Henderson EmilyDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei): It's an honour to rise and speak in support of this bill. I was a member of the Justice Committee that has brought it this far brought it home to this House. I hope we see it now through to its final stages and that it is law because it should be. This is an important change we are bringing about but it is a momentous change and that is primarily what I want to talk about today. But I want to start by talking about those 66 submissions we received and I want to thank those extraordinary men and women who came into our select committee room sometimes via Zoom but often in person and told their trauma to us and did us the honour of having the courage did New Zealand the honour of taking their pain and using it to try to create a better system for those who came after them.Some of that testimony was amongst the most harrowing I have heard—I think any of us have heard. I am sitting tonight beside a colleague who does not normally sit on the Justice Committee and she's just remarked to me that although she comes from the health profession how harrowing that testimony was. It reduced many of us to tears on occasion and I just want again to thank those brave men and women father mother brothers and sisters for what they did for us and for New Zealand. What they did was to remind us of the fact that the people who have suffered are victims as they are called after verdict and complainants beforehand—how they have not been put at the centre of our justice system how we have too often regarded them as tools of the prosecution or the defence instruments of evidence from which determinations are made and we have neglected to give them respect and to protect them and to respect them. This bill is one of a number that are before the House at the moment and it is part of taking this bill on as a bill that has come from the other side of the House—is entirely in keeping with Labour's determination that we will see victims and complainants properly respected and the justice system balanced so that everyone who comes within it is treated appropriately. There is also another group of people who very much need to be thanked because as has been said by previous speakers this bill is unusual in that we kept going with it. It was flawed when it came to us the concept was very much appreciated but it had major flaws. The Ministry of Health the Ministry of Justice—the Ministry of Health in particular—have put their full weight behind it and we have given what I understand to be an extraordinary amount of time and energy to the process of turning a good idea into a workable process.I particularly want to thank the officials who worked with us. I think there were between 11 and 13 versions of this bill brought to us—every single one picked over gone over. That is how hard we and the officials worked. There are whole charts devoted to this bill showing the different stages between the mental health and the criminal justice system because the fundamental thing that this bill tries to do is create an equivalence between two quite different systems: the criminal system the criminal corrections system in which offenders become prisoners and are then subject to easily understandable and chartable stages toward release; and the medical system in which patients vary in their ability to recover and the steps they need to take and those steps can be widely varying.There is very little equivalence between the two systems and the way in which the officials worked on finding ways to create an equivalence that would honour the victims is remarkable. I particularly want to thank Dr John Crawshaw the Director of Mental Health and Addiction at the Ministry of Health; Adri Isbister who is the Deputy Director-General Disability for the Ministry of Health; and Matthew Mitchell the manager for courts and tribunals and policy Ministry of Health. They worked with us over a long period and did an extraordinary job. Now my colleagues have already outlined in detail what this bill does. Fundamentally it does these three things. It creates a different verdict of proven but insane"; it creates a notification process as I've said between the two parallel systems between probation and corrections and the hospital system; and it creates the possibility of a victim impact statement. And it's those that I want to devote the rest of my submission to because bearing in mind the significance of what we are dealing with in terms of trying to put victims at the centre of what we do the reality is that is actually a philosophic conundrum for the adversarial system. I do think it is really really significant as we look toward bills like the Sexual Violence Legislation Bill which looks at how we treat and try not to traumatise complainants/victims during the trial process. As we look towards those sorts of discussions we need to think about the ways in which this bill actually makes some significant changes to the adversarial system. The first way in which it does this is by creating this thing called the "proven but insane" verdict. Verdicts in this country are "guilty" or "not guilty". Not guilty does not mean innocent; not guilty means that the right level of evidence wasn't there. What we've done here is to create a third verdict. We are almost moving in the direction of countries like Scotland or some of the inquisitorial countries which are much more interested in what was actually found. So in Scotland for example you have "proven" you have "not proven" and you have "innocent". So you have "definitely guilty" "dunno but not up to the threshold" and "definitely innocent" verdicts. In creating this new verdict we are doing something profound. We need to recognise that.The next way in which I think we are actually even more profound in this bill—and it is so important in terms of how we see this adversarial system developing in a more humane but also a more accurate model—is in the victim impact statement. Now for those who don't know a victim impact statement is one of the still very few ways in which we allow someone who was the proven victim of an offender to make a statement as to the impact on them of what's happened. In a normal case where you've got a judge who has a sane offender before them who's been found guilty that victim impact statement is essentially evidence for the sentencing judge. It's a point at which the victim is able to be in the adversarial system because they are still a tool. They are still something that is useful to someone else. Not so when you allow a victim impact statement from someone whose offender is insane because in that case there is no sentence. This person is a patient. To describe them as offenders is actually wrong. They do not have the mental element. So who I ask you is this victim impact statement useful to? It's not useful to the judge. It's not useful to the prosecution because the sentence is a foregone conclusion. What this is doing is making the victim a stand-alone person in the courtroom with rights of audience of their own. That Madam Chairperson is a profound change.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Or Madam Speaker.Dr EMILY HENDERSON: Oh Madam Chair I am so sorry—Madam Speaker! Goodness me I'm being carried away with my own excitement over this. But it is; it is a profound change. And I do think that when we look towards the further changes that this side of the House and I hope that side of the House and that side of the House want to make we need to think about this. An adversarial system is flexible is malleable. It can cope with the rights of all persons before it. I commend this bill to the House."