Ryall Tony: Courts and Criminal Matters Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Ryall Tony: Courts and Criminal Matters Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:626;Page:21722] 
Hon TONY RYALL (National—Bay Of Plenty) 
: 
 This is quite serious; I cannot believe how quickly that last part went through. I would hate to think that that debate had been curtailed for any reason to do with the fact that we are here at 4.35 on a Friday afternoon and someone has some arrangements—because this is a serious debate. The debate on Part 6 had gone for 20 minutes when Mr English who had not participated in the debate previously sought the call and was ignored. I would hate to think that that is what is going on. Frankly this debate should go on a lot longer. Mr Tisch and I hope more Opposition members will be down here contributing to it. I do not want someone’s arrangements in his or her electorate curtailing the debate on Part 7 of this bill. 
This is an important bill because it makes changes to the way in which people are paid reparation. At the moment if someone has several reparation orders against him or her—say that person has 10 reparation orders—and pays $1 of reparation to the court that $1 is split amongst the 10 people and they get 10c each. This bill proposes to set some rules for reparation. If for example someone’s reparation orders all relate to the one circumstance—if for example that person bashed up several people or burgled one house and got several reparation orders relating to that—those orders will all be paid on a pro rata basis—$1 is paid and 10c goes to each person. 
But if the offender has a never-ending series of reparation orders because he or she has smashed up people’s property belted people up and stolen stuff from them the reparation orders will now be paid in the order in which the offences took place. So the person with the oldest reparation order will be paid first rather than getting only 10c. This means that every subsequent victim of the offender will have to wait. 
This is a really big problem. We have a whole lot of career criminals whom this Government keeps letting out of prison on parole who are continuing to offend. The House will be shocked to know that one individual has 92 orders to pay victims—92 reparation orders. About 20 people have over 40 reparation orders. A whole lot of bad people are getting out of prison early having served one-third of their sentence reoffending while on parole and getting all these reparation orders—huge numbers of them. 
The amendments being made here are quite serious. We have close to 7000 people who owe money under reparation orders to more than one person so what is proposed is quite a serious amendment and quite a big change. 
The National Party says that it is all very well for the Government to pass a bill that will change the order in which people who are owed reparation are paid but let us do more to get the money in the door to start with. Over $22 million owed to victims of crime is going uncollected. Some of that debt is quite outstanding. Some of the debt that is owed in reparations has been outstanding for ages and not enough is being done to collect it. I totally reject the proposals in Part 8 of this bill which we will be talking about later. 
A lot of people owe reparation. We are talking about huge amounts. Some people owe over $100000 of reparation. Many owe over $2000 of reparation. More should be done to get this money in. The Government is simply not taking advantage of every opportunity to get more information from Government departments to help locate these people. We should be telling the Inland Revenue Department to give us every piece of information it has that could help us locate these people. We should be telling the New Zealand Customs Service to give us every piece of information that it has in order to locate those people. It should be the same in respect of the Immigration Service—every piece of information. We should not be limiting ourselves to phone numbers and addresses of current employers and of the individuals themselves. 
The Government is not really very serious because if it were serious would it be bringing in a bill under urgency that would stop 117 people from getting on a plane? Maybe or maybe not because that is the situation.