Sharples Pita: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Sharples Pita: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:9333] 
Hon Dr PITA SHARPLES (Co-Leader—Maori Party) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Deputy Speaker. Last night I got an email about young people. That is not an unusual occurrence by any means as we frequently receive comments about young people often in association with criminal activity or youth unemployment. But this email was different. The writer felt sufficiently enthusiastic about our young people to take to her computer at 11 p.m. to tell us about the excitement she was witnessing at home amongst the iwi of Whakatohea. She described the 10 projects that Whakatohea have going under Community Max which have employed some 40 young people in their rohe. The rangatahi are involved in upgrading marae developing community gardens mara kai clearing tracks on maunga restoring old pa sites restoring whenua and planting native trees and plants. 
I will quote from the email to share the optimism that she feels for our youth: “To see the mana and confidence these young people show they feel wanted and appreciated they are contributing to our communities they take on any training they need to help them to better their future. These are young people who believe that they are useless and no one cares. I am so proud of them all the more so that our whanau were able to employ them to make our marae and whenua a place to be proud of. This is the beginning of Whanau Ora.” 
I choose to bring these comments to the debate as it is rare for our discussions in this House to make an explicit link between young people and pride confidence and mana. All too often as indeed in the Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill we focus on problems of youth. In this bill the intention is unambiguous. It proposes tools to deal with the 1000 or so serious offenders aged between 12 and 16 years. The young people who are the focus of this bill are mainly repeat offenders. Eighty percent of them are male just over half of them are Maori and the majority have left school or are near to leaving school. 
In this Chamber we debate a range a menu of initiatives including supervision and residence orders treatment foster homes lowering the jurisdiction of the Youth Court to include 12 to 13-year-olds military-style activity camp programmes electronic monitoring and the like. The contribution I would like to make to the debate is to encourage us to take a broader perspective on those 1000 young people. We need perspectives that provide us with an optimistic view to remind us of the potential of all our young people to plan proactively for our future. I was pleased that the Social Services Committee recommended amendments that specified as for example in the issue of placing child offenders in residences that the chief executive must consider all reasonable practicable less restrictive alternatives. But the general thrust of the bill remains to focus on a wide range of sentencing orders to be made for dealing with offenders. In doing so it appears to ignore some of the strongest opposition from key submitters on the bill. 
Judge Andrew Becroft the Principal Youth Court Judge described the proposal to include 12 to 13-year-olds within the youth justice system as “constituting the most fundamental change to the system since its inception in 1989.” Kim Workman from Rethinking Crime and Punishment encouraged Parliament to remember that the 1989 Children Young Persons and Their Families Act has worked well and that any amendment should not detract from its focus on treatment rehabilitation and restoration. Dr Cindy Kiro the former Children’s Commissioner promoted the need to heed the research conclusions that the most effective responses are those that include a child or young person’s family and wider community. That view was strongly supported by Jono Campbell the manager of Te Ora Hau Otautahi. As the manager of the urban Maori youth organisation he described this bill as being counterproductive to building strong communities noting that it alienates whanau community and collective responsibility and will be particularly harmful for Maori. 
The youth justice area as the House will be aware is one of the most well-researched policy areas of debate. Dr Gabrielle Maxwell from the Institute of Policy Studies right here in Wellington concludes from her analysis of the research: “If you are going to make a difference in the lives of young people who have been abused and traumatised it is necessary to provide them with close and sustained supportive pro-social relationships.” 
She also suggests that they will need education and skills to enable them to find their meaningful role in the community and they will require help in dealing with any addiction problems. What we know is that prison youth institutions and boot camps are not a conducive environment for habilitation rehabilitation or restoration. It all depends on the quality of leadership that can embrace our young people: the connection that offenders can make to positively engage in change. We know that “getting tough” approaches do not work. Our young people need to be exposed to opportunities to learn new behaviour and values to be taught new skills in active ways. 
Although it may be heresy to some the leadership to inspire change can in itself come from ex-offenders who are committed to working with young people to reduce offending and reoffending. Examples of this include the Delancey Street Foundation in America the Salisbury Street Foundation habilitation centre in Christchurch and Moana House in Dunedin which were all founded by ex-criminals. Yet the Government and officials all too often cannot accept that offenders have anything constructive to contribute towards preventing offending behaviour preferring to see them as recipients of services and not people who have something to offer. 
I go back to the recommendation from Dr Maxwell to focus on close and sustained supportive pro-social relationships as the key element of change and I want to refer to that broader context of the situation for youth in Aotearoa. One of my key concerns for our young people is the lingering effects of the recession in relation to employment in particular on the 15 to 19-year-old age group. Maori unemployment is approximately 1½ times the non-Maori rate. For Maori youth there is a twofold effect: the effect of being young coupled with the fact that Maori unemployment is consistently higher than that of non-Maori. 
How do we support these young people to continue to promote a situation of hopefulness and to focus on their future? We do that by reminding them of their connection to us—that our collective aspirations include them and that they are worthy of work that they are people whom we care about. During the select committee process Manu Caddie from Te Ora Hou Aotearoa told the committee that the bill is focused on the individual and not enough on the whanau community. It was the advice of Manu that funding for the very worst offenders might be better spent on strengthening communities to support their young people rather than on ordering individuals to be mentored or counselled. Our focus should be on further investigating those interventions and programmes that are whanau and family-based that are effective based on evidence and that represent value for money. 
The 1989 Act stimulated the social sector to consider the centrality and importance of the whanau to the care and protection of tamariki rangatahi and to youth justice. This bill in focusing on individual strategies for individual youth undermines the very intention of the overriding legislation such as greater whanau involvement in decision making and including hapu and iwi in the plans and policies. 
The Maori Party is very clear in our commitment to Whanau Ora. We want to support communities to develop and implement their own solutions. As part of this we require Government agencies to work with families and whanau on issues affecting them. We are tired of servicing the symptoms; we want whanau to be part of the direction forward and we are unable to support this bill at its third reading. Kia ora.