Adams Amy: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeAdams Amy: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8129. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon AMY ADAMS (Minister of Justice): I move That the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill be now read a third time. We have heard a lot about this legislation from yesterday afternoon and through today but what I want to just come back to is the situation we are dealing with. We have heard a lot from the Opposition that I think paints a reasonably misleading picture of how we have got here. But here is where we are. At the beginning of this year we were in a situation where for many many years serious offenders returned to New Zealand without any sort of supervision or oversight. I accept that as Australia changed its law at the end of last year which took effect at the beginning of this year those numbers have increased. But the fact is that serious offenders—murderers rapists child sex offenders drug offenders violent offenders the full category—have been coming back to New Zealand for many many years without oversight without supervision. I first became aware of this issue and got advice from my officials on 11 February. I immediately instructed them that I thought New Zealand needed a regime to supervise these offenders and the work has been moving since that time.Suggestions that somehow the writing of the bill is when the work is done represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the process. For those who have not been Ministers and who have not been in this House I can tell you that in the work of putting together a new regime the drafting is the very last piece. You have to start with understanding the implications on the agencies how you are going to resource it what the right balance is between the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act issues and safety and security issues and to do that you have to know and understand the quantum and the nature of the people being returned. So I have said from the outset that we have to have this in place. Let us get work under way to build it. But in the meantime we must conclude better information-sharing with Australia to make it work.I got the issue put on the Prime Minister’s agenda at the end of February to raise it right up the agenda. That led to finally concluding the information-sharing agreement with Australia. I always maintained that that had to be in place before we could finalise this so that we could assess the impact on the Department of Corrections and so I could stand and say quite confidently that we understand the resources required for the Department of Corrections and for the police we know the cost and we have resourced it. I can say to this House that we have done that work. We have spent the time getting the police the Department of Corrections the Ministry of Justice the courts and their Australian counterparts lined up knowing what we need and how it is going to work. This suggestion that you just rock up to the parliamentary drafters one day and say “Write me a bill that says something.” and the rest of the time is just fluff frankly is absurd; it is absolutely absurd. This piece of work has been going at pace since it was first raised with me.That is more than the Labour Party members can say. Labour had offenders—serious offenders—coming into this country all the way through its time in office and it did not do a thing. Frankly I have been talking about this and putting out releases about the programme of work on this throughout this year and not once—not once—would Labour members be able to point to a single statement a single question from them saying “Where is it? What’s happening?” or calling for it. The only person speaking this year about this issue and about the need to do it has been me. I have worked on it. I have delivered at pace but I have made sure we have got a regime that is fair to offenders that balances their rights properly that does not create a double jeopardy but still provides the monitoring and assistance that I think New Zealanders need.So now 9 months later when this debate concludes we will have a regime in place for the first time that supervises these offenders. I am very proud of that. I know that New Zealanders have been at risk from serious offenders in our communities without supervision until now and that is what we are moving to address. Can I also just address the fact that somehow this is a knee-jerk reaction to the arrival that we are expecting later this week. I can tell members in this House that if they follow the announcements I have made which frankly they showed no interest in until they saw a chance to have a bit of whack they will see that I have been making announcements that this bill was progressing at pace it would be in the House this week and would be progressed as fast as possible. The impending arrival of the offenders came after all of those announcements.So what we now have is the conclusion of three pieces of work that I set up when the issue was raised with me in February. There will be a register to track and monitor these offenders that all of our law enforcement agencies can access. It will be a single point of information no matter where they are in the country sharing that information. That is in place—check. There will be an information-sharing agreement with Australia so that when these people come back we have good advice on their psychiatric state their criminal risk their behaviour in prison their known affiliations their criminal histories—anything we need to make a proper risk assessment and to apply to the courts for whatever additional orders might be required. Having a regime in place where you can apply to the courts for orders without that information would simply have been a piece of paper. You have to have the information. We have it. We now have the regime to go alongside it.This regime is about putting in place the same sort of oversight that offenders would have expected had they been released from a New Zealand prison. No supervision regime will ever remove the risk. We are dealing with serious offenders some of whom will reoffend as offenders who are released from New Zealand jails reoffend. But what we can now be comfortable with and confident in thanks to this bill is the knowledge that the offenders who come back to New Zealand who have only just been released from prison—not people who have offended long ago; but the ones who have only just been released from prison—will be subject to the same sort of oversight regardless of whether they have served that sentence in Australia in New Zealand or in some other country. I think that is appropriate. It would make no sense to have to serve parole if you stayed in Australia but not if you came back to New Zealand. So this bill fixes that gap.The last thing I want to make comment on is the Australian policy that this is all about. I said in my opening contribution that we are not responsible for Australian law. We do not like the way this policy operates. We do not agree with New Zealanders who went to Australia as very young children potentially being removed when they have no ties to New Zealand. We do not like New Zealanders being held in immigration detention centres. But what we are saying is that although we cannot change that we have absolutely expressed our concern at those policies at the highest levels. Mr Little is going to speak to Australian backbenchers. We spoke to the Prime Minister. We spoke to the Minister of Justice. We spoke to the immigration Minister. We continue to raise our concerns every single day—not every single day but every single time we get that opportunity. We do not like that Australian policy but at the same time these people will continue to return to New Zealand as they always have and now thanks to this National-led Government for the first time—the first time—we will be able to supervise them.Can I make just one final point which is that although the numbers will go up and have gone up since Australia changed its laws a large number of that increase are not returning offenders. They have been deported on bad character grounds. It is about 40 percent we understand. Furthermore the extra part of the increase where they are offenders is because the Australian policy is now picking up much lower-level offenders as we heard the Opposition members acknowledge. So when you are talking about that core of serious offenders many of them were always deported back to New Zealand. They continue to be deported back but now they will be supervised. They will be under probation. We will have the power to go to the court and get orders to protect the New Zealand public because that is our primary goal. I commend the bill to the House with great pleasure.