Henare Peeni: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHenare Peeni: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 01 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11620. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PEENI HENARE (Labour—Tāmaki Makaurau): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. E muamua la‘ava ona si‘i le‘veiga ma le mamalu mo lenei aso u‘amafai ai ona tatau ma‘futa fa‘atasi.Thank you for allowing me this contribution. My Samoan is amateur at best but I thought I would take this opportunity to acknowledge Samoan Language Week. Thank you once again for this opportunity to contribute to this particular bill.There have been some great speeches across the House where they have talked about some of the sad outcomes of poor decisions made or perhaps poor monitoring or perhaps poor legislation. I think this is a good opportunity to come into the House this evening to look at this particular bill to work out does it actually meet the intention? Is it going to do what it says it is going to do? Furthermore how will this affect New Zealand moving forward both on the side of the offender and also the community at large?The House has already spoken about technology catching up with legislation and I think that is a great step forward. In fact it has been a long time coming. I would argue that probably by the time that this bill actually passes through into law the technology is going to change again and leave it behind again and we will probably be back some time in the near future to debate this particular bill or make some particular amendments to this bill. But we commend the step forward.Technology plays an important part but I want to flip this on its head because I think that one of the parts in commentary on this particular bill—“Prisoners have for many years been temporarily released or granted escorted absences from prison for several recognised purposes such as funerals”—I want to just touch on briefly. I wonder how technology would keep up with the vast metropolis of Mitimiti in the far north. If I understand it correctly this particular piece of technology will allow GPS to monitor where this offender is at any point in time. I wonder if that will happen in Mitimiti where there is no—Hon Member: Internet.PEENI HENARE: There is no internet. There is no cellphone coverage and—Paul Foster-Bell: Satellite coverage.PEENI HENARE: I cannot see anything in this particular legislation that says we are going to now be commanding satellites to follow these things. Because I can tell you I say to the member across the way that even when you drive out there you look at your iPhone and you have punched in there “Mitimiti”—I can tell you that just past Waihou near Pānguru it cuts out. It is not going to work. It loses you in the system—it loses you in the system. So although I acknowledge that technology has a part to play you cannot beat human supervision. In instances like that I think it is really important for us to remember that. Let us applaud the advances in technology in this particular bill that will keep up with it but you cannot beat human supervision for most parts.Because the other part of that argument is actually just very recently only on Monday I was at a tangihanga—or a hui mate we call it in Ngāpuhi; Māori 101—of a kaumātua by the name of Hoterene Tīpene or Bossy Tīpene they called him a great kaumātua for Tāmaki-makau-rau. His son had his troubles with the law. Bossy was kept in Auckland long enough for his son to be released from prison so that he could farewell his father before his father made the long trek back up to Tai Tokerau Ngāti Hine Tau Henare Marae named after—not young Tau Henare—old Tau Henare. Anyway it was interesting because when they brought my uncle the offender into the marae or the church where we congregated they refused to remove the handcuffs. Although I take the point from Mahesh Bindra who said that at times like that where there is only one entry and one exit into this particular congregation into this particular building—but I thought that a bit of compassion could have been shown. By all means let us have the supervision there at hand ready to do their job—I agree with that—but allow this particular person the opportunity to grieve for a short time before being taken back into prison. In a very pragmatic way which is how this side of the House operates I volunteered my services and the offender was handcuffed to my hand as a family member and I was able to lead him through to pay his respects.There are several arguments here but I guess this is part of the vagaries around some of these bills and we want to make sure that we get it right make sure that the intentions of these bills are actually met. It has been mentioned in this House about rehabilitation and proper reintegration. We argue on this side that in order for this to happen quite a lot of things actually need to take place. It is not as simple as clipping on a monitoring device and making sure that you can track this person by GPS because I think just as important to allow the reintegration is actually to make sure that the community of Aotearoa New Zealand is familiar with these types of bill and this bill in particular. Because the perception of the community regardless of how strong electronic monitoring might be and the advances of technology is that that person is still an offender. I wonder then if this actually is proper reintegration to make sure that the communities feel safe to make sure that the communities can go about their daily business and also that the offender can reintegrate successfully into society.We have heard the sad case this evening being talked about by many of the speakers in the House. To see that repeated again would absolutely be tragic and I hope that this particular bill can go some way to fixing that to make sure it does not happen again.As mentioned we will be supporting this bill but in my short time in Parliament we have passed quite a number of bills by this Government that tinker around the edges. What we have noticed with a lot of these bills and this one is no exception is that the pressure is now being placed on the front line. It is great to have this great technology advancement but somebody has got to monitor it somebody has got to sit there and somebody has got to make sure that the technology actually performs its role—the effective monitoring of offenders. It still requires a human capacity.In the recent Budget sure there was a little bit of money for rehabilitation stuff—some might call it a slush fund; a bit of a fund that is available for some of the rehabilitation programmes—but essentially we need more capacity at the front line to make sure that the type of monitoring that the community in Aotearoa New Zealand expects from bills such as this actually happens to make all and sundry feel safe.Finally just in conclusion we do support this. I believe that most New Zealanders—I repeat most New Zealanders—do not actually understand the implications of this bill. So it will be the responsibility of the members out in the wider community but more importantly in this House to share that message to make sure that they are able to fully understand this so that reintegration works for both sides the community and the offender moving forward. On this side of the House we will be supporting this bill.