Logie Jan: Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 24 June 2014. Volume:699;Page:18835. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green):I am pleased to rise and take a call on the third reading of the Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill which the Green Party is very pleased to support. As has already been mentioned this bill was developed in response to the plight of a woman in Invercargill. Her rapist moved in next door to her after he was released from prison and had his friends regularly harass her and make her life unbearable. When the police went to visit this man and suggested that he move and give her some freedom and peace this man—who had been convicted of rape—declined and there was nothing that the police or that woman could do. That was clearly unjust and cruel so it is wonderful to see this legislation in front of the House tonight to make sure that that situation does not happen again. We have heard from Kim McGregor that there are many cases of this happening around the country but mostly we never hear of them. So this I hope will bring relief to women primarily around the country in the future and I thank the Government for that.I do want to raise a few areas that I think we need to be mindful of in the future in terms of the implementation of this legislation and watching how it goes. If there is a breach when an order has been put in place it will require the police to act on that breach and the courts in turn to rule on that breach and convict somebody for it. It is a very real concern at the moment that in a domestic violence situation when there are non-contact orders we have seen the police taking cases to court for what the courts have then deemed to be minor breaches. And the courts have been telling the police off in instances I have been told for bringing such minor things to court and have been throwing the cases back out. This means that the police are becoming in some places less likely to actually charge somebody with what is considered a minor breach.The problem with that is that the abusers breach orders for many reasons. Often one of the reasons is to test whether they can get away with it—whether they can break those barriers and have access to those women. We have seen that in the tragic situation in Dunedin where there had been breaches that were not convicted and children were then killed as a result.We do not have the safety nets and the systems in place at the moment to ensure that everyone within our police and court system understands domestic violence enough in order to ensure that we have standardised responses and protections in our system. The Glenn Inquiry has reinforced what we are hearing in the communities which is that the system is failing. I really hope that this will not be another example of that.This measure primarily will be used for domestic or sexual violence. I do also want to raise another concern which is that this can be used once there is a conviction but we know that only one in 100 cases of sexual violence is currently resulting in a conviction in our courts in this country. That is not justice. Not one of those 99 people will be able to access this order unless they can get a conviction in our courts. The recent data I have had back from the Government around domestic violence also shows that there is only an 18 percent reporting rate to the police and around a 40 percent rate of charging on average. So less than 50 percent of call-outs to the police result in a charge by the police and then the conviction rate in our courts depending on the area in the country is as low as 38 percent for offences relating to domestic violence. Our system is absolutely failing to protect our most vulnerable people and we cannot tick off the safety with this bill sadly.