Bindra Mahesh: Parole Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBindra Mahesh: Parole Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 24 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1864. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MAHESH BINDRA (NZ First): Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Wharenui. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Parole Amendment Bill with some reservations and I shall expand on those reservations during my contribution.As New Zealand First members have said previously in this House we would like to see more support for the victims of crime. We would like to see that the concerns of the victims of crime are addressed by all of those who are involved in the reduction of crime in New Zealand. The crime rate at present is unacceptable to us. A review of parole laws is well overdue. This bill does go some way to making New Zealand a safer place for our families and our futures—our children. In saying that we also need to be sure that those who apply for parole are not given that request too easily. The offenders must exhibit solid reformed behaviour before being released into our communities. Otherwise we will continue to see the same issue that we have been seeing in the recent past which is reoffending. This puts more pressure on the victims and their families and communities and in many cases it revictimises them.This bill quite rightly aims to reduce the costs incurred by the number of parole hearings when it is clear that the prisoner has not achieved the prescribed milestones in their rehabilitative programme. However it does not go far enough in supporting those offenders who have a genuine desire and motivation to address their offending behaviour and their offending lifestyle. New Zealand First would prefer to see that no offender is short-changed when it comes to rehabilitation because the safety of our society at the end of the day relies on releasing rehabilitative offenders who will not repeat that behaviour and thus harm law-abiding citizens.At this point I would draw the attention of this House to the fact that privately run prisons do not have a single key performance indicator addressing the rehabilitation of prisoners. These are organisations that base their businesses on profits not people and yet they receive no financial penalty if they do not provide rehabilitative programmes on a par with those in the State-run prisons. Although these organisations’ contracts have financial loss if they accidentally let someone out and even though they have to meet certain performance targets none of these targets are about the rehabilitation of prisoners. Prisoners in privately run prisons do not have access to the programmes that our publicly run prisons have. My point is that you could have a situation where a prisoner in a privately run institution has his or her parole pushed out under this legislation with almost non-existent rehabilitative support and therefore has almost no chance to meet the criteria for release when they do go in front of the Parole Board. This is not fair on the prisoners and not at the end of the day fair to the general public whose taxpayer dollars are paying for both systems—the State-run prisons and the privately run prisons.There are many who believe that if you do the crime you do the time and that life should mean life. Well this is not the conversation we are having here today. New Zealand First understands that our laws allow for parole and that the Department of Corrections professes to be committed to reducing reoffending by 25 percent by 2017. That we think is a noble goal. So New Zealand First agrees that now is the time to make changes to the parole laws so that we can be sure we are fair to the victims and we achieve our goal of reducing reoffending.To carry out the changes foreseen by this bill the department will need more resources and the public-private partnerships such as Serco will need to be included in any of these programmes. These programmes should be included in their key performance indicators. If State-run prisons are expected to perform to a certain standard then so should the privately run prisons because both of them are funded by the taxpayer. We will be looking closely at the 2015 Budget to ensure the Government puts its money where its mouth is and we will be checking that public-private partnerships have rehabilitation programmes in their key performance indicators.So let us get this right. Let us punish where it is needed educate where it is needed resource where it is needed and call for performance where it is needed because after all our victims deserve it. All New Zealanders deserve it. Thank you.