Katene Rahui: Parole (Extended Supervision Orders) Amendment Bill — Procedure New Zealand Bill of Rights Act Compliance First Reading Second Reading Third Reading 
Katene Rahui: Parole (Extended Supervision Orders) Amendment Bill — Procedure New Zealand Bill of Rights Act Compliance First Reading Second Reading Third Reading 
[Volume:653;Page:2382] 
RAHUI KATENE (Maori Party—Te Tai Tonga) 
: 
 The ancient Roman lawyer and scholar Marcus Tullius Cicero once said: “Any man can make mistakes but only an idiot persists in his error.” The Parole (Extended Supervision Orders) Amendment Bill is an attempt to prevent the error of unintended changes made through the Parole Amendment Act 2007 from becoming a persistent problem for the Department of Corrections and ultimately Parliament. The bill has been tabled to protect the Department of Corrections from litigation in relation to five sex offenders who are more than 12 months into an extended supervision order but who are still subject to part-time residential restrictions. 
That all sounds fairly technical but the essence of the legislation is all to do with timing. Legal advice would suggest that the amendments made in 2007 to the Parole Act prohibited the imposition of such orders beyond the first 12 months. However in the real world there happens to be those five high-profile high-risk sex offenders who are being subject to conditions similar to part-time residential restrictions yet they are all currently more than 12 months into their orders. And here is the nub of the issue: under the current legislation such restrictions are allowed to be imposed for longer than 12 months only if the offender has first agreed to comply with the restrictions. As other speakers have noted agreeing to comply with the restrictions was not the preferred choice for the infamous five so we find ourselves in this predicament today. 
It seems that the provision of the offender needing to agree to comply with a residential restriction being extended beyond 12 months was inadvertently made. Offenders are required to agree to comply with restrictions in order to be granted parole by the Parole Board in the first place—otherwise they are refused parole—and this provision has been transferred and applied to the extension of residential restrictions when that is clearly not appropriate. I think that this error is a perfect example of the problems with the New Zealand constitutional system which were pointed out by a former Prime Minister the Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey Palmer. It is a perfect example of New Zealand’s reputation of being the fastest lawmaker in the West and a good reason for a review of our constitutional system—oh hey that is happening later on; good! 
It is of paramount importance that the error in the law remains the key focus of our reason for legislative change rather than the release of offenders convicted of serious sexual offending against children. That is not to say that the issue of child sexual abuse is not a major issue to be addressed if we have genuine compassion for the physical emotional educational and economic well-being of children and families in New Zealand. In the Youth 2000 study of almost 10000 young people in Aotearoa over 20 percent of girls and over 10 percent of boys reported having been sexually abused before the age of 18. If that proportion is not horrific enough other studies have indicated that as few as 7 percent of child sexual abuse victims ever report that abuse and that on average it takes 16 years to disclose. There will be members in this House who bear the tragic scars of child sexual abuse; there will be members in this House who know the painful impact of sexual abuse amongst loved ones. It is a reality that not one of us can deny or should ignore. 
But those offenders who sexually harm others are not the focus of the law today; it is the law itself that is coming under our scrutiny. Those offenders are entitled to treatment education and related services and I take a moment to acknowledge the dedicated efforts of groups like the Stop Trust in my electorate of Te Tai Tonga as well as organisations such as the Safe Network in Whangarei Auckland and Hamilton and WellStop Inc. in the lower North Island. Child sex offenders need a lot of support to help them not to reoffend and I want to touch on the type of community outrage that occurs from time to time when we are considering where sex offenders will reside following the conclusion of their sentences. Although there is frequently an outbreak of neighbourhood calls of “Not in my street!” we have to be able to balance the legitimate concern for public safety along with the individual’s right to rehabilitation. The places where these people offended may be the places where they have lived for their whole lives and they may be the only places where they have family or any form of social support. If possible the Parole Board will try to place child sex offenders away from schools. If they are placed in the general vicinity of a school the Parole Board will usually impose conditions such as part-time residential restrictions to minimise the risk. 
But for the special leave that has been extended to this bill the focus on child sexual offenders is secondary to the key purpose of the bill. There are two particular initiatives that will result as a consequence of this bill—namely that an electronically monitored curfew can be imposed beyond the first 12 months of an extended supervision order and that the Parole Board can impose such restrictions on an offender without having to be satisfied that the offender agrees to comply with the restrictions. Without these restrictions in place the Parole Board is likely to decline to impose residential curfew conditions beyond the first 12 months of an extended supervision order and this could mean a potential threat to public safety if such offenders are not monitored. Of course in an ideal world one would hope that those offenders who have a problem with sexually abusive sexually offending and sexually harmful behaviours would have benefited from assessment and treatment services long before they applied for extended supervision orders. Further not only would people who had sexually offended have been upskilled with the knowledge to prevent reoffending but their families and community would also have sufficient capacity to support offenders to maintain pro-social behaviours. 
 The reality is that as the figures tell us reconvictions for sexual offenders do occur and the risk of reoffending is always apparent. A 2008 study of released offenders for the Department of Corrections found that 20 percent of child sex offenders were re-imprisoned in the study period. The academics tell us this is the lowest re-imprisonment rate of all offences. They qualify that statistic by suggesting that only 5 percent of those were re-imprisoned for another sex offence. But I want to place some caution on the interpretation of these statistics. Sure the recidivism rate of released sex offenders is way below that of say offenders initially convicted of burglary—71 percent of which 46 percent are re-imprisoned for the same type of offence. But this relatively low rate of recidivism—and actually 20 percent is still 20 percent more than I would like to see—cannot necessarily be interpreted as signifying the fact that sex offenders seldom go on to commit further such offences. Sex offences against children in particular are subject to very low reporting rates. Even when a sex offence is resolved by the police the rates of successful convictions are also relatively low. It is also the case that with convicted sex offenders the length of time that tends to elapse between the actual offence being committed and the offender’s ultimate sentencing on that charge can be several years. Thus the validity of this type of analysis will be improved when reconvictions of sex offenders have been tracked over longer periods of time. 
Notwithstanding all these riders it is important to bear in mind that wherever there is risk and wherever public safety is a concern we in this House must take appropriate action to ensure that offenders are able to be monitored and that the community’s well-being is taken into account. This is a very complex area and there is far greater depth required than in the 140 or so words that constitutes this bill. But in the interests of certainty and our appreciation that this was a technical oversight that needs to be rectified we in the Maori Party will support this bill throughout all of its readings.