Goff Phil: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Goff Phil: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 08 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:2042. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) 
: 
 The previous speaker Jacqui Dean mentioned that there are 18 justice bills that went through under the last term of Government. That may well be the case but one should never mistake quantity for quality. The bills came in two separate categories. The first category of bills that were passed and the one that we got most used to was the sort of populist bill that spoke a lot about an issue but actually did very little about it. The origin of those bills was in the National Party research unit and the research they were based on was polling: did people feel that might be a good idea? If it looked like there might be some popular support for it and it looked like it might do something then the bill went through. I have to say that those sorts of bills are useless. They waste our time they create the impression with the public that something is happening when it is not happening and they do not actually go to the core of the problem of law and order which is about keeping the community safe.  
The second form of bill is a bill that usually has it origin in the department that sponsors it either the Ministry of Justice or the Department of Corrections as is the case with this bill. They tend to be practical bills. They are based on research they are based on experience and they are based on doing something about the problem of crime in the community and actually making people safer.  
I believe that this bill the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill is largely in the second category; that is why the Labour Party will be supporting this bill through to the Law and Order Committee. I strongly suspect that we will continue to support the bill because having read through the bill there are a number of practical and quite technical changes that are being made and the select committee will I think operate in the way that select committees operate best. We will look at the bill objectively we will see whether it achieves its purpose we will listen to the submissions we will analyse those submissions and we will do the right thing for the country.  
The goal of the legislation is to provide a sound framework within which the Department of Corrections and the corrections system can operate and nobody could be opposed to that goal. The objective set out in the bill is to manage “offenders in the community in a way that is safe secure humane effective and efficient.” and I think that those are proper objectives. I want to come back towards the end of my comments to the whole nature of community sentences because I am a believer—a strong believer—that community sentences should be used in appropriate cases where there is no or very little risk to the community and in place of short-term prison sentences which I believe achieve very little.  
The Department of Corrections way back in July 2010 produced a regulatory impact statement to help inform the major policy decisions that are made in this bill and it proposed changes to three Acts: the Bail Act 2000 the Sentencing Act 2002 and the Parole Act 2002. I have some affection for those Acts because those were Acts passed when I was Minister of Justice. They are major pieces of legislation they shape our justice system today and they are important pieces of legislation in terms of modernising how our system works. They were also bills that were based on a rational assessment of how our justice system was working or failing to work; they were not based simply on populist thinking that this seemed like something that might be what the electorate would like if they are worried about crime.  
The great thing about those three pieces of legislation is that after a decade in operation nobody is saying that they are in any way fundamentally flawed; 10 years on we see that we got that legislation about right and that is quite a remarkable achievement because of the complexity of the situations that we are dealing with. They have indeed stood the test of time.  
However over time a number of minor and technical changes have been discovered as being necessary to make those pieces of legislation work better and those minor and technical problems are identified and addressed in this bill. They will I believe improve the operation of home detention and community-based sentences and the electronic monitoring regimes under which offenders are managed. The technical changes are required largely to deal with operational procedures where the legislation either is silent is unclear or has been interpreted in ways that were not what was intended in the framing of the original legislation.  
The first change is to the Bail Act. Home detention sentences under this bill will continue to run when an appeal is lodged. I think that is sensible because the person is within their own home where they are being detained. An appeal may be lodged but you would not suspend the restrictive conditions while that appeal is being considered.  
Most of the changes are to the Sentencing Act—for example requiring pre-sentence reports before an offender is sentenced to home detention or community detention. I think that is simply a matter of common sense. When the judge is making that sentence the judge needs to have the best information possible. It clarifies the maximum number of hours that an offender is required to serve. That is a technical matter. It clarifies the effect of a subsequent sentence of imprisonment on the sentence of home detention. At the moment if you are sentenced to imprisonment then that brings to an end the sentence of home detention. But the sentence of imprisonment might be for only a couple of weeks and actually what the offender requires is a longer period of supervision under restrictive requirements under home detention. I support that change.  
The bill clarifies the situation where there is more than one community sentence in operation. That makes sense; it speaks for itself. It enables court registrars to issue warrants and applications to review a non-custodial sentence. It provides that time stops running when an application is made to the court to vary or cancel a sentence when the offender is unable or fails to comply with a sentence. At the moment if you abscond and you are not serving the sentence the clock keeps running and you get a discount on your sentence and really that is not very smart. So I think that change is a good one.  
In terms of electronic monitoring you have got a bit of a discrepancy. Sometimes you are sentenced to home detention in your home but the electronic monitoring regime is not the same as the boundaries of your home so it is important to get alignment between those two. Finally in relation to parole and extended supervision orders the bill clarifies responsibility for preparing reports on suitability for residential restrictions. That makes sense. It eliminates gaps in extended supervision order provisions. Most of those provisions are sensible.  
When we extended home detention after the trial period that it went through there were a lot of sceptics and critics around New Zealand who believed that simply locking up offenders in prison was the thing to do even for short periods of time and that that eliminated the risk to the community. I believe that those critics were very short-sighted. The Ministry of Justice did a review into the sentence of home detention and I think those findings are findings that everybody in this House should take on board.  
First of all there is dramatically less recidivism when an offender is serving a community sentence compared with a short prison sentence of pretty much the same time period. About 22 percent on community sentences were reconvicted after 12 months. If you look at the reconviction rates for people on very short-term prison sentences that figure is twice as much: it is over 50 percent. Clearly we want sentences that work. In relation to costs it is about $58 a day to keep somebody under home detention; it is about $249 a day to imprison a person. So there is less recidivism and less cost but I think the other argument is even more important. It keeps the offender who is at the lesser end of serious offending and is not of risk to the community in the workforce maintaining his or her job and maintaining their responsibilities in the home environment which is something that prison interrupts. So I think that community sentences should be fostered. They are important and it is important that we get them right. I think this bill is a step in the right direction.