Logie Jan: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Continuation and Reform) Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Continuation and Reform) Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 05 June 2013. Volume:690;Page:10773. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): I rise to add another Green Party voice in opposition to the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Continuation and Reform) Amendment Bill following on from my colleague David Clendon our justice spokesperson who raised several key points relating to our position. I think you can sum up our opposition with four keypoints roughly. One is that the original Act the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Act 2005 provided for a review to ensure that victims’ rights and the effectiveness of this bill were able to operate clearly. This bill is now going to entrench without consultation and review that law. We think that is a massive lost opportunity. There is a lot of thinking and work to be done to ensure that our system is adequately delivering for victims outside of the prison system and also that our prisons are as safe and geared towards rehabilitation as they can possibly be. By passing this bill in this way we are missing the opportunity to have that conversation and as a result we are missing the opportunity to make our country safer and fairer. We believe that is a real shame.The second reason we are opposing this bill is around the fact that we want to ensure that our prisons are safe and promote rehabilitation. There is a very real possibility too that this bill will provide a perverse disincentive for prisoners to report injury abuse or even torture within the prison system. Anyone who has had anything to do with the prison system must be aware of those power relationships in there and the very real potential of abuse and the need for our systems to actively check those power imbalances to make sure that those places are as safe as possible. That is a matter of rights but it is also a matter of promoting good rehabilitation because we know that the more people are alienated from society the less incentive there is for them to turn their lives round. If they do not feel they are being respected by society and have a stake in society then there is no sense for them to rehabilitate.The third reason we are opposing this bill is that we have a commitment to human rights for all people—victims and prisoners. We note that New Zealand has signed the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. This requires each State party to ensure that victims of torture have an enforceable right to fair and adequate compensation. This bill threatens that commitment. We have been told it is justified but over 6 years $45000 has been returned to victims. I am not sure you can say that that is actually a justifiable result for the victims or for the victims who are prisoners.The fourth reason we are opposing this is that we actually want to improve the justice system for victims. Again as I said earlier this is a massive lost opportunity of the time that has been spent on this bill coming back to the House—for the third time in fact. We are being told that the Government with its agenda at the moment cannot look at work around domestic violence legislation. We have been told by the Minister of Justice that the decades of work that have gone into looking at alternative pre-trial and trial processes that might help increase the conviction rate from the pitiful 1 percent that it is for most sexual offences have been taken off the agenda and are not worthy of the time of this Government. Again we have seen similar work in the Evidence Act. If this Government really truly cared about victims then the focus would go on actually ensuring our system delivered for victims. It is a sad day when we get this instead.