Turei Metiria: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Turei Metiria: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:651;Page:526] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party is not in the business of being in Parliament to make law that makes David Garrett feel better. 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: That has got to be a shock to him. 
METIRIA TUREI 
: Ha ha! That is not our sole reason for being in Parliament. 
Moana Mackey 
: That’s not what you campaigned on. 
METIRIA TUREI 
: It is not what we campaigned on. Nor is it our business to be making law to make anybody feel better; we are here to make law that makes real change. There is an argument here as the debate goes on as to whether this legislation will do anything whatsoever. We are hearing from one side of the Chamber that it will do nothing and we are hearing from the other side that it might do a little bit. Either way it is an appalling way to approach legislation. We should not be wasting an extra day of taxpayers’ money on a Friday afternoon in having the whole House here to debate legislation for which there is no evidence of any description that it will actually do anything to keep people safer to make significant changes to the prison muster to keep dangerous offenders in prison as opposed to out to reduce crime under any circumstances or to impact at all on recidivism and reoffending. On that basis this is an absolute and utter waste of taxpayers’ time and money. Through this debate absolutely nothing will change and nobody knows—not even the Minister—whether this legislation will make any change anytime in the future. 
This is disgraceful behaviour and a disgraceful reason to be using the kinds of precious resources that our community needs when the community does need to be kept safer and the community does have real fears. Much of that fear has been driven up by political fearmongering during the election campaign. Law and order has been used for that purpose for quite a number of years but there are real concerns in the community and they should be addressed. 
So how will we deal with those concerns about reoffending reducing the amount of crime in our community and trying to keep people out of prisons? In many ways prisons are holding cells for the potential capacity of enormous development in this country particularly from a Maori point of view. Too many of our Maori people are in prisons for all the structural racist reasons that I set out earlier in my first reading speech and that Rahui Katene set out in hers. It is a huge waste of potential to have people trapped in our prisons but the law and order debate that is being held at this high level in Parliament and therefore filtered out into the community is one of doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. Of course as we all know that is the definition of insanity not rational evidence-based legislation and lawmaking. 
We need to change the debate and we need to change what we do to make this community safer. We know that if we keep people away from prison they are less likely to reoffend. We know that for a fact so surely there is room here for a serious discussion and serious debate and for legislation that looks at ways of keeping people away from jail because we know that if they stay away from jail they are less likely to reoffend. That is a means by which we can reduce the recidivism rate; it is a means by which we can keep our communities safer. But instead of dealing with legislation to keep people away from prisons we are debating legislation that will put more people in prison and we are somehow expecting despite the evidence to the contrary that this will keep our communities safer. 
It is of some interest—at least to me I guess—that this issue is not faced by New Zealand alone. New Zealand suffers from the problem of a failure both of the imagination and of rational evidence-based legislation in terms of finding the real solutions and of enacting and putting in place the real solutions to reducing offending and reducing reoffending. Australia is dealing with the same issues. It has recently had a number of law changes that have made it much harder to get bail over there and as a result its prisons are absolutely bursting at the seams. It is a particular issue in New South Wales. They are talking about having to build a new prison in New South Wales every 2 years just to keep the growing population of prisoners in jail.