Ardern Jacinda: Parole Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Parole Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 17 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1668. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I want to begin as many of my colleagues in the House have done today by paying my respects to the advocate storyteller and ultimately world-changer in her own right who was Celia Lashlie. Many of her works actually sit on my bedside table not least because she was always one of those individuals who managed so carefully to put stories where previously only statistics existed. She reminded us that behind every grim headline and every known story was in and of itself a very grim story and one that is within our power to change. It is an important lesson which I first learnt from my father. She gave us the uncomfortable truth that change for many young people was something that politicians could play a role in too. Although I hold great hope that groups like JustSpeak will continue her fantastic legacy for now it is up to us to pass on our condolences to her family who have not lost a campaigner; they have lost a grandmother and mother.I come now though to the Parole Amendment Bill. This is obviously the last point in our justice system really at which we interface with an offender at a time when they are meant to be transitioning eventually back into the community. I want to acknowledge the origin though of this bill. It was introduced in 2002. It was crafted by Phil Goff who was Minister of Justice at the time. He saw fit for the Parole Board to have one principle as its primary consideration when considering whether or not an offender would be released into the community and that was the safety of the community. That has not changed. Alongside that within the Parole Act are also set out the parameters around when an offender can be deemed to be eligible. Previously there had been automatic release dates built into sentences. That was removed and was instead replaced with the possibility for an offender to be reviewed by a Parole Board every 12 months once they reached a certain point in their sentence. For indeterminate sentences their eligibility is to be reviewed every 3 years and that is appropriate given the severity of the offences that those individuals may have committed.But parole and the Parole Board do play other roles and that is something we have discussed a little bit in the debate on this bill. Probably one of the most significant roles that the Parole Board plays aside from determining whether an offender is to be released or not is checking whether or not milestones as they were originally called are being reached by an offender—and I will add being reached by the Department of Corrections. An offender cannot themselves access a programme without it being facilitated by the department. Those programmes are many. They are drug and alcohol programmes; stopping violence programmes; specialised sexual abuse programmes like those offered at Rolleston Prison which are highly effective; and work-to-release programmes. For instance it is even the role of the Parole Board to check whether a prisoner would have access to adequate housing if they were released. They also check behavioural change. At a meeting they ask prison officers what the interaction with the prisoner has been like in the intervening period. I even sat in on a meeting where a discussion was had as to whether or not the offender had reconnected with their family as an important support group. These are the kinds of questions that the Parole Board will ask. Those are all important mechanisms and when you delay an offender from coming before a Parole Board at regular intervals you remove its ability to check that those things are occurring.I want to come back to that in a moment though because ultimately primarily that was not the driving force behind this bill; it was not about how regularly the Parole Board checks an offender’s progress against those milestones. The primary focus of this bill was to remove unnecessary parole meetings and to focus more on the victim. I understand absolutely those principles and those goals and that is the primary reason why we are supporting this bill because we do believe that there is value in doing that and that perhaps we are not being as efficient as we could be in the way that the Parole Board is currently operating. But we do need to keep it in perspective.Engagement with the Parole Board by victims is somewhat limitedat the moment. That might be for many reasons. It might be because a victim chooses not to be engaged. It might be because the scale of crimes involving victims is as a proportion somewhat smaller. But roughly 7 percent of victims make submissions to the Parole Board and 3 percent are likely to attend. That is not to trivialise the impact that a Parole Board hearing—and frequent Parole Board hearings—has on a victim particularly when there is no hope of release. In fact we heard from many victims who found ongoing repeat Parole Board hearings particularly for those offenders who had indefinite sentences to be a repeat victimisation. They found the hearings extremely traumatic and that is totally understandable. So that is also why we support increasing at the Parole Board’s discretion the possible gap between Parole Board hearings from 3 years to up to 5 years for those offenders at the extreme end. But at the same time it is also important that we are monitoring on behalf of victims the way that the prisoner is engaging with the prison system in the intervening period.One of the things that was raised at the select committee which we discussed was whether it is possible to separate out those two roles. Yes the Parole Board decides whether or not a prisoner should be released but it also checks that the department is doing its job and making sure that the prisoners are attending all of the programmes that are available. If we are not sending a prisoner back to the Parole Board for consideration for release is there a way at least to send them somewhere where there can be some discussion as to whether they are attending programmes—whether they are on track to get back to that Parole Board meeting and demonstrate some engagement at all. At the moment for the Parole Board it seems that by ruling out one option—consideration for release—we are removing the check and balance role that it has played against the Department of Corrections which has had issues in the past.There are scheduling issues with programmes within our prison system. The Auditor-General has raised this and has confirmed it. The scaling up of the availability of programmes has meant that actually there has been a bit of a hitch with all of it in that we are not always getting prisoners into programmes where we should and we are not necessarily timing the programmes for the appropriate time in their sentence pre-release. That is something that is of concern and by doing this we do lose that ability to monitor them.I want to speak just very quickly about a couple of the things that the Law and Order Committee has changed as part of its work which we have traversed a little bit all of which we think are suitable changes. The term “risk milestone”—that is some of the things I have talked about that the Parole Board can set out as needing to be achieved—has been changed to “relevant activity”. This makes total sense. A milestone implies that if you achieve it you are going to be released. Nothing is automatic nor should a Parole Board’s decision be predetermined in that way. Standard release conditions—we made sure that when no set time frame is set out by the Parole Board there is at least a standard default term of 6 months for release conditions.We made a change to references to the Department of Corrections in several clauses of the bill so it reads “the manager of the prison in which the offender is detained”. I have to say I disagree with the rationale that was given for that in the explanatory note of the bill which is that there was a lack of clarity. I think there is plenty of clarity in stating that the Department of Corrections has responsibility. There is less clarity when you just open it up to the manager of a prison because then we are not sure whether or not we are talking about a Serco prison or a Department of Corrections prison. So let us be really honest about why that was changed and broadened in that way. Dates of future parole hearings—we made sure that there was discretion to bring forward meetings if that was deemed appropriate.Finally and very importantly because this bill is about to come up soon we wanted to highlight with the Minister that information sharing with the Parole Boardwas lacking particularly in civil orders. We understand that via the Judicature Modernisation Bill there will be the ability to have a memorandum of understanding to make sure that information is shared. We want to highlight again and put on record that information sharing with the Parole Board is critical to ensure it makes appropriate decisions. Otherwise we do support this bill we think it contains sensible changes and we commend it to the House.