Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): I am pleased to take a somewhat contrary view to the rest of the speakers we have heard on this bill. The Greens are not supporting this legislation. We see it as addressing the wrong problem in a sense. There may certainly be an issue around information sharing. We think however this bill goes too far. The peculiarity of this legislation is that in the introduction to the commentary we are told that the bill responds to perceived weaknesses in legislation regarding offender and patient management that were identified in the Government inquiry entitled matters concerning the escape of Phillip John Smith/Traynor. The peculiarity is that had all the provisions proposed in this bill been enacted been in legislation at the time that Mr Smith/Traynor took his brief excursion to South America nothing would have changed. There is nothing in this bill actually that would have prevented him from doing exactly what he did and that is very strange in its own right.The inquiry actually identified a whole raft of issues and failures that enabled Mr Smith to escape and make his journey to Brazil. The main findings are set out—what are referred to as principal causes and deficiencies that failed to prevent his escape. The inquiry likened it to links in a chain. Had one of those links not been present had one of those failures not occurred then Mr Smith would not have got away and we probably would not be having this conversation.Firstly—and these are identified as the links the deficiencies that contributed to his ability to escape—Corrections did not adequately assess or mitigate Mr Smith's risk. The surveillance and monitoring of Mr Smith's activities was inadequate. The inquiry went on to say Mr Smith should have been subject to higher levels of vigilance by custodial staff intelligence staff staff members generally" and said that experienced officers expressed strong misgivings about Mr Smith that were not always shared or assessed or were not influential.Mr Nash referred to Mr Smith as being "as thick as two short planks". I love the phrase personally and I am not here to defend in any way Mr Smith's character or actions. But in fact he displayed a considerable cunning or dare I say it even intelligence in being able to manipulate access to a passport and to get out of the country. His undoubted cunning/intelligence was proven by the fact that he illegally but successfully ran a couple of businesses and generated a healthy amount of money for himself while still in custody. So while he certainly proved to be foolish by putting himself in a public forum after his escape he did demonstrate a level of cleverness at least or cunning.I think that the fairly bald statement that the inquiry revealed issues around information sharing is not untrue but it overemphasises the importance of those problems. Had Mr Smith or Traynor been correctly identified then he would never have been able to get a passport. If we had had legislation in place that said serving prisoners may not get passports that would have stopped him presumably—except of course for the historic glitch that meant there were no links anywhere in anybody's database linking Phillip Smith with the name of Traynor. So the response which has been a significant increase in the ability the potential capacity for various Government agencies to share information is we think a significant overreaction in terms of the likelihood that that sharing or lack of ability to share information was in fact the problem that enabled this fellow to get away.We already have—as was pointed out by I think the Law Society—mechanisms to enable agencies to share information and they are called AISAs or approved information sharing agreements. We had a fairly robust submission—several of them in fact—that suggested that those agreements could be used to allow for not only bilateral but multilateral arrangements for information sharing between various agencies. An argument would need to be made that it was necessary. The agreements could be constructed in such a way that the need is demonstrated and that we keep fairly tight reins on the ability of these agencies to share information.It is always a fraught sort of an area the question of information sharing between Government agencies because on a practical day-to-day basis you can see it is sensible and necessary. Police courts and agencies involved with managing domestic violence—you can see very quickly that if the barriers to information sharing are too impermeable or too excessive then we are not going to get good outcomes for some vulnerable people in our communities. But we have to be very thoughtful about exactly how far those agreements go and I think that this bill has overreacted. I think part of the reason why this bill has become a sort of a catch-all almost an omnibus—it is not a universal freeing up of agencies to share information but it has gone a long way down that road.I think it is not as good a bill as it could have been and we can get some evidence for that from the regulatory impact statement (RIS) which was probably one of the most straightforward and frank pieces of advice I have seen from Justice officials. They said very clearly that the main constraint they have faced in their regulatory impact analysis was time. The message is very clearly stated in the RIS that Justice officials did not have time to do a decent job. It says: "The Government has committed to introducing legislation as quickly as possible to improve the ability of agencies to verify identities."—compounded by say—"the Government's decision to not implement recommendations by the inquiry and to consider the full range of tools to enable better information sharing."It is a bit like the old expression "Marry in haste repent at leisure". I think the same can be said about making legislation about forming statutes. If you do it quickly under the haste that is generated by the public spotlight—the public concern and rightful concern that this very dangerous person was able to leave the country—reacting to that sort of public pressure does not make for good legislation. I think this bill is an example of that.The point was made earlier again in terms of this general theme of overreaction that temporary release had been and is and could be again a very successful mechanism for making the transition from prison to society. The inquiry actually made the point that—here we are—"In the 10-year period ending in 2014 the reported number of breaches of temporary release conditions by prisoners was extremely small even minuscule." "Minuscule" was the word it used in terms of the number of incidents of people abusing or failing to comply with conditions of temporary release. Yet when this one guy a very smart person though not an admirable person in any way managed to manipulate himself a passport and get out because Corrections frankly was not doing its job of monitoring him—it did not confirm the sponsor and it did not do a large number of things. The fact that this fellow was able to get away—one serious breach—immediately led to a blanket halt on temporary release.This disadvantaged not only prisoners but some employers who were actually giving those prisoners jobs and who were extremely upset that the inmates turned up to work one day and the next day they did not arrive because they were not released from prison. It undermined employers' confidence in the ability of Corrections to reliably supply them with people who are going to do some useful work and learn some skills. Again there is that whole sense of overreaction. I think even now several years later the incidence of temporary release is at something like only 80 percent of what it was before this one escape which as I say the inquiry described as minuscule.So all in all the Greens think that this legislation goes too far in enabling information sharing. It is a difficult area as I have said. I concede that we certainly do not want to allow people to be disadvantaged we do not want to allow people to be victimised and we do not want to inhibit the provision of necessary social services to individuals who are in need of them by absence or lapse in the ability of agencies to share information. But legislation done in haste and under the glare of public pressure is seldom good legislation and I fear that this bill has fallen into that. Thank you."