Bail Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBail Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 27 August 2013. Volume:693;Page:12881. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Tuesday 27 August 2013(continued on Wednesday 28 August 2013)Bail Amendment BillThird ReadingDebate resumed.Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Justice): Good morning Mr Deputy Speaker to you and to the House. The Bail Amendment Bill also strengthens the ability of police and courts to deal with young defendants on bail. The current law includes a strong presumption in favour of bail for defendants aged 17 to 19 years. The original bill removed this presumption for those who had previously been imprisoned as the data showed that this group had a high rate of offending on bail. The Law and Order Committee questioned the justification for the presumption for bail for 18 and 19-year-olds. This provision seemed to have rather obscure historical origins and the committee recommended that it be removed. The Government has agreed to this change although the original provision for 17-year-olds remains. This recognises the need wherever possible to avoid the incarceration of those under 18 in keeping with New Zealand’s international commitments.The bill includes a statutory regime for electronically monitored or EM bail. This has been a useful aspect of our bail system for several years but until now electronically monitored bail has been granted by the courts under their generic power to impose bail conditions. The Government believes that the time has come to make specific provision for electronically monitored bail in the legislation to ensure that it is applied consistently and effectively.The original bill provided for electronically monitored bail to be administered by police as it is at present. At the Committee of the whole House stage I tabled Supplementary Order Paper 339 to allow the Department of Corrections as well as the New Zealand Police to administer electronically monitored bail. The Department of Corrections already administers a number of other programmes involving the electronic monitoring of offenders in their homes such as home detention and parole conditions involving residential restrictions. It makes sense to take advantage of this expertise by allowing corrections staff to assess defendants in their homes for their suitability for electronically monitored bail. Police however will retain primary responsibility for the oversight of defendants on bail.The member Richard Prosser has tabled two Supplementary Order Papers to bring in what would have become known as Christie’s Law. This started from a petition put together by Mrs TraceyMarceau signed by about 58000 people and that petition is currently with the Law and Order Committee. Can I just thank the member Richard Prosser for providing me with copies of the Supplementary Order Papers prior to the Committee stage so that I was able to consider them. That is a matter that we would look forward to considering after the Christie’s Law petition has been dealt with by the committee and sent back to the House.I have also taken note of comments made by some members in the debates regarding the slowness of matters passing through the criminal justice system. I could not agree more. It is absolutely ridiculous that people are on bail for 18 months and that we wait in some cases for years for these serious matters to come through the court system. I can say that there is some hope already and that is around the implementation of the Criminal Procedure Amendment Act the Criminal Procedure Act Implementation Project legislation—or the “CPAI Act”—which is now in place. But also I look forwardto the support of other parties for the Judicature Modernisation Bill which I intend bringing to this House in the very near future to speed up the system and have justice not only being seen to be done but being seen to be done in a prompt and efficient manner. I commend this bill to the House.Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): Labour is supporting the Bail Amendment Bill as a relatively modest but nevertheless constructive way of dealing with the problem of offending while on bail. I say “relatively modest” because the measures in this bill will tackle the problem around the edges but will not tackle the fundamental problem of why the level of offending on bail is so high. I want to come to that in due course.There is naturally in this country a presumption of innocence until proven guilty and I do not think any member of the House would seriously want to challenge that presumption. It is embedded in our system of justice. If we have a presumption of innocence then we have a presumption that people will be granted bail. That presumption cannot be absolute. It would be crazy for it to be absolute because you also have to take into account public safety when you are dealing with defendants who are charged with committing in some cases very serious offences.Right now the judge has the presumption and then takes into account firstly whether the defendant is likely to continue offending. If that is the case then the person needs to be locked up. The second thing is whether the person is likely to abscond. Again if there is evidence that that is likely then remand in custody is appropriate. And third the judge takes into account whether the defendant is likely to do anything that might pervert the course of justice such as interfering with witnesses while on bail. This bill does not fundamentally change the discretion of the judge or the decision that the judge makes—presuming innocence but weighing it up against public safety factors.The reason why change is needed I think has become very obvious in recent years. In the course of the Law and Order Committee hearing we heard from traumatised people who had lost family members—murdered by defendants who were at that point on bail having faced other charges on sometimes quite serious offences.The particular case that achieved a lot of publicity was the case of ChristieMarceau. It was a tragic case of a young woman murdered by a man who had previously kidnapped her abused her and then was given bail to live in close vicinity to theMarceau household. That family understandably wanted to know why. Why was bail given when the police had come out against the giving of bail? We heard from other families who had suffered similar losses.Those individual cases are backed up by statistics. Seventeen percent of those who are on bail go on to reoffend while they are on bail. Often it is for relatively small offences—relatively minor ones—but not in every case. In the 5-year period from 2006 to 2010 23 people on bail went on to commit murder; 21 went on to commit homicide; about 763 went on to commit acts of a sexual nature including serious sexual offending; and a whopping 7146 went on while they were on bail to commit acts with the intent of injuring other people.Those statistics look huge. I guess you have to see that fairly in context. Those statistics represent a relatively small percentage of the 450000 people who were bailed over that period. But it is not small if a member of your family is the victim of a crime committed by somebody on bail. Therefore we needed to look at that and we needed to do something to try to ensure that greater scrutiny is applied by judges in respect of people with a high likelihood of offending.That is what this bill basically does. This bill focuses on a reverse burden of proof. At the moment the norm is that if you do not want somebody to get bail the police have to prove to the court that that person is not safe to bail. The reverse burden of proofturns it on its head and says that the defendant needs to demonstrate to the court that they are safe to release. The net impact of that as we discovered in questioning people before the select committee is that basically the judges will look more carefully at cases on the margin.I do not want to exaggerate the impact this bill will have. That would be unfair to the people who made submissions to it. We learnt that it will probably mean an increase of 50 prison beds. We are talking about more than 90000 people being bailed each year. It will affect about 350 people because of the flow-through effect and that has an impact. It is much more significant than Simon Power’s ludicrous piece of legislation which this Government put through before the last election that had an effect on 10 people—10 people. That was as an eminent professor of law said simply window dressing.It will not have the same impact as the fundamental law that it is amending the Bail Act which I put through in 2000. That Act lifted by 200 percent—210 percent actually—the number of people remanded in custody. That had a fundamental effect. I believe that it was necessary at the time but again I do not want to create the impression that the answer to offending on bail is simply locking up more and more people. Every year we remand 43 people per 100000 in custody while their trials are awaited. That compares with Australia where the number is 30—our 43 against 30—with the UK where it is 25 and Finland where it is 10. So we are locking up a relatively high proportion of people on bail and that is why I say that this bill just deals with things around the margins.What we have got to do is make some fundamental changes to the way in which bail works. These are the sorts of things that the Labour Party is considering. I am pleased that the Minister picked up the fact that if you have got somebody waiting 18 months before their case is heard then of course there is going to be an increase in the likelihood of that person offending while on bail. Justice delayed is justice denied and the increasing length of time before cases can be heard in court particularly before the District Court in Manukau and Auckland is where you have got to tackle this problem at its fundamentals. Let us look at making justice swifter so that the cases are not waiting month after month after month when the person who is bailed and more likely to be bailed because of the length of time they are waiting is likely to reoffend.The second thing that we looked at was the ability of the police in practice to appeal a case where they applied for bail to be withheld so that the person would be remanded in custody and the judge came to a different decision. I am not saying that the judge was right or wrong but if the police really believed that the person should be remanded in custody they needed to have a way to appeal that decision swiftly. Otherwise it is theoretical. The person is let out and the police say: “Well the person is out now. We won’t bother.” The sense that we got at the committee was that police were not actually appealing cases even when they thought the judge had basically got it wrong.The third thing we need to do is give the judge better risk assessment tools. You have got to say that when you sit in the court and you watch the judge making decision after decision those decisions are made in minutes. They are not decisions that are made after great contemplation. They cannot be if you have got 91000 bail cases a year so you have got to do more to assist judges in terms of risk assessment. We need to look at that. Fourthly and I think quite important is that we need a better review process of where the bail decision in hindsight was wrong.I want to make something very very clear. That is not about interfering with the judicial process. The review process needs to occur within the judicial system maintaining judicial integrity and judicial independence. But the head of bench perhaps with the task of looking at cases like theMarceau case could say: “We got it wrong in hindsight. It had tragic consequences. How did we get it wrong? What can wedo about it?”. I think that that review system could be considerably strengthened and made more transparent.So what I am saying is that this bill does things on the margin. I am comfortable about extending the reverse burden of proof in murder cases and cases of serious violent and sexual offending. We had that in the original Act. Expand it by all means. I think that it makes sense where you have got serious class A drug charges. We know that more than a third of the people bailed on serious class A drug charges are out dealing again while they are on bail. Yes of course a reverse burden of proof should be there with the alleged offender having to prove to the court that it is safe to put them out.I want to touch on young defendants briefly. Look if you are 18 or 19 you are an adult in every aspect of the law and therefore a special presumption—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!Hon PHIL GOFF: —of bail is not warranted in that case. If you are 17 and I will finish on this point—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: No you will finish now. [Interruption] Order! The member’s time has expired.JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki): I am very pleased to speak in the third reading of the Bail Amendment Bill. Firstly I want to answer some of the claims that the lack of efficiencies that have been identified in the court system by Minister Judith Collins and by some members of the Opposition are somehow not being addressed by this Government. In fact in the 5 years of this National-led Government there has been an aggressive programme in this area to refine and make efficiencies in our court and judicial system.The first one I want to talk about is the Criminal Procedure Act which came into effect in July this year. It does relate to the Bail Amendment Bill because the gamut of this bill falls within the judicial framework. The Criminal Procedure Act which has only just come into effect is already having an impact on reducing the backlog of cases that are waiting to be brought to trial. Of course you have to acknowledge that it is not just the criminal system that causes some delays. There are always occasions where defendants or people accused of a crime need to take counsel from their lawyer. There are many reasons for delays but this Government is aggressively addressing the issue of justice delayed.The Judicature Modernisation Bill is also a very comprehensive piece of work to be brought to the House by the Hon Judith Collins. It is designed to speed up court processes. It will allow for more powers to be able to manage judicial resources so there will be efficiencies within the judicial system and it will allow for better administrative efficiencies. Knowing my local courts and having visited a few courts it is a system that up until very recently has been paper-based and is still making the transition through to using audiovisual links. The Hon Chester Borrows is leading that work in our court system and already it is having a beneficial impact on court waiting times and access to justice.Talking about the bail system is about deciding what is going to happen to a defendant who is charged with an offence while their case goes through the criminal justice system. If a decision on bail is required the basic decision that the court has to make is whether the defendant should be imprisoned or whether they should be allowed to be returned to the community with some conditions. The Bail Amendment Bill contrary to what the Opposition might want you to think makes some significant refinements for the better around those decisions about whether to award bail and under what conditions. The main provision in the bill is around reversing the burden of proof. So those charged with serious class A drug offences such as the manufacture of P will on the enactment of this bill be required to convince the judge as to why they should beallowed bail. Similarly in respect of people who are charged with murder the current list of specified offences which has not been reviewed for some time since the Bail Act was enacted has also been reviewed. So the bill expands the list of violent and sexual offences that result in a defendant being subject to a reverse burden of proof. It will be harder for those people accused of a serious offence to get bail in New Zealand.I want to pay tribute to TraceyMarceau and the 84000 others who signed the Christie’s Law petition. I want to pay tribute first of all to theMarceau family. They have lost their beloved daughter in the most awful of circumstances. I want to commend them for having the courage to bring the Christie’s Law petition to this House. The decision was made in the Law and Order Committee that we would not consider the Christie’s Law petition at the same time as the Bail Amendment Bill. That was done for very good reason. The reason we decided not to consider those two items together is that we need to give the petition the petitioners the parents of ChristieMarceau and the other people who have been the victims of murder the due consideration of the matters they have brought to us. We considered that some of the items brought to us in the petition were out of scope with the provisions of the Bail Amendment Bill and we would not have been able to do justice to the petition had we put them together. I want to assure the petitioners on behalf of ChristieMarceau and the other victims of serious crime and murder that the Law and Order Committee is giving very serious consideration to their petition and we will be reporting to the House when we have considered our deliberations.The Bail Amendment Bill goes a long way to protecting New Zealanders. The Bail Amendment Bill goes a long way in National’s programme of making New Zealand safer for New Zealanders. I commend the bill to the House.ANDREW LITTLE (Labour): I rise to speak in this third reading of the Bail Amendment Bill. I will just start with some first principles when it comes to criminal justice. There are two things we look to the criminal justice system to do. The first is to convict and to deal effectively with the guilty—those who have committed crimes those who have been found guilty after a consideration of the evidence and a decision made whether by a judge or a jury. The second thing we require of the criminal justice system is to protect the innocent because the truth is that the enforcement authorities can get it wrong and they can get it horribly wrong and catastrophically wrong.Over the years over generations indeed over the centuries rules have been built up in respect of those who face serious allegations of criminal wrongdoing from the State—with all the resources that the State brings to bear upon that process—to ensure that there are rules to consider the evidence and to ensure that those who are innocent those who are not guilty are properly safeguarded and protected. Part of that process is the time between when an alleged offender is charged and when they are tried. As other speakers have already noted—Phil Goff the Minister Judith Collins and indeed the last speaker Jacqui Dean as well—actually we do have delays in our criminal justice system in New Zealand at the moment and we have had those delays for some time now. This is not new. That has made the decision about how to manage an alleged offender in the meantime a very important one. The longer the time between a person being charged and the time they get tried that weighs against incarcerating them because if they are subsequently found not guilty then they themselves have experienced an injustice that we should not take lightly.So the bail decision is a very important decision. But as my colleague Phil Goff has pointed out what we have seen in more recent years is that some who have been released on bail free to move about the community but under conditions have continued to offend on bail. So the balance has had to berestruck to ensure that when judges are considering what to do with alleged offenders particularly those who have aprior track record and especially when that prior track record includes convictions for the same or similar offences judges are now more alert to the risk assessment needed to make a decision on whether bail should be granted. That is a healthy response to growing community concern about that particular issue. This bill I think seeks to strike that balance. I think notwithstanding some ongoing reservations that we have particularly about the treatment of young people by and large this bill gets the balance about right.For serious offences and where there are alleged offenders who have previous convictions for serious offences it is no longer a matter of the police having to demonstrate why bail should be denied and why they should be incarcerated. It is for the defendant in the matter to demonstrate that they do not pose a risk to the community. I think that is an acceptable trade-off to make in our criminal justice system where a track record of convictions clearly elevates the risk that an alleged offender poses and therefore is a matter for the judge to take into account and to say “Well all right. You’ve had these convictions. You’ve offended again. Clearly the risk is heightened so the presumption would be to detain you but you have an opportunity to demonstrate to this court why you should not be detained and why you should be released on bail.” This legislation does not deny bail or at least it does not automatically deny bail to alleged offenders but it does heighten the hurdle if you like for them to jump in order to continue to enjoy their freedom until such time as they are tried on the charge that they face. It heightens the obstacle if you like for those on very serious offences and those on serious drug offences. I have to say in light of events over the last few years that I do not find that objectionable. When considering public safety and community safety particularly the management of offenders and those with a track record that is an acceptable standard to legislate for.It is for the same reason that I think it is going too far to say that just because you have been charged with an offence even if you do not have any prior convictions that should lead to a presumption that you should be detained rather than being granted bail. I think that was the conundrum in the dreadful ChristieMarceau case where the judge—dealing with a young offender who had no previous conviction and was facing a serious charge one of kidnapping—had no information about what subsequently became known about that offender’s mental health and made the decision to release that offender on bail with the tragic consequences that it had for theMarceau family. The reality is that this law would not change that situation in terms of the judge’s discretion and what the judge has to do when dealing with an application for bail.I think that highlights another very important point too and that is that in the end it is the judges sitting in court with the information provided by the police and the defendant who are in the best position to make judgments about the management of the offender or alleged offender as the case may be. There are repeated calls to limit reduce and in some cases eliminate judges’ discretion when it comes to these matters of human frailty and humankind. I just register my strong objection to that. We charge judges with a very difficult task and I do not know of any judge who when dealing with a bail application or a sentencing and the possibility of incarcerating a person does not take great care with that decision. Most of the applications for bail that judges deal with are on minor matters and do not need to be particularly taxing of a judge’s time and intellectual effort but in the very serious cases judges do need to have the means the time and the resources to pay very careful attention to the matters before them. For that matter I think anything more that can be done to assist judges and give them the means the tools and the methods to undertake a proper risk assessment of an offender or an alleged offender appearing before the court is all for the good. That is the sort ofthe thing that we should be encouraging when it comes to the effective administration of our criminal justice system.Notwithstanding the reservations that we have had from the outset because of a pattern that we have seen over many years now in our law of just shifting that balance and while trying to secure public safety through the effective management of the guilty and those who act anti-socially we have to make sure that we do not also in that process capture the innocent and treat them unjustly. That is always the difficult balance that the criminal justice system has to deal with.One of the good things that this bill does is it elevates bail applications in cases of serious drug offences to be considered by judges only and that is as it should be.I am going to conclude by just simply commenting again on one of the matters that appeared in the Minister of Justice’s Supplementary Order Paper 339 which was tabled only yesterday and that is the issue of the management of electronic bail. Although the Minister gave an explanation today that she had not hitherto given even after I requested an explanation from her office yesterday that explanation still does not deal with the mechanics of how the Minister’s discretion on who will be responsible for electronic bail is going to be exercised. It is all very well allowing it to be done by either the police or the Department of Corrections or both of them. But how is a decision going to be made on who is best equipped to do it?The Minister says that the Department of Corrections is best equipped to do it. So why not give the job to that department? It already monitors those who are sentenced to home detention and to sentences that carry electronic monitoring. Why not give the department that job? Why provide in the law for either the police or the Department of Corrections or both? We still have not had an adequate explanation of the way in which that discretion by the Minister might be exercised and the grounds that the Minister might take into account on making that decision. Is it going to be done on a regional basis? Is it going to be done by simply just saying yes both departments can do it and you sort it out amongst yourselves.”? That remains an unsatisfactory element to this bill and no doubt this House will have to monitor very carefully its application and implementation. But notwithstanding that as I have said we will continue to support the bill.JAN LOGIE (Green): I would like to start my speech today just by questioning the use of urgency for this Bail Amendment Bill. The first reading of this bill happened 3 days after the bill’s introduction in May of last year and then there was 6 months between the Law and Order Committee’s report back and the second reading. Now we find ourselves in urgency. It is hard to see actually what the urgency is and it does seem to be that this is possibly more a case of poor House management than the actual urgency of this bill.For more than a decade the Green Party has stood in this House and spoken up for a justice system that is consistent with our human rights obligations based on the best evidence fair and principled. We have often been in a minority taking this position and it seems that today again there is no exception in this situation as we are in a minority opposing this Bail Amendment Bill.This bill is another dog whistle to the “Get tough on crime” brigade who have been feeding the myth that getting tough on crime will make us all safer. If only it were that easy I suggest that we probably would have eliminated crime altogether back in the Dark Ages but it did not happen. This bill has an admirable purpose—to improve public safety and ensure the overall integrity of New Zealand’s bail system. It is hard to argue with that as a purpose but sadly by examining the evidence we know that it is not going to achieve these goals. These piecemeal reactive changes do not serve theintegrity of the system. We need a much more strategic integrated approach to ensuring justice and safety in this country.Despite the small likelihood of success this bill does considerable mischief to some key tenets of our judicial system such as the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise. It also erodes the importance of judicial discretion. These erosions of the central tenets of the legal system must be resisted. This bill seeks to further erode these tenets so we will continue to oppose it.We oppose this bill because it is another ad hoc measure that is not supported by evidence or sound principles. We oppose this bill because it reverses the burden of proof so that now someone with a previous conviction will have to prove to the court that they will not offend while on bail. I ask this House: how do you prove a negative? It is really a very difficult thing if not impossible. We oppose this bill because it significantly reduces judicial discretion when hearing bail applications despite the exercise of discretion being a very basic principle of judicial practice. We oppose this bill because it compromises the presumption in favour of bail for those aged 17 to 19 who have previously been sentenced to imprisonment.This reverse burden of proof is a breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and this was noted by the Law Society. Within the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act it states that there is “the right not to be arbitrarily … detained.” There is a right when charged with an offence “to be presumed innocent until proved guilty”. There is the right when charged with an offence to “be released on reasonable terms and conditions unless there is just cause for continued detention;”. This bill undermines those core rights. It changes the goalposts. There is a provision in this lawmaking process to override those rights but there needs to be a strong justification for doing so and in this case there is not.The Human Rights Commission noted in its submission that the case for changing this law effectively relied on a reverse onus preventing less than one instance of serious violent offending a year—less than one instance of that. When I say that I am not undermining the huge impact of that one instance on those families and clearly that person themselves but we do need to hold that in balance with the rights that are being taken from all the other people who will be affected by this law change. I need to remind this House that currently 60 percent of people remanded on bail are found not guilty. By extending this provision of not providing bail to people we are denying them liberty and freedom when they may not be found guilty. That is a very serious matter.Removing the strong presumption in favour of bail for 17 to 19-year-olds who have previously been sentenced to imprisonment breaches a raft of our international obligations: the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice the United Nations Guidelines for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency and the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child. All of these conventions emphasise the well-being of the young person and the avoidance of detention wherever possible.We signed up to these agreements as a country because we recognised that they are in the best interests of our children and young people and our society as a whole. Yet this bill seems to have forgotten that and it has forgotten all of the research that we have done as a country and that has been done around the world to find out what actually works to reduce youth crime. In 2000 the Ministry of Youth Affairs as it was then commissioned a meta-analysis of all the research that had been done into the causes and solutions of youth crime. This research found that persistent young offenders started young and started committing serious crimes fairly early and were likely to keep offending.The dog whistle brigade will say “Well that is just cause for this bill. We need to lock them up.” but what that research found was that persistent young offenders comefrom families overloaded with problems and under-equipped with coping skills. Young offenders show a range of problems that include “substance abuse criminal behaviours accommodation difficulties poverty unemployment mental health problems violence neglect and abuse of every type imaginable poor education and more.” and I am quoting from the report when I give that list.With so much going on they found that effective solutions need to use multiple techniques and touch on the four corners of a young person’s life: family school/work peer group and neighbourhood. They need to provide these young people with skills in how to avoid offending. This “lock ’em up throw away the key” attitude does nothing towards that vision.That same research found that residential interventions—of which locking them up is clearly an example—have to work so much harder to succeed and that getting tough with young offenders almost always fails. The Law and Order Committee already verified the failure of the prison system to address youth offending when it noted that young defendants who have served a prison sentence offend while on bail at a much higher rate than those with no history of offending. So why—why—when we have a chance to intervene and actually make a difference in the lives of these young people and reduce their chances of offending would we forget everything that actually works and respond by removing the fairness from the system and keeping them locked up longer?MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): The previous speaker Jan Logie said that the Government and the National Party have moved the posts and that is right. We have moved the posts and I am actually very proud about that.I want to acknowledge the Hon Judith Collins because for too long in this country—yes we have a system that is built on the presumption of innocence and that is important and we will never depart from that—I do not think we have actually given proper care and consideration to victims’ rights. It is important that a victim is actually brought into the process and I do not see anything wrong with actually putting the victim’s rights ahead of an offender’s rights.I would like to acknowledge the families that appeared in front of the Law and Order Committee because that was a tough process for them to go through. It was critically important for us as a committee because sometimes we can sit in this sanitised environment down here and to actually hear the stories and to be able to understand the huge impact that they make on these people’s lives—and they will always have a huge impact on their lives—was really important to us.I want to acknowledge Tracey and BrianMarceau. They are the parents of ChristieMarceau. I met with Brian and Tracey shortly after the tragedy when Christie was murdered. Of course it would be fair to say that they were still stunned at that point. Of course Tracey has gone on with the support of the Sensible Sentencing Trust to campaign on Christie’s behalf. I want to acknowledge them and I want to acknowledge the submission that they made to the select committee as well because it was compelling and I know that it sits in the forefront of our own minds when we are dealing with this Bail Amendment Bill.I want to acknowledge the Hon Phil Goff and of course Kris Faafoi who were on the select committee with us. I feel that we worked really well together on this bill. I want to acknowledge the chairperson Jacqui Dean and of course Richard Prosser who took the time to put those Supplementary Order Papers 334 and 335 together and as the Minister said to get them out there early for review. Of course I am disappointed in the Greens’ position. David Clendon always has some interesting contributions to make in the committee. It appeared that the Greens had already taken a position on thebill and that was to oppose it which was disappointing but in some ways it does not surprise us.Mr Goff made an interesting comment about making sure that the process in terms of getting offenders back to court was important because offenders out on bail if they are on bail for too long are likely to offend. Well to me that is almost counter-intuitive. If we are worried about that then that is probably a good test to say that an offender should be remanded in custody if the clock is ticking in terms of when they are going to offend.In terms of the numbers that are going to be affected by this bill it does have some real meat in it. All I would say to that is that if we can save one ChristieMarceau—save someone from having that happen again—then this bill is actually doing the job it was designed to do.I just want to say that this is a very very good bill. It was a pleasure to work on it. It is certainly in line with the programme that has been implemented by our Minister of Justice and Minister of Police and I am very happy to commend it to the House.RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): I am pleased to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to the final reading of the Bail Amendment Bill. New Zealand First has supported this bill from the outset and we continue to do so. I do not intend to impose too greatly upon the time of the House simply to go over old ground yet again. As I have stated several times throughout these debates New Zealand First’s only quibble with the bill is that in some respects we do not believe that it goes far enough.This we have attempted to address through the introduction of Supplementary Order Papers 334 and 335 and by restating several times that we hope that the Government will not regard the culmination of this process of lawmaking as being the end of the problem. Rather we hope and trust that the Government will come back to this issue once again as soon as it is practical to do so to apply the lessons that have been learnt through the process of this bill to incorporate the information that submitters have brought to the knowledge of the Law and Order Committee and to address the concerns of all those very fine people who signed and were involved in the petition initiated by the tragic and avoidable case of ChristieMarceau.The passage of this law has been a moving process for the select committee members. Under the very able chairpersonship of Jacqui Dean we listened to a number of very impassioned submitters some of whom had experiences to recount that I am sure no member here would want to repeat. The commission of crimes against the person crimes of violence crimes against property sexual crimes and others are particularly obnoxious and the stories that were told bore that out. There is raw emotion connected to this subject and people have an expectation and I believe a right to expect that the Government will pay it adequate regard and will craft laws that will protect innocent people from the actions and the degradations of criminals.The commission of crimes by offenders who are on bail is particularly difficult for ordinary people to stomach and I believe it behoves this House the Government and all of us here to do our very utmost to ensure that the risk to the public is minimised. No system can be absolutely perfect of course. This we know and to a large degree we regret that fact. But laws can always be made better when there is will on the part of parliamentarians and when all parties and members from across the House resolve to work together for the common good put aside petty differences and work in the best interests of public safety.When this House next addresses the issue of bail—and I hope it will be sooner rather than later—I look forward to working constructively with the Government and with members of other parties to ensure that as much as is humanly possible is done to ensure that those offenders who pose a danger to other people are removed from theopportunity to express that danger. It is a balancing act; we accept this. Against the need to ensure public safety we must measure the right of those who stand accused to the presumption of innocence. Somewhere in between those two competing priorities a value judgment—an informed judgment—must be made by those who are learned in the ways of criminals the criminal mind and the likelihood of criminal behaviour. It falls to this House to provide those learned judges with the very best of tools—with the direction and the guidance and the ability to set bail or refuse it based on an accurate and informed assessment of the likelihood of further offending.We hope and trust that this bill will be a stepping stone on the way to that situation being resolved. New Zealand First supports this bill.IANMcKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): It is a pleasure to speak in support of this bill the Bail Amendment Bill in its third reading. I was a little concerned I suppose or I thought that it was unfortunate during the Committee stage yesterday when I heard a speaker refer to this piece of legislation as populist. I do not really think that “populist” is a term that I would apply to it. I think it is a very structured piece of legislation that moves the bail system with the times and I think it is really important that we do that. It is going to make quite a lot of difference to the way the system works. This bill is one of a suite of legislation introduced by National in a comprehensive programme of law and order reform that is unquestionably working and I will touch on a little bit of that shortly. It is achieving much better results that one could have hoped for.This bill improves the integrity of the bail process. It gives the police the ability to make positive decisions in respect of people who fail to answer to police bail it tightens significantly the bail arrangements for defendants under 20 years of age and it reverses the onus on those people to prove that they are capable and worthy of release on bail.Again we heard from the Greens. Unfortunately it was from a member of the Greens who was never at any stage present during the submission process. I think that if one had been present during the submission process one would take a very different view of this. When someone has proved that they cannot be trusted surely the onus must go back on to them to prove that they can be trusted and I think that is the simplest way of looking at the reverse burden of proof. It is really putting people who have proved in the past that they cannot be trusted in the position of having to prove they can be trusted before they can in this case receive bail. I do not think that is unreasonable or unjustifiable and I certainly do not think it breaches people’s rights. I think that once you have breached that trust the onus is on you to sort yourself out.Phil Goff during the debate on this bill has mentioned a number of times the 50 more beds required as a result of this bill. That figure takes no account of the great results that this Government’s policies are achieving in reducing both reoffending and youth crime. We are seeing youth crime rates significantly down. Of course youth crime is the area that applies particularly to this bill and particularly where we might have seen the significant increase in bed use because that is the part of the bill that has the most impact—the area of the younger people.At the conclusion of the select committee process we had the opportunity to visit the courts to get a better understanding of how the bail system works in practice. I was both surprised and impressed at the efficiency and have a much better understanding of the pressures on both police and judges. I also understand the need for speed in the bail system. Information processes are essential to an effective efficient bail system through our courts. Although there are always going to be issues with bail and the way it is granted—there is certainly always going to be pressure on the courts because of the need for speed—I think this bill has followed a really good process. It achieves a good position given the situation that we are in and given the need to protect people’s rights.I want to congratulate the chair on what at times was a very difficult process. The chair Jacqui Dean and deputy chair Mark Mitchell have both appropriately acknowledged theMarceau family and other families who contributed to the submission process on this bill. It was a pretty testing time for many of them. So I have great pleasure in supporting this bill as it passes through the House.KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): Thank you very much for the chance to take a call on the third reading of the Bail Amendment Bill. I do want to address some of the comments made by the Green Party member Jan Logie because as a member of the Law and Order Committee—and I acknowledge the others who are here today—I know that this is a very complicated issue.I also want to just touch on something that Ian McKelvie has just said as I think I was at the same session as him when we visited the Wellington District Court to see the process when judges are making the decision around granting bail. To an extent and I think it would probably be for about 85 percent of those decisions they are very fast decisions made in a kind of factory floor way. But there are a number of offenders who are coming into the court system and as we have seen what has unfortunately happened is that the decisions made by judges have not necessarily been the best ones and there has been reoffending while someone has been put out on bail. Although we support this piece of legislation with reservation as my colleague Andrew Little has said we think—and we have supported it because of this—that this piece of legislation is trying to get the balance right between the rights of offenders and the rights of victims. It tries to address the public mood of discontent of people out there and victims of offenders who have been put out on bail and the growing unrest that that just was not good enough.I also want to acknowledge some of the submitters who came to the Law and Order Committee. There was one particular session that Mark Mitchell from across the other side of the House has mentioned when we were all in Auckland about a year ago. That was a particularly tough day sitting through those submissions and obviously much much tougher for those people to come and give their submissions to us. I do want to acknowledge theMarceau family—TraceyMarceau the mother of ChristieMarceau—and also one submitter who for me stuck out and whom I still remember quite vividly and that is CharlieBorrell the father of AugustineBorrell a young teenager who was killed in Auckland. Those two submissions I think brought home to a lot of people in that select committee the real pain that is caused by offenders who are going out there while on bail and in those two cases committing the ultimate crime.I do not say that the concerns that Jan Logie has are unfounded and are not passionate but I think as a member of the select committee that we needed to do something to appease or to please those families out there who came to the select committee not just because of their own personal pain but to make sure that they prevented that from happening to other families as well. I do not think I could let that go without a response and I say that certainly on the Labour Party side of things although this is a National piece of legislation we do support it because we do know that there needs to be greater protection for the public out there especially when you are looking at the types of offenders who were being granted bail. I just wanted to make that comment.Again to those families and friends and the people out there who submitted to us thank you because it took a lot of courage to do that. There were some very emotional moments and I thank them for making those submissions. I also acknowledge Ian McKelvie and Jacqui Dean from the other side of the House and—who else is here today; that is probably breaching the Standing Orders—the other members of the Law and Order Committee.The headline clauses in this piece of legislation are clauses 7 and 8 and they are where we have got the reverse burden of proof for those people who have been convicted of previous crimes and who are charged with murder and other serious offences. One of the things that has already been mentioned here today is giving the judiciary better tools to be able to make better decisions when it comes to these bail applications. We certainly heard from the police about their processes around when they are opposing bail but there was some suggestion—and hopefully the Minister of Justice might be able to address this in the piece of legislation that she said will be brought to the House—about giving our bench much better risk assessment tools so that when a tricky case does turn up judges might be able to make much more informed choices. We heard about the ROC٭ROI system that the Department of Corrections uses to be able to assess how dangerous an inmate is and whether or not they will offend while they are incarcerated and heard that might be able to be taken and used in a court setting. There was one submitter—if I am reading my notes here correctly—Susan Platt who had done a bit of research internationally into some kind of risk assessment tool. She said that nothing had been done as of yet from all the international research and stuff that she was looking at and that New Zealand could be a world leader if it took the case to be able to have a risk assessment tool for our judiciary. Hopefully that might be something that New Zealand can do because if we were able to do that and able to use the technology that we could pioneer and have in place other countries could look at us to be able to make their communities much much safer as well.As I said earlier there are some reservations that we do have around this piece of legislation. One of those reservations has already been touched on by members on this side of the House but also by the Minister of Justice Judith Collins and that is the delays in the court system. At this stage I am not going to traverse that too much because I think what has been said has already been said. I think it is good that the Minister of Justice has acknowledged that that is a problem and hopefully that will be addressed in the piece of legislation that she will bring to the House.I do not think I need to take up much more time of the House. I just want to acknowledge once again the submitters who came to the Law and Order Committee. Although we do have some reservations we do support this legislation.Hon TAU HENARE (National): I am pleased to take a quick call on the third reading of the Bail Amendment Bill and I want to congratulate the Law and Order Committee on all its work on what was a traumatic experience for all of the select committee members. I do not wish upon anyone the sort of evidence and hearings that they had to go through so my hat goes off to the select committee for doing a pretty good job of shepherding this bill through.I have never in my political career ever used the words “soft on crime”—never. I have tried to steer clear of accusing anybody of being soft on crime apart from today when I do so reservedly and I do so in the face of one of the Green members actually being a friend of mine until today. Unfortunately the talk that I heard from the Green member Jan Logie basically said to me that the Greens are soft on crime and that is a term that I do not use lightly.When we consider what has gone before we see that this bill and even the bills before it on the criminal justice system are about protecting the community. They are about protecting the victims from more tragedy and more trauma. This bill is specifically in front of us to deal with those two situations. It is about protecting the person in our community who has been visited by crime. Whether it is a punch a kick a murder or whatever we have to do all we can to protect that citizen from more trauma and more crime. Look I am not saying that if we had had this bill before ChristieMarceau’s tragic demise it would have stopped that happening. Who knows? But wemust always do our best to make sure that we protect those in our community who have been visited by such trauma and crime.I once again say and I do not make this point lightly that that is what you get if you vote for the Greens. I have a message for the Labour Party and yes that includes the “deputyDeputy Speaker”—Assistant Speaker Robertson. If Labour wants to hitch its wagon to the Green Party then it had better be very very careful where it does hitch that wagon.Again I say to everybody on the select committee that it was a job well done. I think that New Zealand will congratulate the committee and congratulate the House on the passage of this bill.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the Bail Amendment Bill be now read a third time.Ayes102New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 34; New Zealand First 7; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes19Green Party 14;Māori Party 3; Mana 1; Independent: Horan.Bill read a third time.