Parker David: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8048. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): Correct so I should start. This bill is being considered under urgency. It has been brought to the House after we are told 12 days of drafting because the Government has been so ineffective in running earlier processes that it did not get to parliamentary draftspeople until 12 days ago. And it stands out obviously in the form of the bill. Take clause 7—“Who is returning offender” does not even make grammatical sense. There will be a number of other mistakes in this bill.Unfortunately this House has to deal with it under urgency and we actually agree that given that the Government has got to this point it should be dealt with under urgency but it does take away liberties from people. The Attorney-General says that those interferences with the liberties of returning criminals are justified and I think he is probably right but we cannot be sure that that line is drawn in the right place exactly without considering these things carefully. Neither can we be sure that it is going far enough to protect the New Zealand public without these things being considered carefully.I thank the Minister Amy Adams for her interactions with the Labour Party and in particular with Jacinda Ardern but it is obvious from those interactions that the form of the bill has been changing substantially in the last day and yet we are expected to believe that the form of this legislation will be perfect. I made a suggestion through Jacinda and Andrew Little that we guard against mistakes here by passing two forms of this bill today. One would have a sunset clause that would say that it expired after a year—we said: “Say a year.” If the Government came back and said “Say 2 years.” we probably could have lived with that but it should have had a sunset clause.At the same time under the same debate with no more parliamentary time we offered to cooperate with this at the Business Committee. We said: “Pass a second version of the bill identical except that it would not have a sunset clause and it would not commence until the date of the sunset clause in the first bill and send that to the select committee.” And then starting tomorrow the select committee could have heard from the Law Society heard from the victim impact groups and heard from civil society as to where the flaws are in this bill because there will be flaws in this bill.I say Amy Adams why did you not respond positively to that request? The Minister Amy Adams replied saying: “Well we’ll have a review after 2 years.” That is not the same thing. That is a review as to whether the legislation was working as anticipated; it is not “Review now as to whether this legislation is right tomorrow.” That was a very good offer from the Labour Party as to how you get the balance right between protecting the public—because we might not have properly protected the public in the form of this bill—and making sure you are not unduly penalising people post-release who should not be further put upon. I cannot understand why the Government did not accept that.The final point I will make because I think I am just about out of my 5 minutes—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): No you have got a minute and a half yet.Hon DAVID PARKER: I have got a minute and a half left. Why is it that on a bill like this which is being introduced in such a hurried way under urgency the Government members are not taking their allotted time? Why is it that they are not taking the trouble to actually read this legislation? They only need to get to clause 7 of the bill to find the first obvious grammatical mistake which is on page 4 of the bill—it is not a long way to read through it to get that mistake. Why is it that we have not had a discussion as to how it is that we guard against the risks that we are creating—[Bell rung]—through the urgency motion? My colleague David Shearer will take the rest of this 10-minute call to illustrate to the public how lax this Government has been in terms of meeting time lines so that we would not be doing this in such an urgent manner.