Little AndrewHon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): I'm just trying to tease out the contradiction in that member's argument and I'll just put it there. So he wants the right for all prisoners to vote regardless of the length of sentence but he thinks it's an affront to the victims and actually no one should have the right to vote if they've gone to prison. So if the member comes to the House with a story it should be a straight story. Let's be consistent.Let me respond to some of the points he made. So he's a bit worried as I understand it as I infer from his contribution that if there is a future court ruling perhaps on this law that says it's still inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act therefore what are we going to do. I'd just make this point: the laws of this land are in the hands of this House. The laws of this land are in the hands of this House. This House will decide. And even under the declaration of an inconsistency with legislation that we've got going through the House at the moment it is very clear. Courts may well declare laws to be inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and it will come back to this House and this House will decide. And one of the decisions the House might make is it's going to carry on for the very good reason that at a political level we decide that inconsistency with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act is one that is tolerable. So there is no further risk there. The member asked: why three years? I've laid that out. It is about the right of those sentenced to a short sentence who know that by the time of the next election they will be out and therefore they're going to have a period of freedom and their right to have a say on who's going to govern the country that they're going to be released into.I might just say this about victims of crime because I know the National Party trots that out as if they're somehow the champions of the victims of crime. They're not. They ran down the police force. We saw a rise in crime a massive increase in the prison population under their time a lot of victims as a result. They did nothing about trying to improve the outcomes for prisoners to reduce their offending. They just carried on putting more and more back into prison. But I make this point too: actually the majority of those in prison are also victims of crime. They've been victims of child abuse child sexual abuse. They've been beaten and treated and also badly assaulted and harmed. Most of those people in prison are victims of crime. So when the members opposite are trying to trot this out as though they're mutually exclusive; they're not. And if we have a system that's doing its job it's actually recognising that and working on stopping the criminal habits and the criminal attitudes to change those behaviours.In any event I go back to the point I made before: members who were in the previous Government voted for this. It might've been a member's bill but the National Party unanimously supported it when they were in Government as a member's bill and in 2010 when the prison population was only 7500 the law change at that time that they supported did nothing to stop the prison population rising to nearly 11000. So taking away that this right to vote for this small proportion of prisoners does not make it better for victims does not reduce the number of victims. So let's not kid ourselves that that somehow is a magic answer to the problem of victims of crime. There are other things that need to happen. What victims of crime most want is a strong voice in the system. They don't want to be ignored any more because they've been papered over for so long. So that's where we're looking. That's the support that we're providing. We've started in the last couple of Budgets and we will continue if we're given permission to do so after 19 September.