Goff Phil: Public Safety (Public Protection Orders) Bill Parole (Extended Supervision Orders) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Public Safety (Public Protection Orders) Bill Parole (Extended Supervision Orders) Amendment Bill — Second Readings[Sitting date: 26 November 2014. Volume:702;Page:873. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):This debate is an unusual debate in the sense that it is considering two bills together cognate bills—a fairly new term even for an old-timer but it is because the two bills are dealing with very similar matters. Both bills are intended to protect the community against people who have completed a finite term in jail but are still considered as being at extreme risk of reoffending. I listened closely to my two colleagues in the Green Party and I always respect where they are coming from. They take a principled stand but it is not a stand that I agree with and I will touch briefly on that.Yes human rights are a universal right—they apply to everybody—but we are dealing with people whom I had to deal with when I was Minister of Justice people who I knew were totally incapable of controlling their urge to offend and to offend seriously. The choice that I had to make at the time—and therefore I understand the choice that the current Minister is making—was that if I let that person out because they had completed their finite sentence they would offend and their breach of other people’s human rights and particularly children would be serious and fundamental.I am talking about an individual the individual who is the reason why the Parole (Extended Supervision Orders) Amendment Bill has come before the house. I brought the bill in because of him and a group of people like him. His name is Lloyd McIntosh; it is in the public arena. He has an IQ probably of 80 or 90. He is incapable of controlling his urges. He is not evil; he just cannot control his urges. He was convicted of raping a 2-year-old child with awful awful consequences. The child nearly died. Lloyd McIntosh and his mother both want to maintain a supervision regime of this nature.I am very conscious of the fact that when you serve your finite term generally you have done the crime you have done the time and you can start again. But we are talking about a particular group of people who are extraordinary and they are extraordinary because they are at imminent risk of reoffending seriously. So what the Parole (Extended Supervision Orders) Amendment Bill does is extend the legislation that I brought in in 2002 and it does that by saying that when you have reached the end of your 10-year term you can be considered for and you can have imposed on you a further term of close supervision.The interesting thing about the extended supervision orders is that the people are still in the community so we are trying to minimise the limitation on their freedoms while respecting the freedom of others to be protected. This is a bill that has applied to about 332 offenders and still applies to about 251. What will it do? According to the departmental statement it will probably affect 25 to 30 high-risk sex offenders against children a year; 25 to 30—that is a significant number. If we did nothing about that the number of victims would be multiples of that number.As well as extending the term beyond 10 years the bill extends it to two other categories of offenders both with high risks of offending. One is sexual offenders against adults: that will affect a much smaller number of people a year four to nine. And also a third category: violent offenders with extremely high levels of risk of reoffending—that will affect only one or two over a 5-year period. So there are significant numbers particularly in respect of crimes against children and smaller numbers in the other categories.Interestingly this is a bill—and regrettably this is a bill—that does breach the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. It breached it in 2002 and it continues to breach it and we have the Attorney-General’s comment on it. I would very much like to have avoided doing that. I do not ever lightly support a breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. I raised it at the select committee and we considered whether we could do what the Public Safety (Public Protection Orders) Bill does—which does not breach the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act—and that is make it a civil regime. The extended supervision orders regime is a criminal regime because people come before the Parole Board.What we found out is that you could do that but you would be duplicating the regime that was already in place and there will be certain risks in doing that. The impact on the offenders would be exactly the same but we would actually remove it from breaching in principle the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. I thought: “Well I’d love not to do that but should we go to this expense and also to incur risks if the impact on the individuals is exactly the same?”. In the end I came to the conclusion that probably that was not warranted particularly because the Ministry of Justice was unable to work through the alternative regime in the time frame before this legislation would come into effect which is designed to deal with the situation of Lloyd McIntosh and others in the same position.I was not on the select committee that considered the Public Safety (Public Protection Orders) Bill but I did speak on the first reading and I have read the bill carefully. It allows again for people who have completed their finite sentence to be detained this time in a secure detention facility. So it is not out in the community like extended supervision orders. It is in a place where there are walls and fences and they are unable or unlikely to escape. This applies to a much smaller number of offenders—about five to 12 over a 10-year period. It is a tiny number but the consequences would be huge if those people were let out into the community and we were unable to prevent them from reoffending.I looked closely at what the characteristics were in order to have a person put in this position. First of all the judgment is not a political judgment; it is made by a High Court judge. There are four characteristics that a person has to have: they must have an intense drive or urge to commit a particular type of offending and much of that would be sexual offending against children; they must have limited self-regulatory capacity; they must have an absence of understanding or concern for the impact of their offending on their victims; and they must have poor interpersonal relationships or social isolation. So the Act will be quite specific. The judge will make the decision and the judge will make the decision on the basis of people who have the professional medical or psychological skills and have had the opportunity to make that judgment about the person who has been in prison.Of course there are other ways that you could do this. One is of course a life sentence—there are some offences where there is a life sentence. For murder you always get a life sentence and that can be with a minimum parole period or not. Generally it is at least 10 years. That makes it easy to deal with those people because when you let them out on parole they are on parole for life and they can be recalled at any time.We also considered at the time a much wider use of preventive detention. Preventive detention means that you can lock a person up indefinitely. It is an indeterminate sentence. In some ways that would avoid entirely the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act issue because if you give them that at the time of the sentencing by the judge you would not be in breach of that Act. A sentence is imposed and the person can be locked up for life literally and if they are let out they can be recalled at any time and that happens. But in some ways it would be a more severe regime to have a much wider use of preventive detention than what we are doing with these two pieces of legislation.I support and Labour supports these two pieces of legislation. We have considered them carefully. We are not doing this for any knee-jerk populist purpose. We are doing it for the fundamental responsibility that we have in this House to protect people where we can particularly vulnerable people like children against offending that is classified as almost inevitable and against an extreme risk on the part of that offender to go on offending and to cause and inflict appalling harm on other people. I think we have got the balance right. The Labour Party is supporting the second reading of these bills.