Power Simon: Criminal Justice Reform Bill — Second Reading 
Power Simon: Criminal Justice Reform Bill — Second Reading 
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SIMON POWER (National—Rangitikei) 
: 
 It was with some interest that I listened to the Minister of Justice’s comments on the Criminal Justice Reform Bill. Peculiarly we have had three justice bills before the House tonight. The first two National supported and I will explain shortly why as a party we continue to have major difficulties with the largest segment of this bill. 
It is not to be underestimated just what a significant change to certain areas this bill proposes. Disappointingly it is one bill dealing with three quite different subject matters. The first relates to the arrival of the Law Commission - recommended Sentencing Council. The second relates to changes to home detention so that it is brought in as a sentence in its own right which is quite a difference from the current back-end front-end use of home detention that currently exists as well as some electronic bail issues and parole changes on the back of the Burton disaster—I suppose that is the only word to use in respect of that matter. Thirdly and sitting out there on its own as the Minister finished is the victim compensation sunset clause which expires shortly. The Minister urges the House to support the extension of that sunset clause. 
Can I say that National has taken this bill extremely seriously for a range of reasons. The first reason is that the Government has made no secret of the fact that its Effective Interventions package is largely on the back of the structural reform proposed in this bill. National members approached this bill with the view that we were concerned about the Sentencing Council. We were open-minded about Part 2 with respect to the home detention and community sentencing options and frankly remain warmly enthusiastic about that part. The difficulty for us is that as a caucus we had to make a decision as to the overall weight of the bill and the most significant change that was being proposed was that of the Sentencing Council. 
My colleague Chris Finlayson the shadow Attorney-General will go into more detail on this issue but I arrived at the Justice and Electoral Committee to sit in on the work on this bill for most of the time—I did not make it to every single hearing. National members remain particularly concerned about the Sentencing Council and still believe that whichever way it is measured or viewed it has the potential to eat away at judicial independence. We believe it has the potential to cut into what has historically been a clean separation of power between the legislature and the judiciary. 
That independence from the executive is what enables the judiciary from time to time to take hard decisions out of the hands of the legislature and to make decisions in the light of badly drafted law or the like. National in its minority report makes clear that it tried to have this bill split and it will try again in the Committee stage so that the Sentencing Council can be dealt with separately—although I appreciate there will be a part by part vote—from those matters for which we have more enthusiasm which are contained in Part 2 and relate to some of the sentencing options that the Minister proposes. 
The basis for the bill is the concern the Government has around the size of the prison population—that is the basis for the bill. That is what was in the explanatory note right from the start—up front from the first consideration. National members said in the first reading that we were concerned about what efforts we could make in this area to prevent crime from occurring in the first place. The Minister’s suggestion that parole is a privilege not a right and the fact that the Justice and Electoral Committee chose to enshrine that in quite strong wording in the bill is something that we agree with. But make no mistake that parole eligibility at two-thirds—which we told the Government in 2002 when it passed legislation to reduce that eligibility to one-third of a sentence was the wrong thing to do and the Law Commission has agreed with that—has to be offset against shorter sentences across the board. The Minister kind of skipped over that a bit but one of the recommendations of the Law Commission report was that in order to balance the need to get the parole eligibility ratcheted up to two-thirds of the sentence sentences across the board would have to be reduced somewhere in the vicinity of about 20 percent and we are not convinced on this side of the House that that is what the New Zealand public wants to see. So during the Committee stage we will be putting some amendments that will try to deal directly with some of these concerns I raise now. 
The other concern is that I am not convinced that departments like the Department of Corrections and the courts department are up to dealing with the quite high-level approach that the Minister of Justice is taking. He is to be commended for taking a high-level approach because somebody in that sector has to get their eyes up a bit. But the problem is that when we are dealing with a different home detention and community sentencing basis for non-custodial sentencing can the departments and the ministries responsible for administering these new arrangements cope? We will be testing some of those ideas in the Committee stage shortly. I believe we are going to move pretty swiftly to the Committee stage over the next few days. 
The Government assures us that by the end of this fiscal 3-year cycle there will be 1000 more police on the streets which means more arrests will be made which means the courts will have to deal with that inflow which means the Department of Corrections will have to deal with that situation at the other end which means the way that we monitor and check the new sentence of home detention and community sentences will also require a focused workforce. We remain to be convinced that that can be done. I welcome the Minister’s comments tonight that as far as the new sentence of home detention goes public safety is the Government’s No. 1 concern. The Minister and his colleagues in the justice sector can rest assured that we will be making sure they are held to that commitment during the course of the next short while. 
I think some of the issues around community home detention some of the use of information which is monitored and the right to access to that information needs a bit more exploring through the Committee stage. We certainly did that in the select committee process and I believe we amended the bill in a pretty constructive way when things like reporting times on public holidays and the like are taken in account. Under the guidance of Lynne Pillay we made some amendments to the bill which I think were pretty constructive amendments. But there is no doubt that on this committee the Government was rolled when it came to issues surrounding the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Act 2005. I want to be clear that although the two other parties on the committee may have had different reasons for opposing the extension of that sunset clause this is MMP at work. I tell the Minister that victims of crime should not have to relive their crimes in order to claim monies awarded to offenders; there are other ways other channels and other criminal sanctions that can be used to deal with offenders who are maltreated in our prison system. We will talk more about that during the Committee stage. 
Overall the weight of the intervention on judicial independence of the Sentencing Council puts National members at this position at the second reading: we will be voting against this bill at this time. As we head into the Committee stage we will be working constructively to deal with the issues raised part by part and we will be voting part by part for the parts we agree with and the parts we disagree with for amendments we agree with and for amendments we disagree with. I urge the Government if it wants to be serious about cross-party support for measures in criminal law to think seriously about allowing that split to occur in a constructive way. Overall the invasion of the Law Commission’s idea of a Sentencing Council on judicial independence is the big stumbling block that National sees with this bill.