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:20999] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 This part is as has been said the grab bag the loose ends of the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Bill which we are debating. On behalf of the ACT party I want to draw attention to the statements made by Mr Goff when he promised yet again to introduce a bill on this issue. Among the assurances in his press release of 4 October last year was the following statement about the legislation: “Victims will of course be able to bring civil claims for damages not only when the offender receives state compensation but also for any other windfall gains such as inheritances the proceeds of any book written or even winning lotto.” 
I did not see anything about windfall gains of those kinds in the earlier parts of this bill so I have looked carefully to see whether as grab-bag matters they are somewhere in Part 3. Part 3 does not seem to deal with Lotto winnings income from books or windfall gains. It deals with the Human Rights Act the Legal Services Act which provides for legal aid the Limitation Act the Privacy Act and the Victims’ Rights Act. But I see nothing there to state that windfall gains will have to be put into trust when prisoners get them or to facilitate people who have had their reparation claims ignored to get access to those windfall gains. Indeed the bill is very very strict about what a specified claim is; that is in a provision in an earlier part. The Government rejected my amendment to help to extend it so we cannot deal with that. 
The grab bag in Part 3 is actually very small. There is another Act that this part does not refer to. I think members will be stunned given that they have heard all the assurances that the key thing is to make sure the complaints do not arise in the first place—that prisons must be made into places where there is no cause for a compensation claim—to realise that the Corrections Act does not seem to be touched by this bill. The bill is about reacting to the mistreatment of prisoners yet the Government has not even bothered to do anything in it about the Corrections Act. I have an amendment to this part. In that amendment I reinstate some provisions that this Government left out of the prisons legislation or changed when it passed its new Corrections Act. 
I believe the first thing this Government should have done was to ensure the independence of visiting justices. The term “visiting justice” meant just that until last year. It meant a judge who would go into a prison and be an independent person armed with all the clout and authority of the judicial office and give us all an assurance that our prisons were not like Turkish prisons—that people were not being beaten up and brutalised and were not being made too frightened to report it. I thought that the visiting justices were independent experts who were not beholden to anyone and who were assured that they would not get sacked or victimised by the Government because they were judges. Well the Government has kept the label but under the Corrections Act a visiting justice is now simply an appointed employee of the Department of Corrections. The label “visiting justice” has been used but the authority has been stolen—the brand that has been built up by judges in our system over generations. A visiting justice now just has to be a lawyer of 7 years’ practice. He or she can be a full-time departmental employee who goes around using the label of visiting justice and pretends to be independent. 
My amendment would reinstate the requirement for the genuine independence of visiting justices. I think that if the Government really meant what it was saying—if it really wanted to make sure that the causes of the payouts to prisoners would be removed—it would have included provisions to make the disciplinary system more robust. Then we would not have judges deciding to take it on themselves to invent remedies and to punish the department by ordering that it pay $358000 in legal fees and $55000 to one of New Zealand’s worst scumbags Christopher Taunoa and thousands of dollars to his mates—over $500000. If the Government meant what it said it would not have responded to that situation with cosmetic legislation. And it would feel ashamed to see the Sensible Sentencing Trust—