Ardern Jacinda: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8131. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I want to begin my final contribution on this bill by acknowledging that the Minister of Justice has in the past week or maybe 2 weeks engaged with us as an Opposition party on the finer drafting details of this bill. I acknowledge that that has indeed happened. But I can tell you that it is a sure sign that something is being done at great pace with great haste and unfortunately without the scrutiny that good lawmaking deserves when you are being engaged with to that degree so late in the policy development. So yes I acknowledge that the Minister gave us a call and shared with us various iterations of the bill. But the fact that we were getting amendments on the morning this bill came to Parliament demonstrates part of the problem that we have with this process. When you rush law you unfortunately make bad law. You inevitably make mistakes.I want to debunk some of the myths that have been raised by Government members in defence of that process. They have said: “Look we did it in a rush because this was as fast as we could go. We could not have produced this legislation any more quickly than we have.” They have made all sorts of claims about Opposition members in the process. I want to debunk some of the myths that have been raised in the House. Myth No. 1—the statement that somehow we are not allowed to raise process points because deportation is not new. No one has ever said that this is a new issue. Of course we have had offenders deported back to New Zealand for many many years and from many many countries—legitimate citizens. In fact the Minister’s own notes—Hon Maggie Barry: 700 under Labour. Nothing done.JACINDA ARDERN: And no one has ever denied that Maggie Barry. No one has ever denied that.Hon Maggie Barry: No protections. So what did that member do about it?JACINDA ARDERN: Maggie Barry can I just quote from Minister Adams.Hon Maggie Barry: That member does nothing.JACINDA ARDERN: Do you want to listen for a moment? Do you want to listen?Hon Maggie Barry: Not really.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! I am calling for order. If the Minister does not want to obey that then she can go somewhere else. I do not care.Hon Maggie Barry: Sure.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: And she is carrying on doing that right now. Do not do that.JACINDA ARDERN: Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker. I think if the member is willing to listen I am perfectly happy to follow the facts as set out by the Minister. We have never disputed them. Yes in recent years as it states in the Cabinet paper approximately 60 to 100 offenders have been deported to New Zealand each year after serving a prison sentence in an overseas jurisdiction. No one on this side of the House ever denied that. However recent changes—the paper goes on to acknowledge—in Australia’s visa cancellation policy have resulted in a large increase in the number of offenders being removed or deported to New Zealand. Those numbers are then explained. The rate of deportations has increased from an average of five per month in previous years to 25 deportations per month since June 2015. So yes deportations have occurred before but not as we know it now—not as we know it now.So what about the claim then that was made by the Government that at least the Government is doing something? Well that is because it had it within its power. I am not just saying that because it has been in Government for 7 years—apparently we can still be blamed for errors of times gone past—but we are actually in a different environment. Not only has Australia changed its laws in the last year which means we have this rapid increase but we also have more information available to us. So I say to Minister Barry that when Labour was in Government we had no information-sharing regime. Australia was not giving us the information that we now have through an information-sharing agreement which was signed only in September and we now have the ability to put in a regime like this. In fact Amy Adams herself said that having a regime in place without this information would have been meaningless. So to somehow blame another Government for not having done something that the Minister herself claims would have been meaningless without that change in process I think means that those claims from that side of the House are totally unfair and unjustified.But the Minister has then made the argument that she has gone as fast as she could. Yes we are not naive; we know how legislation is drafted: you create a regime and then you give your instructions to the Parliamentary Counsel Office. The Parliamentary Counsel Office which literally writes the law for us was not told what to write until about 3 weeks ago. This law that we are debating here was drafted 3 weeks ago. Anyone who has read legislation knows that it is a complex job. If you do not have time and proper scrutiny things go wrong. This started 3 weeks ago. Did it have to be that way? No the Minister herself acknowledged that she knew that we had a problem—well if she read the paper she would have known—well over a year ago. The Australians said “Hey New Zealand we are changing our laws. You should know about that.” a year ago. The Minister claims that she has been working on it since then. Really? Really—it does not take year to give drafting instructions to the Parliamentary Counsel Office. In fact as far as I can tell some of the Cabinet papers on this—which are the first step in the process—that went to the Cabinet saying “This is what we should do.” happened well after August. We know there was at least 6 months when nothing appears to have been happening and in that time hundreds of offenders were being packed up and shipped out.So yes we have a problem with the time line for this bill—we have a problem with it. Our concern is that as a result we will have made bad law. What signs do we have that that might be the case? Well let us look at the way that the law is going to work. The law has set out that there will three sets of different kinds of offenders coming back into New Zealand—three types of returnees—and we would add that the first category are those who should not be deported back in the first place. As the Minister said we are not talking just about offenders who are being sent back to New Zealand; there is a character test that is the cause of about 40 percent of the people being deported back into New Zealand. They are failing a character test. These are people who believe themselves to be Australians who are being deported to New Zealand—a place they have no connection to—simply because they may have been born here or have New Zealand parents. On a character test they are being sent back. We think that is wrong and will continue to fight that. I acknowledge again the enormous amount of work that Kelvin Davis has done on that because our Prime Minister has not.The second group of people who are being deported here and are covered by this regime are what we call returning prisoners. Returning prisoners are those who are defined as having been released for having served a sentence for an offence that attracted a sentence of a year or more. They are being released and they have not spent 6 months out in the community. The rationale of the Minister is that if they have not spent 6 months out then we do not know whether they are able to reintegrate properly. So that group of deportees when they come back into New Zealand will be automatically be monitored—automatically. The point here is that you will notice that we are not focusing on the offence of the person being deported. It does not matter whether or not they have committed a highly violent crime or whether they have stolen something from the backseat of a car. That is not what New Zealand in this regime is paying attention to. It is simply whether or not they have been in the community for 6 months. That in itself has some issues attached to it.Then the next category of people are those who have been out in the community for 6 months before they have been picked up by officials and sent back to New Zealand. For that category of people to be monitored New Zealand’s Department of Corrections has to apply to a court. Those individuals could be murderers—and we know that some of them are. They could have been child sex offenders—and we know that some of them are. They will be covered by a regime only if the Department of Corrections goes through the courts. Our concern is that we have already since December 2014 had the ability to monitor serious offenders who are deported to New Zealand if the department asks for them to be. How many has it asked to be monitored in a year? Zero—not one. Thirty percent of people who have been deported back to New Zealand in the last 2 years are categorised as serious offenders. The Department of Corrections has applied for not one of them to be monitored. We are concerned that this bill is reliant on a department that is underfunded under-resourced and managed poorly at present and we are giving them an enormous job.In summary this bill has been rushed unnecessarily. It has not been given due consideration and yes although we agree that we need a regime we argue that we should have had another bill go through a full process to replace this one. It is disappointing that we are here in this House doing this at the last minute because New Zealanders’ safety is reliant on our doing a much better job than this.