Henderson Emily; McKelvie IanDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei): It's a pleasure to stand up and take a call in support of the repeal of this really quite detrimental dangerous and unworthy piece of legislation one that my colleagues in the criminal court and the judiciary have long long despised and wanted rid of. I guess I would answer my colleague across the House—Ms Hipango—by saying: when is the right time to do the right thing? Every time.Harete Hipango: Right now.Dr EMILY HENDERSON: Right now is the right time to do the right thing—which of course is always the left thing. Having spent most of my adult life working to help vulnerable victims particularly of sex crimes to get access to justice I do understand the desire to find a silver bullet to the problem of crime. But there's a saying in the courts: hard cases make bad law—meaning the facts of a terrible case can make us reach for simplistic solutions that feel good in the moment and go on to leave a trail of havoc when the next case isn't as hard or as straightforward. Now sure it feels good to lock 'em up and throw away the key on a terrible offender except that some of them turn out to be sad people like Mr Fitzgerald in the Court of Appeal case with serious mental health problems who offend compulsively and whose crimes consist of still distressing but ultimately low-level offending—not good not OK but not worth seven years in jail. And that is exactly what has happened here and exactly why we are repealing this bit of feel-good no-good ineffective legislation. And it is ineffective to the point that no one researching any of the many countries and states who have had these things—so not just New Zealand—has been able to come to a conclusive answer demonstrating this piece of legislation does anything much. We've got stats going up and stats coming down. Over the debate in the last few weeks a number of combatants on the other side have tried to cherry-pick a study out of the muddle. To cherry-pick one study one way or another is bad science. The overall picture is what we need and the overall picture is at best inconclusive or to give it the technical term meh". Now I may be going out on a limb here but it seems to me that "meh" is not a good enough reason to continue with a law that as our highest courts have said in the strongest possible terms is a continual danger to the human rights of defendants—namely the right to protection from cruel or disproportionately severe punishment. Meanwhile all the time the court has had the ability to do everything the Opposition might want in terms of throwing the book at serious offenders. They have all the power in the world to impose maximum sentences or deterrent sentences or any combination of sentences. The difference is that when a judge does it in anything else than a three-strikes situation they are enabled to do it with a full grasp of the circumstances of the case in a system where proportionality is the watchword. When it's a three-strikes offence all sense of proportion or indeed rationality is out the window in favour of the good old knee-jerk reaction. And the really awful bit is that this appeal would have been unnecessary had the ACT-National coalition who produced this unholy mess listened to the experts in the first place. If you turn back to the original advice given to the ACT-National alliance it was full of warning as to what would happen—which is to say nothing good. Because really all these studies of the three-strikes laws do is demonstrate what multiple other studies have proven before: that the big idea of deterrence doesn't work. It only works when the people you are trying to deter are making rational calculated decisions and people in these serious violence offences aren't calculating anything. They act on the spur of the moment fuelled by rage revenge and uncontrolled emotion. Deterrence only works for one sort of person: people who plan their crimes. Just a thought for those across the House but possibly it's the white-collar criminals who you ought to be targeting with this sort of stuff. Deterrence doesn't work. We'd like it to. It would make a lot of people happy if it did. It would make crime so much easier to eradicate. But we can't all live in an ACT-National fantasy. We can and I do commend this bill to the House.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): I understand the next call is going to be a split call also and I call Glen Bennett—five minutes."