Dalziel Lianne: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dalziel Lianne: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 10 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:2185. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 As my colleague the Hon Phil Goff has already said Labour will support the Bail Amendment Bill’s referral to a select committee. As a member of the Justice and Electoral Committee I am very pleased to see that it is going to the Law and Order Committee. There are obviously going to be significant issues that the select committee is going to have to address and my colleague started off by highlighting those that are set out in the regulatory impact statement. The regulatory impact statement makes it very clear in its disclosure statement at the front that the Government is basing its decisions without any real knowledge of either the fiscal costs or the benefits of the options. That is a strategy that a Government can adopt and it does kind of tie back to the reason why we are debating this bill but I think this is something that will be explored at the select committee.  
The statement from the regulatory impact statement says: “The expected fiscal costs and benefits of options can only ever be approximate as there is no foolproof way of predicting: how the policy change will influence the Court’s exercise of discretion [and] which defendants will offend on bail and the extent to which serious offending on bail is reduced.” When one turns to the back of the regulatory impact statement there is a very interesting analysis of the specific offences and the proportion that serious offences represent in terms of the total number of offenders who offend while on bail.  
Of course if we were thinking about the legislation that we have in front of us today we would expect the bar on the graph here that goes right out to the end to be one of the very serious offences included in this legislation but actually it refers to offenders who are much more likely to commit a traffic or vehicle regulatory offence than anything else. Other offences committed while on bail that certainly go up there on the graph are “Offences against justice procedures Government security & Government operations”. “Offences against justice procedures” are no doubt offenders not complying with the provisions of their bail and perhaps not fronting in the court when they are required to. The next one down is “Theft & related offences”. It is only when we get down to 11.4 percent of the most serious offences committed on bail that we start to get acts intended to cause injury.  
So I think it is important when the select committee is considering the detail of it to actually look at what offences are committed while people are on bail and to remember that the presumption of innocence until proven guilty is part of the analysis. I am not saying that we are not going to support the bill as it traverses through the House; I am just saying that there is a responsibility on members of the select committee to look very carefully at this detail and to report back to the House accordingly.  
What the regulatory impact statement cautions is that there are a number of assumptions and caveats used to assess the fiscal costs and benefits of each option. So there are some costs that are included in the regulatory impact statement—I am going to come to those— 
Mike Sabin 
: What about the human costs? 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: —and some of the benefits are not really known. Well I think the member is interjecting that it does not matter what it costs because keeping people safe is the priority. That might be the conclusion that the Government reaches—that it is prepared to lock everyone up who is charged with an offence of this nature— 
Mike Sabin 
: That’s not what the bill deals with. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: I know that is not what the bill does. It is all very well to say that it is not relevant to look at the question of costs and benefits but that is what a regulatory statement does.  
In addition to the fiscal implications policy options that involve increasing the use of reverse burdens of proof in bail decisions will also as my colleague has highlighted require—and this Government has said this itself; it is restated in the regulatory impact statement—“a particularly strong case before regulation is considered. Reverse burdens of proof may override the following fundamental common law principles and rights guaranteed by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990: [namely that] a person charged with an offence is to be considered innocent until proven guilty [and that] no person shall be arbitrarily detained.” This issue is then also raised in the regulatory impact statement: “Amendments to youth justice provisions … also potentially have implications for New Zealand’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to ensure that children under the age of 18 are detained only as a last resort and for the shortest possible period.”  
I am simply highlighting these facts from the regulatory impact statement because it is going to be important for the House to address them and certainly important for the select committee to consider them because they will be issues that will be raised at the select committee. The last thing that we want to see happen is for changes to the law to be made in order to look like something is being done to address something that people are fearful of but actually the changes do not make any difference at all.  
We have had a drop in our crime rate in real terms every year in this country since 1995. The crime rate has gradually been coming down. That is I think a much more interesting issue. If one considers whether we would rather have changes to bail laws affecting people who have already offended or have changes that actually make a difference in terms of the amount of offending that is happening in the first place I know where I would like to be putting my effort and that is certainly into those drivers of crime that lead to the crime rate.  
I actually think that this House is going to be facing a very serious challenge as to whether the Government is prepared to make a difference in terms of our crime rate when we come to the Alcohol Reform Bill because we all know that the changes being promoted in that particular legislation do not meet the very strong bar that the Law Commission set when it undertook its very evidence-based report to the House. It basically ensured that we were aware that if we could make a difference in terms of the amount of alcohol that was being consumed we would end up having a huge impact on our crime rate because so much crime—domestic violence and other offences—is committed while people are under the influence of alcohol. So that is going to be the challenge to this House. It is all very well to talk about the bail legislation but when it comes down to the fact of how people will vote on the amendments that Labour is going to be tabling to the Alcohol Reform Bill then I think members on the other side of the House will be called to account by their own constituents. This legislation will not have the impact that changes to our alcohol laws will have.  
This regulatory impact statement also goes through the question of the individual offences that have been chosen and there are a couple of offences that I just want to highlight to the House. What the Ministry of Justice has done is set out the risks around the status quo then it has set out different options—options one two and three—and then it has highlighted which is its preferred option. So when we come to defendants charged with serious class A drug offences the preferred option is to “Reverse the burden of proof for defendants charged with serious class A drug offences”. The other options that it looked at were an amendment to section 10 of the Bail Act looking at those who had a history of serious violent sexual or class A drug offending and option three was to “Prohibit defendants charged with serious methamphetamine offences who are remanded in custody from applying for release on electronically monitored bail”.  
The preferred option was option one: just reversing the burden of proof for defendants charged with serious class A drug offences. This is what the cost is. The cost is listed as: “Could result in a significant number of defendants being held in remand who would not have offended on bail or would not be convicted of the offence charged. [It is likely] to be the least justifiable infringement on defendants’ criminal process rights. Fiscal cost to the Department of Corrections due to increased defendants in custody of $774000 per year or the equivalent of 8.5 prison beds.” It was $774000 per year—three-quarters of a million dollars—for an estimated 7 percent reduction in offences committed on bail by defendants charged with serious class A drug offences which is a minor number of offences when compared with the total number of offences on the graph that I showed to the House before.  
So I think there is going to have to be some serious consideration of all of these factors and one should not just get bound up with the hype around looking like one is tough on crime. If one really wants to be tough on crime then the Alcohol Reform Bill is the one to use.