Ardern Jacinda: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8054. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I want to respond to an issue that has come up across the House during the initial first reading of this bill. That question has been that we somehow as a party are not able to critique the speed of this legislation and the timeliness of it because we have had offenders from Australia deported into New Zealand under a Labour Government. We also had Australian offenders deported here to New Zealand under a National Government before that. No one has ever argued that we have not had a regime that allowed legitimately New Zealand citizens to be deported to New Zealand. What has changed under this Government in recent times is that an amendment was made to Australia’s immigration Act that has led to a significant increase in the number of people being deported here—significant. In fact from what I have seen it is up to five times per month the number of offenders than we have seen in the past. So the scale has changed significantly.The second thing that has changed is that finally New Zealand was able to negotiate an information-sharing arrangement which allowed a monitoring regime to be put in place—pretty critical if you are going to undertake this piece of work. Things are not the same as they were 7 long years ago when Labour was in Government so I think it is probably not necessarily the legitimate point of debate that members on the other side of the House would like it to be.Like the Minister Amy Adams I think this is an unusual second reading speech given that it is immediately after the first reading. Usually at this time we would have a conversation about the changes that have been made at a select committee. I want to use this opportunity to just highlight again that it would have been useful if we had—as Metiria Turei and as David Parker have mentioned—a dual-track process that would allow this stopgap law to be put in place but we allowed for parliamentary consideration and a new regime to replace this law in a year’s time. If you look at the regulatory impact statement—under external consultation 3.6: “In the time available only New Zealand Police the Department of Corrections and Crown Law were consulted on drafts of this bill.” I know given the short time frame—we were being consulted right up to this morning on some changes—that that consultation would have been relatively rushed. There was no Law Commission no Law Society no Parole Board no PILLARS—groups that always bring to the table substantive and useful arguments and critiques of this kind of legislation. Again I want to make that point: we still could have been debating a dual-track process the public still could have had their say and that would have been highly desirable.I want to use my second reading speech though to highlight some of the issues that we are likely to spend a bit of time critiquing in the Committee stage the first of which is the fact that we will keep making references to detention centres despite the discussion between the member Kelvin Davis and the Deputy Speaker in the first reading where the Deputy Speaker requested that we stop referring to detention centres. I would like to point out to the Deputy Speaker that under clause 17(3) of the bill there is reference explicitly to immigration facilities because for the purposes of this bill they count as incarceration. And as defined by the Minister individuals who are released from prison and have 6 months outside of prison custody technically should not have elements of this bill apply to them unless that 6 months includes a turn in a detention facility. And why? It is because you are not therefore mimicking someone who is reintegrating into a community because you are still incarcerated. A detention facility is incarceration. Therefore it has the dual act of meaning that your liberties are removed from you for longer and the double whammy of meaning that you will be monitored for longer as a consequence. And yet you have absolutely no control over that period of incarceration. So it is a dual injustice as it were in terms of how this bill would then apply to you. So we think it is absolutely right that we are able to talk about incarceration in detention centres as part of this legislation and what defines of course that incarceration and what people are enduring in those facilities.The second issue that we will be drawing on in the Committee stage is the appropriate application of the law as it relates to the gathering of offenders’ information. I want to thank other members who have raised instances in the development of this bill anywhere in the legislation where we have seen the law go beyond what we would consider to be reasonable. Our bar for what is reasonable is what we have already passed through due and thorough process in the New Zealand Parliament already. So if we are for instance putting in place a regime that is more stringent in terms of who is required to give a bodily sample that goes beyond our existing bodily samples legislation then we would consider that to be unreasonable. If it asks for the police to gather more information than would currently be the case for someone who was being paroled we would consider that to be unreasonable. And that is where we need to critique as well. The legislation sets out the time for which a person could be detained in order to hand over those samples and hand over that information. Again we need to check that it mirrors exactly requirements in the current existing New Zealand law because at least that law has gone through a thorough process.It is probably right to point out that I am advised that where the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet falls down is around bodily samples and that that is because of existing bodily samples legislation having failed that New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet when it initially went through. But again that is something we will be looking at during our second reading.The third point that we will be focusing on during the Committee stage is the dual regime that is set out in subpart 2 of the bill because this is where the bill applies to both sets of categories of individuals—returning offenders and returning prisoners. Our concern is that between those two groups there is the potential for some gaps to emerge and that those gaps actually could emerge at the higher end of offending rather than the lower end. And I want to just delve into that a little bit now. For instance in the bill under clause 16 it defines who is a returning prisoner: “A returning prisoner is a person who has been determined by the Commissioner to be a returning prisoner in accordance with the criteria set out in section 17.” Clause 17 then goes on to define that “The Commissioner must determine that a person is a returning prisoner” if they have “(a) … been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction of an offence for conduct that constitutes an imprisonable offence in New Zealand; and (b) has in respect of that conviction been sentenced to (i) a term of imprisonment of more than 1 year;” or cumulatively more than 1 year and “(c) is returning or has returned to New Zealand within 6 months after his or her release from custody during or at the end of the sentence.” Then it goes on for the sake of clarity to point out that custody does indeed include immigration facilities.So we have here a default regime. Basically if you are in prison for an offence of a certain period of time and you come out you are immediately stuck in a detention centre and then you are shipped to New Zealand automatically you will have a monitoring regime applied to you. What if however you are released into the community for 6 months and then come out? You could have a life sentence and be in that category. Well then we are reliant on the regime that applies to returning offenders. That regime requires the Department of Corrections to make an application within a specified period of time to the courts to have your parole conditions as they were in Australia—to apply to have a similar regime to apply to you here in New Zealand.We are relying on the department to be quite spry under these circumstances and it could well be that those whom we wish them to be spry about have committed a range of offences that we would consider to be high end. We know from the information that we have seen in the regulatory impact statement that for instance we have already had since 2013—15 percent have been offenders with rape or sexual assault offences and 5 percent with murder and manslaughter. And yet how many extended supervision orders has the Department of Corrections applied for when for the last 2 years we have had people in those high categories—how many? Not one. So we will use the Committee stage to delve into whether or not a system that is relying on a department that is struggling will deliver the outcomes that New Zealanders desire.