Adams AmyHon AMY ADAMS (Minister of Justice): It is a pleasure to take a call in this justice-themed section of the debate on the Appropriation (2015/16 Confirmation and Validation) Bill. I want to obviously address my comments as both the justice and courts Minister but also the Minister who leads the wider justice sector. I want to pick up on the comments that the chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee Sarah Dowie made in her contribution where she highlighted the success of the sector in the time we have been in Government. It is working very much as a sector and we are no longer looking at these as individual stand-alone portfolios but looking quite comprehensively right across the justice sector and actually even more so increasingly right across the social sector and understanding the interactions between them.While my contribution will focus on that part of our work I also want to almost beg a little bit of indulgence and look at it through the lens of one of my other portfolios which is around social investment. I actually think that when you look at the work that the justice sector has done which we have seen reflected in the various financial reports that we are debating in this bill you see an excellent example of agencies tilting towards and pivoting towards taking that social investment approach. Absolutely they are working as a sector. They are no longer devising their work programmes along agency lines with those strict vertical silos that have for so long frustrated the public around the way the Government works; they are very much focusing on early intervention. They understand that it is not enough for them to simply react to what is happening react to the crime in society react by processing them through the courts and react to the prisoners who turn up in our corrections system. They are very much—and most of the work programmes of those agencies are—thinking about and working out how we can better understand the people who are ending up in the system and how actually as a system we could have intervened sooner and more effectively to both reduce the level and severity of the offending and to actually stop them offending at all.I think that really has been the story of the work in the sector over the year. We are seeing a lot more better-targeted interventions. That really comes about through a far greater analysis and understanding of the customs we see through the system and understanding that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach. The justice sector has been one of the leading sectors across Government at doing what we call the investment approach—understanding its population understanding the types of stories that are coming through being able to segment its analysis and its response down to some very very granular levels of interaction and ensuring that our responses are very targeted to those particular understandings. What all that means is that we have a much more effective way of intervening and working with people who might otherwise end up in the criminal justice system and the best chance of working with those who are in the criminal justice system to turn that around.I did want to just reflect on and commend the work of my fellow Ministers in the sector but also the chairs of the two select committees Sarah Dowie and Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi. I congratulate Mr Bakshi on his appointment as parliamentary private secretary—for his work in Police and his strong interest in this area.We are seeing quite an interesting programme of work that supports that investment-approach lens that I have been talking about. It will not be any surprise to this Committee that one area that I am very proud of and I think absolutely demonstrates this approach is the work around family violence. Because if you want to look at an area where as a society and as a House and as a system we can intervene far better more effectively and much earlier to turn around not only criminal justice outcomes but actually whole-of-system outcomes it is in this area. We know that children growing up in households where there is violence are five times more likely to commit suicide and have a significantly higher chance of not getting NCEA. It is the highest—by a long shot; the single highest—predictor of going on to then become both offenders and victims of family violence. So it is working far better at those early signs of violence in the home—long before they get to court actually. If we wait until they are in court to get help we have left it too long.So the whole package of reforms is now in a bill in front of a select committee for consideration and we are having a family violence summit in the next month to continue discussing with the wider community the response programme. It is exactly that: it is pivoting the whole of the justice system alongside their colleagues in the social system to working in a much more citizen-centric way to better address and better target family violence and respond much much more quickly.In that respect in my closing seconds I do just want to particularly comment on the work of the Integrated Safety Response pilot in Christchurch and the Waikato. In the 9 months that has been operating we have seen 24000 people helped through that programme. I can tell this Committee that the feedback we get—we never pretend that we have a perfect solution and it will magic it away—that resonates most with me is that the victims who have been in contact with the system the providers have said that we can never go back. This system has shown us that this is the only way to be working. It is the way to make progress and I think it very well demonstrates the system-wide early intervention approach of the sector.