Franks Stephen: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Bill — In Committee Procedure Third Reading 
Franks Stephen: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Bill — In Committee Procedure Third Reading 
[Volume:626;Page:20965] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 This part of the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Bill is the heart of the bill. In simple summary for the benefit of those who are listening to this debate it states that prisoners must exhaust all the internal remedies before they can go to court and bring claims based on human rights law or tort law. It states that if prisoners do get an award it must be held for claims by victims. The bill takes a lot of pages to state that. I think this Parliament should go for a practical test: what does this legislation save? What will it do for this country for prisoners for discipline in prisons and for victims? 
I have gone back to the judgment that prompted this legislation: the judgment of Justice Young in the case of Christopher Taunoa and others as a result of which more than $200000 has been awarded to Taunoa and his mates. That judgment which is only the first of the judgments is 136 pages long. It is 136 pages of a judge at great distance reviewing the case and expressing a view on how prison officers should have dealt with some of New Zealand’s worst prisoners. The judgment is fair-minded and even-handed or it tries to be even-handed. But on a typical page the judge goes through a complaint by Christopher Taunoa that he was unreasonably restrained—the technical term is “confined and restrained”—after he had shouted at prison officers rung the bell for prison officers and gesticulated. The judge having heard all the seemingly endless evidence concluded that it would have been better to leave Mr Taunoa in his cell. That is an example of exactly what this bill should be making irrelevant. 
This bill should simply state that people can bring proceedings—prosecute or foster prosecution—and that there should be a complaints system to prosecute prison officers who have broken the law. This bill should not have Her Majesty’s judges at great length second-guessing about prisoners who have suffered no injury that we can read about—prisoners whose litany of complaints included the lights being left on for too long or being too bright there being too much noise the windows being open or not open at various times and there being a lack of respect for their dignity and who then tried to categorise that as torture. The Government needed to make a simple response. It should have been “Stuff off.” The victims of prisoners have had their remedies eliminated under New Zealand law by the accident compensation scheme. Mr Taunoa and his mates qualify for accident compensation coverage and they are therefore in the same position as their victims in relation to the alleged abuse. We should leave it at that. 
Instead in this bill we have pages of cynical pretence. The bill would be perfectly unobjectionable as it stands if it were not being held up as the solution for victims who will continue to see monetary payouts to those who have hurt them when the victims themselves will not qualify for compensation for far worse hurt. The Government can do nothing to hide that. All it can do is to rush this bill through and hope the issue goes away because the bill does absolutely nothing for victims. It does not respond at all to the victims who came before the Justice and Electoral Committee and said they were not looking for money but were simply looking to make sure that punishment was punishment. The Sensible Sentencing Trust has essentially done more for victims than this Government with all the resources it can command has done in 6 years. The Sensible Sentencing Trust is living off the generosity of a very fine farmer and his wife who decided that something needed to be done and who put their own time and money into it. The money from one of those prisoner claims cases would keep the Sensible Sentencing Trust going for a year.