Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. I want to begin by acknowledging and congratulating the member Darroch Ball in whose name this bill comes before us today. I think it's incredibly admirable as everyone has said in the House today his care and effort to protect first responders against violence and to protect their safety as they carry out some of the most important work in our communities—whether it's policing whether it's working in our grossly overpopulated prisons whether it's as nurses and paramedics. I think we have seen across the House that there's consensus across every political party every member who's spoken and I'm sure every member of the apparently hung Justice Committee that we do care and we do want to protect our first responders. There's no place for violence anywhere in any of our sectors but particularly for those in those care industries or professions rather. So it is it is an admirable job that this bill attempts to do.But the Green Party and we've said this before—we've said it so many times—we do want to protect our communities against violence; that is an important kaupapa to us. But we want to do that in a way that works and in a way that the evidence tells us will work. That is to say that deterrents from violent crime via increased sentences of imprisonment do not work. We had the Prime Minister's chief scientist the previous chief scientist Dr Gluckman undertake this as an area of focus and come out with that conclusion: imprisonment has failed. That's what the evidence tells us. So if we do care we do want to take care of our communities and we do want to take care of our first responders we have to accept that we can't keep doing what we've been doing while violent crime in particular remains steady. We know reoffending rates remain steady. So we've got to look at the evidence and as part of the Green Party we do want to look at the evidence. We know that the majority of people we lock up in our prisons suffer from previously undiagnosed mental illness serious mental illness including a lifetime diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. We know that a vast number of those we lock up in our prisons suffer from head injury with really serious consequences as to the way they process risk they process stress and that contributes grossly to the level of violence that a person with that type of injury is likely to undertake in stressful situations like being arrested like being taken into an ambulance while they're stressed and injured. This is the kind of situation that our first responders are facing. This is what's making them unsafe. We know that for young people who come through our justice system 90 percent suffer from what's called a serious learning disability. They've fallen through every crack; so they are frustrated. They are also likely to carry some of the mental illness that shows up in the later stats of those in our prisons. Knowing those things we know that we need to invest in the types of solutions that address those causes of offending. We need to invest in drug dependency rehabilitation. We need to invest in mental health care in healthcare generally. There's no reason for us to have people in our communities suffering serious brain injury that's gone undiagnosed and untreated and for us to rely constantly persistently on the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff which is imprisonment.We also know that our justice system is broken in a different way and that it targets disproportionately Māori and Pacific men. We know that that's a breach of the Treaty of Waitangi and we know that we need to address that by supporting those communities in all sorts of different ways to prevent them from harm and from crime. That is in housing in education that's inclusive and in investing in jobs that are sustainable and meaningful. This Government is committed to addressing crime and to addressing violence. We want to do it in a way that's effective. We want to be brave as leaders of this nation to do things that aren't all about politicians looking tough on crime. And I'm not saying that that's what this member is doing but we have had a history of that where successive Governments and politicians have wanted to use the rhetoric of being tough on crime while our stats of actual crime violence—whether that's drug offending whether that's sexual assaults whether that's domestic violence—have remained steady. So we want to invest in rehabilitation. We want to invest in drug treatment. We want to invest in mental health care and in our communities to thrive so that levels of violence do come down so that we actually protect our first responders. It is for that reason that the Green Party will not be supporting this bill at this reading. Thank you.