Chadwick Steve: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Chadwick Steve: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:9318] 
Hon STEVE CHADWICK (Labour) 
: 
 I am delighted to take a call on the Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill tonight. The title of this bill is rather clunky as it is. But having looked at what will result from this bill—and also from its commencement date; my colleague Sue Moroney has very clearly pointed to this—I say we will need to have a children’s prison bill. I will just talk about the youth justice central site which has been built in Rotorua. The National members of our community led a campaign not to have that youth justice site built in Rotorua. Ruth Dyson and I spent a long time looking for it because we said these were our kids and they needed to be looked after. We knew that they were children and that they needed to be given wraparound services. But National members very clearly said we should not have the facility at Kaharoa. They grew vociferous about that and the meetings about that site were some of the most difficult public meetings that I went to. 
There is a delicious irony here tonight: National is building a youth justice central site in Rotorua and closing down Te Hurihanga which is an hour’s drive away in Hamilton when the call from the provisions of this bill and the requirements that it gives to the Youth Court are to criminalise children of 12 and 13 who will need to be placed on short-term programmes of about 13 weeks in order to turn their lives round. There is an irony here. National members complained during the election campaign that they did not want to have these facilities in their backyard. They said we should take the youth justice facility out of Rotorua and put it up in the forest. We fought—I fought—to have that facility sited in our community. Now the Minister is coming in with Todd McClay the member for Rotorua and lauding how fantastic National is in dealing with the young kids in our community. Yet just 1 hour away from Rotorua National is closing down a model facility in Hamilton that is second to none in the country and that we learnt from in terms of its success when already we are being told that not enough beds will be built in the Rotorua facility. 
National has done no long-term planning. The commencement date of October for this bill is absolutely totally unrealistic. This is all because National went out on the campaign trail with rhetoric and slogans saying it would get tough on crime. But this bill does not fix the criminal offending of young children. The title of this bill is I suggest quite wrong with regard to the provisions that it gives to the Youth Court. I think that we should have called the bill the “About Children and the Family Court Bill” in light of the provisions around jurisdiction and orders that are required in order to fix the drivers of crime in our community. 
So here we are crammed into urgency tonight in absolute chaos I have to say. There was no question time in the House today because the Government could not bear to go under the scrutiny of the media. We are going until midnight tonight in a shambolic way; proceedings have been managed absolutely shambolically. We succeeded in moving a part in the bill that we were debating previously and the senior Government whip quickly looked embarrassed so the Speaker came to the House and the Government tried to fix things up. We will argue and debate this bill tonight. The commencement date is a shambles. The bill is just a farce. It is about the Government saying it will fix the issue of youth offending by October. Well we will not have our youth justice site in Rotorua ready in October. By October Te Hurihanga will be closed down— 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: By June. 
Hon STEVE CHADWICK 
:—by June—and that is a sign that this Government is in absolute chaos about addressing criminal offending ranging from children right through the spectrum to young people who are classified as adults when they are 17 years of age.