Harawira Hone: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Harawira Hone: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:8788] 
HONE HARAWIRA (Maori Party—Te Tai Tokerau) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker huri rauna kia ora tatou katoa e te Whare tatou e nohonoho nei ki roto i to tatou Whare Miere tenei haora o te po. Tena koutou kia ora tatou katoa. 
Whenever people screech and carry on about the sins of youth one guy’s name keeps being brought up time and time again. Judge Andrew Becroft Principal Youth Court Judge since 2001 is quick to point out—and rightfully so I might add—that youth offending has remained relatively stable and has even reduced in some areas while violent crime has increased right across the spectrum particularly in the 51 to 99-year age group. It makes one wonder why all of a sudden the Government has decided to spend $84 million on targeting serious and repeat offenders in the Youth Court when in fact only 1 percent of kids actually end up before the court. The Government should be focusing on the key issues put forward by people like Judge Becroft such as ensuring more targeted resourcing and the coordination of relevant agencies instead of beefing up the court infrastructure and extending the court’s jurisdiction to include 12 and 13-year-olds. 
We are not walking away from our responsibility for dealing with serious and repeat offending amongst a small group of youth either. We know that this country has to deal with this issue honestly and openly but we also know this: increasing the thumping power of the courts criminalising even younger kids and dishing out orders and punishments like French fries quite simply does not work. Research from all around the world as provided to me by Chester Borrows shows that the countries that invest more in communities and in rehabilitative justice have lower criminal offending rates than those that use the big stick approach that this Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill is proposing. One report from Britain showed that the more face time that we spend with kids at risk and the better we target resources towards helping them the better the outcome we get and the lower the cost our society pays as well. The same report proved that the cost of support services needed to help youth to break out of the cycle of criminal offending is less than a quarter of the cost of keeping them locked up. 
All that confirms what we already know—that the best way to reform young offenders is to help them deal with the issues in their lives and equip them to make better choices in the future. Of course the long-term cost savings are not just economic. People profit as well: offenders their families their communities and society at large. That is what Whanau Ora is all about: taking the funding currently being wasted in futile one-size-fits-all social recovery programmes run by Government agencies and targeting that funding in ways that help and that enable families and their communities to lift themselves out of despair and raise themselves to another level. 
There has been a lot of talk about boot camps too. Although I have a soft spot for good programmes—boot camps or whatever we want to call them—that encourage rangatahi to challenge themselves and raise their sights I know too that some are based simply on isolating kids and treating them to a short sharp shock. I know that all that does is increase their sense of alienation and fuel their anger. Boot camps are OK but they simply will not work just by making somebody fitter faster and harder to catch. There must also be strong elements of rehabilitation and a challenge to youth to reach their potential. Dr John Langley a member of the Youth Justice Independent Advisory Group said: “the one single factor that correlates most highly with violent behaviour in our young people is that those who commit it have had an excess of violence and punishment inflicted on them … Why dish out more when we know that has caused the damage to them in the first place? Such an approach is both wasteful and logically absurd.” At its extreme this wasteful and absurd approach also threatens the whanau-centred approach articulated by the Maori Party and enshrined in the Children Young Person and Their Families Act. 
What this country needs now is effective interventions and programmes like those where communities taking responsibility for their youth are supported by resources that would otherwise be spent on their incarceration and are reinvesting the savings in other community youth programmes. The results of the interventions and those programmes are clear: increased community care a 25 percent reduction in detention and probation and a 75 percent drop in jail time. That is what we should be talking about: strengthening communities and helping them to develop their own solutions to take care of their own kids. That is also the basis of the Children Young Person and Their Families Act: treatment rehabilitation and restoration. It is a youth justice system based on making young offenders accountable for their actions but also because they are just children it is based on rehabilitation and restoration. Those principles remain the basis of our world-leading reputation in the field of youth justice—a reputation that this bill places at risk. 
The Children Young Person and Their Families Act 1989 was the brainchild of John Rangihau and others who wrote  
Puao-te-ata-tu 
. They recognised the centrality and importance of the whanau to the care and protection of young people and of having positive alternatives to custodial sentencing based on families and communities taking responsibility for their own. This bill will erode some of those principles so regretfully we will be opposing this bill and focusing our energy on making Whanau Ora a concept that will help to turn whanau communities and the whole of Aotearoa round. Kia ora tatou.