Worth Richard: Criminal Justice Reform Bill — In Committee 
Worth Richard: Criminal Justice Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:640;Page:10211] 
Dr RICHARD WORTH (National) 
: 
 The Minister simply does not get it. He does not understand some basic propositions that have been put up and the answer he has just offered is no answer to the issues that have been raised. He is also quite wrong to say that the judiciary is supportive of this legislation. It is not. It is not about to come out and say it is opposed to this legislation. But there are those of us—and there are members on this side of the Chamber who are active in their relationships with the judiciary—who know only too well what the degree of misgiving is in connection with this particular part of the bill. 
We have come to have great faith in the Law Commission but on this occasion we have been sadly let down because this is an initiative that comes from that commission. The Government has been sucked into legislation that it has not had sufficient time to consider. I say that because this bill is titled the Criminal Justice Reform Bill and I just underscore that word “Reform”. Reform hints at a measurable gain; it hints at an advance; and it hints at an improvement in the human condition. That simply is not what has occurred here. Because what lies behind this part of the bill and the Minister knows this and he should acknowledge it is a shameless exercise in cynicism. Why do I say that? Because it is writ large on the face of the bill in clause 15. 
Clause 15 states in connection with these guidelines which the Sentencing Council is required to produce: “A draft guideline or group of guidelines that is available for inspection must be accompanied by a statement of the guidelines’ likely effect on the prison population.” What in fact this is all about is an exercise to control the number of people who are imprisoned in any particular period in the context of the constraints set by the current prison facilities and also the resources that the Government is prepared to spend in housing the prison muster as it was called and as it is now called by the Justice and Electoral Committee the prison population. 
Consistency in sentencing is obviously an appropriate broad-based aspirational guideline. But I doubt that the Minister truly understands what is implicit in this legislation if it is enacted. For example for an offence such as excess blood alcohol there will be very strict parameters that will limit the ability of the judges to take particular circumstances into account in imposing the appropriate sentence. I think we tend often to forget also what the role of the judges is certainly in those cases that involve jury trials. For it is the juries that are the ultimate determiners of the fact and it is for the judges to fix the appropriate sentence. That is all to be cut away by this legislation. 
In fact as Chris Finlayson Georgina te Heuheu and other colleagues of mine have said this legislation is in constitutional terms an outrage. That is because it blurs three clearly understood and defined elements that constitute the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. I suppose one might be forgiven for not realising that if it were not explicit on the face of the bill but it is. There is the role of the executive given that one of the objectives of this legislation is to limit or influence the prison population. Now that is a role of the executive. It is a role that is implicit in clause 15. It is the executive function. Then there is the judicial function—the judicial function in setting these guidelines. Then there is the legislative function which is the signing off of the guidelines. Even the Minister must realise that it is very odd indeed for the legislature to approve guidelines. I plan in later calls on this topic to come back to that.