Clendon David: Policing (Storage of Youth Identifying Particulars) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Clendon David: Policing (Storage of Youth Identifying Particulars) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 16 August 2011. Volume:675;Page:20911. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 We have rejected and opposed the Policing (Storage of Youth Identifying Particulars) Amendment Bill and clearly will continue to do so. As I said earlier today we oppose the bill on issues of both process and substance. In terms of process in particular we have just heard from the Minister that all parties were given advance copies of this bill—some more in advance than others. We do not consider getting one single hard copy of a bill at 10.30 the night before it is due to be debated to be particularly advance notice. It clearly was inadequate for us to do any substantial investigation consideration consultation within our caucus or indeed to obtain confidential but skilled legal advice. No forward advice was given to us. There was no attempt to streamline the process of this bill through the House by getting the buy-in of all parties in advance of its coming to the House. I made the point in my earlier contribution that had the Greens been taken into the confidence of the Government at some reasonable time in advance of the bill’s being tabled we might well have been able to negotiate an outcome that would not have involved the process we have gone through today.  
Mr Ardern put a challenge to us in his contribution to the House. He wondered why it might be that we were not taken into the Government’s confidence in this matter. I have given that a wee bit of thought in the intervening couple of hours and I have come to the conclusion that the reason the Government is unwilling to take a smaller party into its confidence—an Opposition party—is perhaps that the Government has not yet grasped the reality of MMP. To not give some reasonable advance notice to a party that I can proudly say has proven its ability to accept and respect a confidence I think indicates that the Government is locked into the notion of a two-party adversarial system. I do believe that the work of this Parliament would proceed more smoothly and get better outcomes if members on all sides recognised that we are in a new context.  
Then there is the issue of retrospectivity. Effectively one major component of this bill is that it will be retrospective. It will if you like validate the actions of the police between October 2008 and 2010. We are told it will protect the Crown and the police from any possible liability from litigation and from appeals of convictions that may have depended upon information that was retained illegally. I do stress the point that we know the police were acting illegally but they did not know that and there was no reason they ought to have known. I make no criticism of that action.  
However I think we have to respect that retrospective law is most often bad law. There are very clear situations where it ought not to be opposed and we recall a recent example of that. The Greens had no opposition to the issue of the constable oath. That was finely nuanced wording that put the possibility out there that constables did not have the power to arrest. We had no objection. It was very clear-cut and obvious. This is none of the above. This is far from being a similar case. Retrospective law is anathema to this House to the extent that protections against that appear in our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. I quote from section 26 of the Act: “No one who has been finally acquitted or convicted of or pardoned for an offence shall be tried or punished for it again.” There is a clear message within that. It is clearly codified in our law that we do not change the law after the event except in very exceptional circumstances. It may well be the case that this law needs to be changed. However there is no justification for the way in which it has been done—to put it through without the benefit of legal advice or opinion without exposure to the public gaze and without even giving participants in this Chamber reasonable time to consider their views gather evidence and undertake some sort of commentary on it.  
We are told that the Crown is at real risk of potentially some multimillion dollars from litigants who might seek to appeal against conviction. I think the scale of that risk does not justify the degree of speed secrecy and urgency in the passing of this legislation. A contributor from the Labour Party referred clearly in jest to a trillion cases out there where young people and their lawyers might choose to attempt to pull back a conviction and to have a finding overturned at the Youth Court level. I reject that completely. We have only to use our common sense to think it through. There would be only a very few cases out of the 1200 or so that have been talked about where the finding rested solely on one piece of evidence that had been retained be it a fingerprint a photograph or whatever it might be. Any opportunities even for an opportunistic lawyer to go hunting to have a conviction overturned would be vanishingly small.  
This House does make mistakes and it will continue to make mistakes because we are all human beings and long may that continue. However mistakes carry cost. I have heard several times the explanation that when young people have committed offences they must be punished for that. If this Government puts itself at risk of some cost because of a mistake made so be it. The degree of secrecy of urgency is not balanced by the degree of real risk of the likelihood of appeals against this.  
We heard a revealing commentary from the Minister in her contribution to the extent that she indicated that these young people who are offending cannot be helped unless they go through some process like a Youth Court. I reject that. I think we can do a great deal to help our young people stay out of the courts to keep away from this register and away from the notice of the justice system if we invest heavily and well at an earlier stage in their development. We could have a very different debate today about the $1.2 billion in the corrections budget for example that could be spent in so many better ways that would absolutely reduce youth offending adult offending and recidivism.  
Finally I refer to the challenge I put out. Ten months ago the police realised that they had been getting it wrong albeit with no blame to them. Clearly in the intervening 10 months they have not been retaining information. They have been acting in accordance with the law as it is currently written. The challenge I put out is to ask where the evidence is that that has caused a real problem. We have heard that in the absence of retaining information about these young offenders who have been found guilty of some offence there will be major and serious repercussions that they will get away with further offences and that there will be significant adverse effects from that. Where is the evidence? Not one speaker from the Government pointed us towards any information from the police that said that their job became harder that they had a more difficult time locating offenders and that they had a more difficult time proving who had committed some crime against the local society.  
I am very surprised by that. I would have thought that that for me would be a very compelling argument—if I had a document that contained evidence from the police that said their job was made more difficult and they had more difficulty locating offenders or getting orders against them in the Youth Court or at the District Court in the absence of being able to retain that information.  
A certain quiet has descended. I do hope that from the Government’s contributions we will hear that such evidence exists that an empirical study has been made and that this error which apparently was made did have that adverse effect in the last 10 months. We know that if young offenders are going to reoffend they tend to reoffend quite quickly. They are captured in some sort of cycle of offending. I would advocate that if the seriousness of this error had been such as has been put to us today we would have seen evidence of difficulty experienced by the police. I look forward to hearing that evidence from the Government. Kia ora.