Tanczos Nandor: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Bill — In Committee Procedure Third Reading 
Tanczos Nandor: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Bill — In Committee Procedure Third Reading 
[Volume:626;Page:21025] 
NANDOR TANCZOS (Green) 
: 
 Members of the public can be excused for being confused about the content of the bill because it is clear that a number of members of this House are themselves confused judging by their contributions to the debate. The interesting thing is that many of the things that members who are opposing the bill are calling for are the very things that the Green Party has secured through our support for the bill. 
Wayne Mapp for example talked about the need for an independent prison inspectorate. That is something that the Green Party has supported—in fact the whole Justice and Electoral Committee supported it. The Greens have been supporting it for quite a deal longer. We tried to get it during the passing of the Corrections Bill and failed. I have raised the matter with the Prime Minister during question time in this House but perhaps members like Dail Jones were asleep when that was going on. Clearly the National Party did not come up with the idea. That party may support it but it has done nothing about it. It is exactly what the Greens have secured—a written commitment to establish an independent prison complaints authority by the end of 2006. 
Mr Mapp talked about the victim compensation scheme in Australia. Actually last week the Justice and Electoral Committee was in Australia and visited victim support services. The Greens are very supportive of the victim compensation scheme available in Australia. The idea that some victims can get accident compensation on the same basis as people who had an accident at work is offensive to the victims of crime. That is why we think there needs to be a review and specifically we have a written commitment to look at support available for victims and the role of victims in the criminal justice system. I agree with Mr Franks that the rights of victims are not being met under the current system and the Greens are pleased that we have been able to negotiate something that will advance the rights of victims. 
Peter Brown suggested that the bill would lead to a situation where two inmates who fight in prison would both sue the Department of Corrections under accident compensation. Firstly the member seems to have forgotten that accident compensation is specifically designed to stop people suing and in fact it is not a regime that relies on suit; and secondly the member is so far away from the reality of what the bill actually does that one has to wonder who he gets his advice from. 
But then of course one remembers that it is Mr Dail Jones. That member had so little to say about the bill he knew so little about the bill that he had to spend most of his speech talking about cannabis because that is all he could think about. Also the select committee staff as far as I understand no longer take that member’s nameplate to the Justice and Electoral Committee because he does not bother to turn up any more. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: It is out of order to refer to the absence of a member whether it is in the House or at a select committee. Members have other duties as well. 
NANDOR TANCZOS 
: My apologies. 
Dail Jones 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. As members of the Law and Order Committee will know I am trying to attend that committee on the Criminal Procedure Bill which has a lot of legal information in it rather than going to the Justice and Electoral Committee. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: Thank you Mr Jones. That was not a point of order and I had already referred to that matter. 
NANDOR TANCZOS 
: What the bill does in essence is three simple things. Firstly it provides guidelines for judges when determining whether to provide financial compensation for people who have been abused while in the State’s custody and it makes it harder to get. Secondly if compensation is made it freezes the compensation while the victims of that person are informed and provision is made for them to sue for that money. Thirdly it suspends and extends the statute of limitations relating to victims of crime. It is very very simple. 
The Greens did not originally support the bill because we were not convinced either that it was the best way to deal with the situation or that it did not have the potential to breach international conventions. In fact we were given very strong evidence in the Justice and Electoral Committee that the bill did potentially breach international conventions although officials also gave us advice that in their view it did not and clearly it is a borderline case. However the Green Party was persuaded to support the bill for four very good reasons. 
Firstly if the Government had to rely on United Future for support the amendment that United Future required would have removed all rights of redress for breaches of people’s human rights while in the State’s custody. That is a clear flagrant unashamed breach of international conventions and as I have said before the Green Party is a party that believes that New Zealand does need to adhere to its international conventions and agreements and to the word we have given the international community. Such an amendment would have left the door wide open to continued abuse in the prison system. I note that Mr Marc Alexander is confused on this issue because sometimes he says that abuse should not happen in the prison system and sometimes he says that prisoners deserve whatever they get. Clearly his commitment to stopping abuse in the prisons is not as solid as his position on other things. 
Secondly the Greens are supporting the bill because we negotiated a sunset clause to limit the bill to claims made before mid-2007 and that applies to all parts of the bill except the bit relating to the statute of limitations provisions which we do support as I indicated in my first reading speech. 
Thirdly we got a written commitment to an inquiry into support for victims and the role of victims in the criminal justice system as I have already mentioned. We heard clearly in the Justice and Electoral Committee that victims’ rights are not met by this bill and the Greens hope to see a victim compensation scheme similar to the one in Australia introduced in the House. I have already talked about that. We believe that the rights of victims do need to be advanced in this country. I make the point also that we have spoken about this consistently and continuously since we came into Parliament as an independent Green Party and have consistently made the point that the rights of victims will never be properly met while we rely on a primarily adversarial court system. 
Fourthly we got a written commitment to establish an independent prison complaints authority by the end of next year and its function will be both to investigate complaints and to do institutional inspections. We believe that it needs to have both those functions to work properly. We believe that the best protection from compensation claims and the political difficulties that arise out of them is prompt and effective investigation of complaints within the prison system so those complaints do not then go on to become significant problems that need significant redress. 
The last thing I would like to touch on is the issue of retrospectivity which has been an issue of some interest in the media this morning and has been the subject of comment by Mr Tony Ellis—a lawyer who like Mr Franks I deeply respect for his very strong clear and consistent commitment to defending some of the most marginalised people and advancing the causes of human rights in this country. The bill as I understand it applies to claims where the final determination has been made after the enactment of the bill. Clearly that is why the Government is seeking to pass the bill this week—because of the cases before the Court of Appeal. Appeals that require leave are not included in the definition of a final determination so it does not include appeals to the Supreme Court. So my understanding is that the bill is not retrospective in the sense that it does not go backwards in time. What it does is provide a broad enough net that it captures cases still current. In that sense it will actually affect the cases before the Court of Appeal this week. I think it is useful to make that point clear. 
So the Greens do remain concerned about the bill. We remain concerned that it is a bill passed in haste to address a specific court case. But we believe that in the current circumstances we have negotiated the best possible outcome—one that balances the rights of victims with the need to protect against abuse within the correctional system and maintains our commitment to international conventions.