Paul TamathaTAMATHA PAUL (Green—Wellington Central): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. During the committee of the whole House phase I was going to suggest when we were talking about the title of this bill that we could consider this the Legal Disservice Amendment Bill" because this bill is a disservice to our communities it is a disservice to our society and it is a disservice to victims of harm and serious crime. But I was too slow. But I know now!Everything has a whakapapa. Every thing and every person has an origin story and all of us here in this House have a whakapapa that describes and explains how we came to be the people that we are and why we do the things that we do. We know that because when we first stand in this House we craft our maiden speeches in which we honour that whakapapa and we talk about our lives and the trials and tribulations that we've overcome that have allowed us to come here.In the same way those cultural reports are about whakapapa; they're about understanding what kind of an upbringing somebody had what kinds of challenges they face in their everyday lives whether they have health disabilities whether they struggle with addiction whether they have experienced abuse in their upbringings or in their lives whether they have experienced abuse at the hands of the State. Understanding this allows us to understand what the rehabilitative pathway forward is for that individual and that's something that we need to understand in order to stamp any issues out at their root cause.Moana Jackson said that a justice system does not exist in isolation from the society it serves and that's exactly what these cultural reports aimed to address and what they sought to understand. What are the parts of our society that we all enable that are contributing to the reasons why people are causing harm? And similarly an individual and their actions do not exist in isolation from the society in which they live and were raised. And as I just said without those cultural reports we won't ever fully grasp the extent to which our society is responsible for the harm that is experienced in our communities. I wonder whether that's because some of us and some of the rules that we've made in this House are culpable for creating the conditions in which crime happens and harm happens in our communities in the first place.I wanted to raise a point that my Te Pāti Māori colleague Tākuta raised in the Justice Committee when we were able to question the Ministry of Justice Corrections and Police on a whole range of matters but specifically on these cultural reports. Tākuta raised the point that when Moana Jackson wrote his magnum opus He whaipaanga hou and when he exposed the racism that is baked into our justice system and the way that our justice system disproportionately incarcerates and impacts Māori at the time of that being published Māori women made up a very small percentage of the women's prison population.Hon Member: 67 percent now. TAMATHA PAUL: Yeah exactly—over the span of just a few decades we've seen the representation of Māori women in prisons balloon to the point where Māori women are the most incarcerated indigenous group of people in the world. And that is not because there is something inherent within our whakapapa that makes us criminal; it is because our criminal justice system has racism baked into it and this bill bakes it in even further. It's also because of the wealth inequality that our country has enabled to grow since the 1980s. We know that poverty is a driver of crime as well but the thing is that we're not going to understand those drivers of crime because we're taking out that important mechanism by which we can understand that more.I wanted to talk too about the way that this House and in this debate today that we have talked about written about scrutinised and ultimately objectified Māori and Pacific people as criminals. I think that in itself is criminal. There have been mountains of research that have pointed to the many ways that colonisation has contributed to a justice system that disproportionately incarcerates Māori Pacific Island people and poor people and those are the communities that will be most deeply impacted by the removal of cultural reports.When you turn on your TV and when you grow up in a place like I did like Tokoroa and you switch on your TV all you see is the representation of Māori as criminals—whether that's on the TV whether that's in films whether that's in television shows we are represented as criminals. That's something that we have to understand because you can only be what you see and if all we're seeing on TV is ourselves being represented as criminals then of course there's going to be an element of living up to that. But we're never going to understand that because we're removing the element that helps us to understand the cultural influences on why people commit crime.So it seems that we only search for the causes of outcomes in every other area in life except for crime the prime area that will impact the trajectory of somebody's life the most. It is time for a new way to approach the justice system and that is by incorporating humanity and empathy into our processes and to allow for us to honour each person's right to seek justice in our system. In order to do that we have to understand where somebody comes from who they are and what has driven them to do what they have done because we have to. Our justice system is at breaking point. Our prisons are overpopulated. Corrections are struggling to recruit staff to even service the enormous prison populations we have—both the remand population and the sentenced population.So this is just kind of funnelling more people into the justice system for longer periods of time and doesn't get to the root cause of why that crime was committed in the first place. I'm sure that there are also many victims of crime that may be able to move towards a space of healing by understanding why the person committed that crime towards them as opposed to never knowing never having that closure of understanding why that was committed in the first place. And that's not to justify their actions but it is to acknowledge that these cultural reports do help in the healing process for somebody to understand that background as well.The Minister said today in the House that his mandate for rushing this bill through urgency was based on their election win and that people on the doors were saying they just want to feel safe in their community and they wanted some law and order and I think that's perfectly reasonable. It's perfectly reasonable that everybody should be able to live free from harm and free from assault and harassment and discrimination—I absolutely accept that. But what I don't understand from today's debate is why the Minister saw this bill in particular as the key thing that would make communities feel safer. Because we know based on evidence and the lack of evidence underpinning this particular bill that this is not going to make our communities any safer. In fact like the Hon Duncan Webb was saying it actually creates more future victims of crime and of harm. So yeah that's all I've got to say on that. Thank you."