Goff Phil: Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 18 June 2014. Volume:699;Page:18678. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):Right at the start of the debate when this Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill was introduced Labour said that it would support the bill. The reason for that was pretty clear-cut. We need to have a system that pays more attention to the victim. Sadly in relation to serious violent and sexual offending there are far too many victims. It is time actually to produce some fundamental change in the way our system works; to try to build more fences at the top of the cliff rather than try to do small repair jobs at the bottom.Frankly the bill as introduced was pretty weak. My colleague Carol Beaumont has referred to the regulatory impact statement. I say to the Minister of Justice that I was kind of astounded to read in the regulatory impact statement that the best estimate of your officials was that this bill might deal with 10 cases a year—10 cases a year. We are talking about thousands of cases of sexual and violent offending each year and the victims who arise from that. Each year hundreds maybe thousands of people are let out of prison and there was not protection for the victims in particular circumstances. Minister you will recall that the origin of this bill was a case in Invercargill where a woman was raped her offender was convicted he was sentenced to prison he served prison he was let out of prison—as happens at the end of your sentence or when you are released—and he moved in next door to the victim. The victim was absolutely powerless. Every day she faced the risk of confronting the man who had sexually violated her and there was nothing she could do about it. That apparently was what caused this bill to be introduced.The difficulty with the bill is that when it was introduced we found that it would have had no application at all to the woman whose case sparked the need for the legislation. Why was that? Because in order to have the protection of the non-contact order the offender had to be jailed for at least 5 years’ imprisonment. He had been jailed for 4 years. There was no protection in this bill for the very person whom it purported to protect. So that was a huge weakness. We indicated at the first reading of the bill that that was utterly inadequate and that we would fight to get that changed. In the Law and Order Committee they moved it to 3 years and after a discussion with the Minister personally she agreed to move it to 2 years. I think 2 years is appropriate. It brings it in line with the definition under the Parole Act which demarcates a serious from a less serious offence.But there are other important changes that we made in this legislation to strengthen it and they are set out in Part 2. The first is that the way the bill was introduced once again meant that you could not get a non-contact order until the offender had been released from prison. That was pretty dumb. That meant that there was always going to be a gap between the release from prison and the victim being able to get a non-contact order. In fact the victim would not always know that the offender had been released and there was real risk in it. So we made I think a very sensible change in the committee that you can get a non-contact order at any time after the offender has been sentenced. That was a sensible move.The other area of weakness that we addressed really came out of the submissions that the select committee heard. It was that some offenders were reasonably cunning in the way they sought to revictimise their victims. They did not do it themselves but they got an associate to do it. So what we have put into this bill is a provision that will allow the non-contact order to apply to people other than the offender. We have put reasonably strong safeguards in there. In order to have a non-contact order made out against a person who was not the offender they need one to have been encouraged by the offender to engage in the behaviour that is being prohibited; two to have engaged in those kinds of behaviour; and three the person’s behaviour has been and continues to be detrimental to the victim’s ability to manage the effects of the offending. So there were three key weaknesses in this legislation that we have addressed and I think the legislation is better for it.But I want to come back to the point that I made at the beginning. We will not be dealing with just 10 cases a year now. Maybe we will be dealing with scores of cases but the number is still pretty small. What we actually need is a substantial piece of legislation if we are truly to protect the interests of the victims. I found out from a victims organisation in west Auckland—indeed the chief executive has just been acknowledged in the Honours List this year—that maybe in one in 100 cases of sexual violation is the offender actually charged convicted and sentenced to prison. One in 100. One in 100 cases means that 99 percent of the victims are not seeing justice done. We have helped by helping another 0.05 percent of the victims. It is worth doing in specific cases because there is a gap in the legislation where people are not covered by the Domestic Violence Act they cannot get a protection order they are not covered by the Harassment Act and they cannot get a restraining order. We do address the gap but we do not address the problem.The problem lies in a number of areas. In part it is a case of protection. We have just considered the estimates on the police to find out that for 5 years in a row the police budget has been cut in real terms—cut by $114 million dollars. If we want to protect victims cutting the police budget cutting police staff and closing police stations does not appear to be a very good way of doing that. We are doing a mildly good thing here but not offsetting a very bad thing that the Government is doing by reducing protection of victims by cutting the police budget.Secondly you need attitude change and that is not short term; that is the change that we can make through our education system. There needs to be a concerted effort and I do not think anybody in the Committee would be opposed to that sort of education programme being run or opposed to more effective programmes for those in prison who are guilty of violent offending.The third area is this. I really want the Minister in the chair Judith Collins to address this because if this bill is about protecting victims then we have got to face up to the fact that we have a system that is not designed to protect victims. We have a system that is adversarial. We have a system where still even after various changes in legislation the victim feels that they are being revictimised in court. The victim does not want to go to court. The victim feels that they are going to be revictimised because of this adversarial system. I guess the question that I have for the Minister is why she is so opposed to changing the system in its fundamentals to having a more inquisitorial system that is better designed to protect the interests of victims and to get to the truth in order to help the victims themselves.I would have to ask the question about why we are not doing more in the area of restorative justice because a number of rape survivors whom I have talked to said they are actually not interested in a 20-year sentence for the offender; they simply want an expression of remorse and of contrition to confront the offender and to actually hear the offender admit that he was wrong in what he did. That does not seem enough to me in terms of a person who has been a victim in that way but it is a hell of a lot more than what they are getting out of the present system. In the present system—I come back to the statistics—99 out of 100 victims of sexual violation are not going to see justice done. Although this piece of legislation is a very small help it pales into insignificance compared with the nature of the problem that we should be addressing in this legislature. This is not enough. We need to do a lot more.In terms of the actual provisions of the bill I have outlined the key provisions where I think we have made changes that were necessary so that this legislation would at least have some real practical effect. I think we have closed the gap that we are talking about but we have not resolved the problem. That is why I ask the Minister to not simply bring a series of minor pieces of legislation to the House—we will always support any piece of legislation that will enhance and promote the interests of victims—but to do something that will really make a difference to the overwhelming majority and the too many people who fall victim to serious sexual and violent offending.