from their homes in Australia from their families and from their support networks and landed here on New Zealand soil where we actually have to look after them and where we have to re-establish them. And of course as I have said if we do not do that properly these people will be set up to fail and they have not committed a crime. They will be set up to fail. Does that mean that they have to commit crimes to get by? Does that mean we create more victims in New Zealand?I just want to finish telling the story and I have told it already during the course of this debate about a young guy Beau Adams whose entry into the Australian criminal system was on dubious grounds to start with. He had a domestic violence order put against him. The person who put that domestic violence order against him then texted him phoned him insisted that he drive her somewhere they argued she claimed that he broke the domestic violence order and he was then imprisoned. And I do not even know that he went to court; he was definitely on remand. He was there for 159 days before he was eventually sent to Perth from the east coast where he lived and then on to Christmas Island. I am not even sure that that guy has been charged with a crime and he could possibly be sent back to New Zealand where he has not been since he was 4 years old.I know that Australia has the sovereign right to make the laws that it makes but its laws are wrong and we in New Zealand are the ones who are bearing the brunt of its poor laws. And if this does not work if this legislation that we are enacting now does not work then we are going to create more New Zealand victims. Kia ora.