Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. Like others across the House it is a time of reflection and looking back on the Speech from the Throne and also starting this parliamentary year we can all acknowledge and express our gratitude for how well our nation has done in the COVID response and in not only surviving but in a way thriving as well in this pandemic. Everyone here keeps saying this phrase and I think we need to hold tight to it which is that we will build back better". So I want to focus on something that wasn't necessarily working before that pandemic and hold too on to the idea that we need to be bold moving forward because some things don't call for us to return to the status quo. We did do well in the COVID response through active leadership and as a Government—and in the Green Party we were so proud to be a part of that Government and that COVID response—the act of leadership meant doing things that hadn't been done before. We were good at the lockdown in this nation because we worked as a team but we were also good because we invested in the lockdown. We provided a wage subsidy we kept the businesses going and we allowed people to stay home. And we're seeing some around the world in particular some of our traditional Western allies as we call them doing so so poorly because they are holding on to ideology that doesn't work. Putting business first hasn't worked because people do need support to stay home. So the thing I want to focus on as the justice spokesperson for the Green Party is justice because that is an area where we need to build back better and we need to be transformative and we need to let go of old prejudices. We know that our prison system is not working. We've been told over and over again and last term by even the Prime Minister's own Chief Science Advisor that prisons have failed. We've got the High Court telling the Crown that they are no longer to bring up the idea of deterrence in drug sentencings at least because all the evidence shows that deterrence does not in fact work; it is a myth. We have high recidivism rates. We have one of the highest per capita prison populations. We constantly get reports from the Ombudsmen and from others about abuse in our prisons. And we are not keeping down crime rates. We are not keeping victims safe. In fact telling victims that we need more and more people in prison—we need to lift sentences of imprisonment—has now become callous because we're not keeping them safe. What we do need to invest in is what we know will prevent crime. That means acknowledging that the vast majority of people that we do imprison suffer from serious mental health issues suffer from brain injury that's been undiagnosed. They suffer from addiction. I think it's 90 percent or just under 90 percent of young offenders under-19-year-olds that suffer from a diagnosis of what is described as serious learning disability. So we're failing at different stages of our education system of our healthcare system in mental health and addiction treatment. These are places where investment must go instead of the failed system of imprisonment that we've been pouring billions of dollars into in the past. The purpose of our justice system must be rehabilitation. It must be successful reintegration back into the community. That means that rehabilitation programmes drug and alcohol programmes mental health support have to happen outside of those abusive prisons that have so far failed our communities victims and perpetrators and caused intergenerational harm. Now those reports into our justice system also say repeatedly that the justice system is racist. Māori are experiencing at every encounter with the justice system—from the first time they encounter police to the charging system to the first time they appear in court to convictions and if convicted to being sentenced to imprisonment—far far disproportionate rates to Pākehā and others for the same types of acts. Now we've seen the Black Lives Matter movement across the globe. We know that we don't have those very high rates of police brutality here but we do have it and we know that our justice system harms Māori in all sorts of other ways. So that's not OK. We need to be bold and transformative as we were in the COVID response and do things differently. We need it for the health of our community we need it for Māori and we need it for a better future for all of Aotearoa."