Goff Phil: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Goff Phil: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 10 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:2181. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) 
: 
 Labour members will be supporting the Bail Amendment Bill going to the Law and Order Committee. We will be doing so because we need to look very closely at whether this bill is real and necessary in what it sets out to do and will actually achieve that or whether this is simply political spin. There is no doubt that the aims of the bill which are improving public safety and ensuring the integrity of the bail and justice systems are proper aims. The question that we have is whether this bill will actually deliver on those aims.  
I noticed that the Attorney-General when he was introducing the bill said that National has already passed a bail bill and in fact had introduced it in December 2008 to reverse the Labour policy of softening up conditions for bail. I remember that debate. I remember going to look at the factual basis for the legislation which was actually just an election slogan. And what did we find? The net impact of that bail law passed by Simon Power and enacted in December 2008 would affect 10 people a year—10 people a year. There are 15000 people remanded on bail every year and what we had was a bill that predicted that maybe 10 people would be affected by being put into jail.  
I have no problem with tough bail laws. We start from the position that a person is innocent until proven guilty. That is the fundamental precept of our English system of justice in this country. I do not think even the Attorney-General or the Minister of Justice would disagree with that comment. That is the principle that the judge begins with and then that principle can be overturned if there is a justifiable reason. The justifiable reasons are firstly that there might be a danger that the alleged offender the defendant would abscond and if there is a real and provable danger then that is a good reason for denying bail and remanding the person in custody. The second justifiable reason is that the person who is the alleged offender is at real risk of committing further and serious offending in the community. Where that is demonstrated I have absolutely no problem with that person being remanded in custody. In fact about 20 percent of all people charged with offences are remanded in custody so the judges are using the discretion that they have to make that judgment and to remand in custody.  
Nor do I have a problem with the principle that there should be a reversed onus of proof in particular cases where it is up to the defendant to prove that he or she should be given bail rather than the prosecution to prove that they should not. In fact the substantive Act the Bail Act 2000 was an Act that I passed. I took a National Government bill and I moved a Supplementary Order Paper on becoming Minister of Justice precisely to reverse the onus of proof for categories of people who were offending at very high levels on bail. I took career burglars—you know you get only one in 10 burglars actually convicted but of those who were charged 26 percent of them were offending on bail. They would be given bail in court and on the way home for tea they would commit another couple of “burgs”. That was not good enough as far as I am concerned and we took an action and said: “Reverse onus of proof. Those people have got to prove that they are safe to have in the community.” I also took another hard-core group of people. These were people who already had substantial convictions. I estimated using the information provided to me by the Ministry of Justice that the rate of offending in this hard-core group was about 90 percent—90 percent of them while on bail would reoffend.  
We changed the law. We took the weak law that the National Government had proposed in 1999 we changed the law and we toughened it up. Did it have an impact? By God of course it had an impact: 2 000 people a year were remanded in custody who would otherwise have been given bail and that is about 269 at any one time. That did have an impact on the level of offending while on bail.  
We were able to do that and stay within the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. We made sure that the legislation was within that Act so that before people were presumed innocent and therefore the prosecution had to demonstrate why they should not get bail we had good grounds for doing that. The Crown Law Office upheld that that it was within the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. We passed legislation. It was expensive legislation. It cost $30 million in extra prison space to lock more people up on remand. 
So I do not want to hear the Attorney-General or anybody else saying that a Labour Government had not been prepared to take tough decisions on bail. That legislation was justified. If you can justify it and if it is about safety of the public and you can prove that you can make people safe then we will support it. But if it is just a bit of political spin—something that was invented for an election campaign and they know that it is not going to make a difference—then I will oppose it when I have seen the evidence if that is what the evidence shows. And actually I would expect a select committee to do that because that is the job of the select committee: to take away the political flimflam and find out whether what is being proposed is justified on the facts on the evidence on analysis and on cross-examination of the ministry officials to show that that is going to make a difference. I am not interested in doing what National and Simon Power did in 2008 which was to pass legislation where the publicity vastly exceeded the actual impact—10 people a year when we were talking about 15000 people a year getting bail.  
The critical thing I will want to know at the select committee is whether what is being proposed here is justified in terms of the impact it will have on genuinely improving public safety because there are people who are arrested for offending who should not be let out on bail. And at the moment there are people who are let out on bail and who keep offending. So I will look at this as will my colleagues on the Opposition side of the select committee to find out whether this is real whether it will actually have an impact that increases public safety rather than being something done—as it was last time under the National Government—simply to carry out an election promise that had no substance. It sounded good but it has not made any real difference at all.  
There are a number of things that we want to know that unfortunately the Minister did not touch upon. He did not touch upon whether this has been put for clearance under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act is a reasonably flexible document. If there is justification for suspending a right that people would normally be entitled to—the presumption of innocence—then they will say: “Yes it meets the requirements.” But if it is just a political thing and there is no justification I want to know that and I want to know why we have not yet had any suggestion from the Government benches as to whether this meets the provisions in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.  
I want to know what empirical evidence the Government had in terms of justifying this on the impact it might have. I have the regulatory impact statement in my hand and it says there is no way of predicting what the cost of this policy will be because you cannot predict how the policy change will influence the courts’ exercise of discretion. So we might have a lot of loud noise and fuss around this and the judges will go on doing exactly what they have done in the past which is to look at it objectively and say: “Is there a real risk of this person absconding or offending?”. The regulatory impact statement itself says that the Ministry of Justice does not know how much impact this is going to have. And there is no way of predicting it goes on to say “Which defendants will offend on bail and the extent to which serious offending on bail is reduced.”  
Here we have a regulatory impact statement that says it does not know what the impact of the legislation is going to be. Well actually I would have thought the sensible thing to do is to find out what the likely impact is going to be before you bring the legislation in. If you are looking at it rationally and saying that you are genuinely about public safety find out what the likely impact will be. Do not work off what the National research unit put together as a result of polling before an election campaign. Find out what the real impact will be.  
So just summing up yes we will support this bill to the select committee. But we will be looking at it carefully in the select committee to see if it genuinely does improve public safety. If it is just political flimflam we would vote against it. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: Just before I call the next member I wish to remind members to advise them regarding cellphones and iPhones in the Chamber that this is a debating chamber. It is not a place to receive phone calls during sittings of the House. We are not a call centre. Phones should be on silent mode when brought into the Chamber.