Goff Phil: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (2012 Expiry and Application Dates) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Goff Phil: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (2012 Expiry and Application Dates) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 28 June 2012. Volume:681;Page:3511. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) 
: 
 Can I begin by correcting the member who has just resumed his seat Tim Macindoe. He has not been in the House very long so I guess he can be forgiven for not knowing that far from the previous Labour Government leaving the justice system in disarray the two biggest pieces of legislation—the Sentencing Act and the Parole Act—were both passed in 2002. Shortly after that there was a Victims’ Rights Act also passed by the Labour Government. That replaced a previous Victims of Offences Act also passed by a Labour Government in the previous term. So I reject entirely the facile arguments raised by Tim Macindoe that the system was in disarray. In fact the pieces of legislation that are most important in the justice system today were passed under the last Labour Government not the pieces of legislation that have gone through in the first 3 years of the National Government which are basically window dressing and do absolutely nothing. 
Secondly the member had the effrontery to tell the House that this legislation is so important it must be passed by tomorrow. Do you know why it has to be passed by tomorrow? Because with 3½ years’ notice the Government did nothing knowing full well that the existing legislation the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Act expires tomorrow. That is political mismanagement. This Government should have acted in a timely way to get the new legislation into the House. 
Tim Macindoe 
: Your filibustering prevented it. It reflects your filibustering. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: And the fact that we are doing it now the day before the adjournment is an indication not of filibustering at all; it is an indication of incompetency in management of the legislative agenda. 
This Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (2012 Expiry and Application Dates) Amendment Bill is a simple bill. It would have been unnecessary if the Government had acted in a timely way. That is the Government has had 3½ years to come up with replacement legislation knowing that the existing legislation had a sunset clause and that should have happened. The one advantage of that is that the Minister of Justice gave a commitment earlier in this debate which I hope she intends to honour that she would use the year ahead to review the legislation and to determine the most appropriate way of replacing it. I know that there is a piece of legislation that the Government has drafted. It does not do the job that I believe needs to be done if we are to put victims at the centre of the justice process. 
At the third reading I think it is important to give the context of the existing legislation. It was passed in 2005 and it was passed when I was Minister of Justice. That was because we had an unprecedented number of claims being made by inmates within the system for compensation for a system that had not upheld their rights. I do not justify the fact that the corrections system in its behaviour modification regime got it wrong. We are bound by international law on this not just recently but for the last 40 or 50 years. 
Mr Ryall is in the House today and he might remember this little speech that he gave at the time. He was the leading speaker for the National Party in Opposition. He said National was opposed to the bill and believed that the payments should be “blocked stopped and wiped out”. He said: “We do not believe that New Zealand should be constrained by the figment of what the United Nations may or may not state in various conventions.” That “figment” was a series of the most important human rights standards passed by the international community to be signed ratified and observed by New Zealand for 40 years and they were observed by all of the countries that we would like to compare ourselves with: the United States the United Kingdom Australia and Canada. I suppose I should say while Mr Ryall is in the House that after that rabid statement I am pleased this Government has at least resiled from Mr Ryall’s awful claims and acknowledges that you need to uphold the international standards that we have committed ourselves to. So I suppose that is progress of some sort. 
Notwithstanding the fact that the inmates concerned had committed some of the most serious crimes and that they had been amongst the most recidivist of offenders we nevertheless have to have a system where we set rules and the people we put in charge of the corrections system have to follow and observe those rules. I did not believe however that the only way of doing that was to provide huge compensation payments to those inmates. I will tell you why I thought that at the time. First of all I thought that only in exceptional circumstances where there was no other proper remedy of the breach of rights should compensation be granted and I hold by that statement. 
Secondly I thought that it was really important that if these inmates were to receive compensation the victims they had created—people who were badly damaged physically who had had their property destroyed and who still bore the scars of the offending by this group of people—should not be left out in the cold while the inmates whose rights were also abused came into a huge sum of money. Not one of these offenders would have given reparation to their victims. They left behind people who they had badly damaged without any sense of remorse without any attempt to make a payment and no payment ordered by the State because they were on their way to jail. So here were the victims of these inmates who had been badly abused—much more so than the inmates themselves—and they were getting nothing while the inmates were going to come in for a windfall. I thought that was wrong and I still think that is wrong. So what we wanted to do and what we did in this Act was to restrict the circumstances for payment and to allow the victims of that offending to make a claim against the inmates if the inmates got compensation. 
We put a sunset clause in. Why did we do that? Because although the principle was right—that the victims should be properly compensated for the injustice done to them by the inmates—we were not sure that the mechanism was going to achieve this. I am grateful that the Minister came into the House and said what this Act had actually done. It had enabled five victims of inmates to receive compensation I think totalling around $45000. Well that is good but it is tiny. It is not a remedy for the wrongs done to victims across the board. My concern at the time and my concern now is that I was dealing with a fraction of the victims of offenders. 
And there are all sorts of other circumstances that were arising. Some people in jail were writing books about their crimes and if it was a sufficiently dramatic and dreadful crime they would come into a whole lot of money from the proceeds of selling their book. Where is the justice in that while their victims are left without anything? What about the inmate who receives a bequest—you know they come into a whole lot of money that they have inherited? They are now in a position to set things right for their victims but there was no requirement for that. There is another set of circumstances—and I was reminded of this by a situation in the paper the other day where a former gang enforcer is now living a relatively respectable life as a businessman on Auckland’s North Shore. He has a whole trail of victims behind him. He has now got the means to set things right. He will never have shown remorse and he will never have given any compensation to his victims. 
What I say the Minister should be doing in this year that we have got now is to think laterally and to look at other systems where victims are better treated than they are in our system. You know we have court cases and they are described as—if you will excuse an example Mr Deputy Speaker Roy—the State against Roy. So you have got the State which is the prosecutor and you have got Roy who is the offender but nowhere in that case is the name of the victim mentioned. We say that the victim should be at the centre of the process not an adjunct. They should be there. 
You get real justice when you follow a restorative process. What does restorative justice mean? It means an expression of remorse. Maybe that is a bit easy but it means that the offender is required to the extent possible to set to right the wrongs that have been done. I would hope instead of this half-baked measure that the Government wants to introduce we would look more widely at a system whereby we respected the victim and we required the offender to put things right even if it is some years after the offence was committed because at the time of conviction hardly any serious offender will be able to make payments to the victim. But if they are in the position later on why should they not even at that stage be required to put right their wrongs to the victim? So I ask the Minister to uphold the undertaking that she has given to the House to talk to all sides of the House to try to come up with something that does actually provide genuine justice for victims. This is an opportunity and we should take that opportunity.