Franks Stephen: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Franks Stephen: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:606;Page:3391] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT NZ) 
: 
 I went through the Prime Minister’s statement looking for apologies or looking at the very least for a set of promises about something that would be done in the future on a topic that was made a feature of every party’s election campaign. I went through the statement looking of course for a crime and justice work programme. There is absolutely nothing. So I thought perhaps the work programme on crime and justice is so obvious it did not need touching; it did not need reciting. I went back through the  
Journals 
 through my own files as ACT’s representative on the Justice and Electoral Committee and through the statements that have been made on the topic by the Minister of Justice over the past 6 months. What do I see as the Government’s crime and justice programme? First we have the clean slate legislation. I have to assume that the clean slate legislation is part of the credit card promise to give more support for proven programmes to cut youth offending. 
Hon Richard Prebble 
: Oh yes wipe their records! 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: Wipe their records. More support for proven programmes to cut youth offending—it is a pretty easy promise to make given that the Government knows there are no proven programmes to cut youth offending. At its most cynical it could mean the Government was saying it would give more support to nothing because there are no proven programmes. But it does not sit at all with the only active move related to youth offending at this very moment before the House which is a bill to suppress the records of young offenders. It is a bill to tell young offenders that the community does not really care about offending. It does not really draw a distinction between kids who go straight and stay straight for 10 years and those who have never offended. It does not really care about the message that is going out already from a youth justice system that automatically suppresses all the records of offending while one is a youth. If the Government was wanting to do something about proven programmes to cut youth offending it would have been funding some research to find out what has been the real effect of a youth justice system that says to youth: “We don’t think crime is wrong; we think it’s just a little mistake; we think that if you offend you’ll get a second chance a third chance and a fourth fifth sixth seventh eighth and ninth chance.”  
The average young offender has had between nine and 11 prior incidents involving the youth justice system before he or she gets anywhere near a custodial sentence. What sort of message is that sending to young people? What sort of message is that sending to people at the key area of dealing with crime—the entry level? We all know that after people become habitual offenders after they are confirmed in their habit after they have become persuaded that it is easier to live by preying on others rather than making for others after they have decided that the system is a sucker and any feeble excuse will do the resources of the community are still applied for them those who cause trouble instead of for those who do not. After they have had those lessons it is too late.  
It is far too late for us to start thinking about rehabilitation as the primary objective of our penal system once young offenders have been through this useless youth justice system but that is exactly what we have done. We now have a new Sentencing Act that is focused in vain hope entirely around rehabilitation. No demonstrated programme in full operation has ever been able to establish that if we are really nice enough to offenders they will be nice back to the community. So we have adopted a youth justice system that says: “Don’t worry about it; we do not really care; the law does not really mean what it says; crime can pay; truth does not necessarily out; and cheats can prosper.”—because all those things happen. 
Even the Government’s youth justice report which was finally released in the 3 months before the last election and was 2 years overdue did not dare offer any statistics on performance in youth justice. It did not dare to try to compare the so-called achievements of our youth justice system with those of other countries. The report did not dare mention the United States experience of a one-third drop in youth crime over a period when the youth population grew from 26 million to 34 million. It did not dare to compare the rates of victimisation of people from youth or any other crime. The youth justice report simply asserted that it was doing very well but would do even better if we were doing more of what we are doing now.  
The report did not provide any statistics on proven programmes to cut youth offending. If it had been taking that seriously it would have asked where the proof was that anything was being done at the moment that cuts any offending. Where is the proof when they do not bother to keep statistics? We do not know how many young offenders are arrested. We do not know how many young offenders are dealt with by family group conferences. We think it is around 6500 to 7500. The police will tell us that the number of young offenders arrested is somewhere between 35000 and 40000 because it is not clear that records are being kept on the same basis and that the numbers who are actually processed through the Youth Court might be between 12000 and 14500. However the actual outcomes—a finding of proven or not proven—are probably around 1500 or 2000. We simply do not know. Yet Mr Goff went into the election trumpeting that he had dealt with youth justice.  
What other programmes do we have on the plate at the moment? We have the “boy racers” bill. We are told that a bill is pending probably to ban private prosecutions against police or at least to ban publication of the names of police who are accused of exceeding their proper role in the use of firearms. We have some sort of promise to deal with the obviously widespread scandal of cross-examination by an accused who upsets a victim who has already had a terrible time. There might have been two or three instances in 2 or 3 years. I compare the immediate ministerial promise to deal with that with absolutely no action on the repeated plea by victims for the right for them to say something in court.  
Just last week in Wellington Jonathan Tolo a barman whose eye was seriously damaged—probably forever—went to court with his family as the victim of an entirely unprovoked assault with a flying glass. All he wanted to do was tell the court what he thought should happen but he was prevented. That was no slip-up; that was no loophole or oversight. It was a direct result of the Government rejecting ACT’s amendments in the select committee to allow that to happen. We brought that forward against the backdrop of a sentencing bill that imposed a duty on the judge to listen to the submissions about sentencing from whanau or representatives of the offender. So we have a victim who has no right to speak a victim— 
Hon Richard Prebble 
: If the victim was a criminal the court would have sent him to jail for speaking out. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: He would have offended the court if he had spoken. All he wanted to do was put forward a completely non-binding suggestion as to what he thought would be justice and he was gagged deliberately by a Government that has absolutely no interest in real criminal law reform and only wants to make gestures—a Government that at the commencement of this Parliament was so contemptuous about the concern about crime that the Prime Minister felt she did not even need to mention the topic. It does not have to put any provision in the parliamentary calendar for reform of the rorts. The Minister of Justice repeatedly pointed to judges complaining about the deliberate so-called errors in his Act and said the Government would fix them but gave no indication of any time. The Victims’ Rights Bill now means that the police cannot properly prosecute burglary. The Government is asking whether it can slip a change through in the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 2).