Goff Phil: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8075. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): The heart of this particular debate on Part 1 is the purpose clause. The purpose clause sets out in a reasonably anodyne way that this legislation is about obtaining information from returning offenders and establishing release conditions for offenders who have come back to New Zealand having spent at least a year in a jail overseas. Well “overseas” is a euphemism. We are not talking about overseas; we are talking about Australia. We know that the reason for this bill is that we are going to have a flood of people sent back to New Zealand because of the changes to the Australian Migration Act 1958 which was changed last year. I want to ask the Minister in the chair Amy Adams why she did not act earlier if the purpose of this bill is actually to protect the safety of New Zealanders. There is not a person in this Chamber who does not want to protect the safety of New Zealanders. Why have we left it so late to pass this legislation through the House? We have got 861—861—deportees about to flood back into New Zealand.But it is worse than that because already in the period I think between May and September of this year 157 offenders have been deported back into New Zealand. I want to ask the Minister what the offending of those 157 people was. What level of risk do they pose to New Zealand society and why did she do nothing knowing that these people were coming back—having known that for a year? There are 157 people coming into New Zealand and we do not know what they did or what level of risk they pose to New Zealand or what things are in place to protect New Zealanders. I sat in this Chamber the other day to be accused by the Prime Minister of protecting rapists and murderers who come from Christmas Island. There were none there but amongst this group of 157 there very likely will be some rapists and murderers. When the Prime Minister can direct an accusation to the rest of the House about how we were backing the rapists and murderers and not worried about public safety—I want this Minister to come clean and say why this negligent Government has allowed 157 people who have offended overseas to come back into New Zealand some of them possibly rapists and murderers and why there was nothing put in place in a timely way to protect New Zealanders against that.The purpose of this bill is to protect the safety of New Zealanders. We are accused of backing rapists and murderers yet the Government sat on its chuff and did nothing while 157 offenders came back into this country without any release conditions at all without the knowledge or the information on those people that New Zealanders have a right to know. The Minister has known about this and the pending flood of deportees that the Australians very kindly are dumping in New Zealand for over a year—for over a year. Why do we get legislation not at the eleventh hour but at the 13th hour? There are already 157 of those offenders here and there are a whole lot more coming. I think it is a fair question Minister. Why could we not have put this legislation before the House a year ago? Is there any reason why we could not put this legislation—designed with the purpose of protecting the safety of New Zealanders—before the House in a timely way? We have had no explanation of that.I want to say that if we were looking at the purpose of the bill which is to protect the safety of New Zealanders the first thing we would have done was have the guts to stand up to Australia and say “Some of those people should come back to New Zealand and we will deal with them and we will have proper provisions in place but some of them are your responsibility. If a kid goes to Australia aged 6 months old has lived there for 30 years has children who are Australians and parents who are Australians and they are shaped by Australia why is it our problem?”. Did our Government have the guts to stand up to the Australian Government and say that it does not protect the safety of New Zealanders to send people to this country who do not know this country who have no support mechanisms who have no friends or family here? They will be alienated. They will be angry that they are separated from their family. And the Australians—our mates the Australians—have put the problem on us. So if we want to achieve the purpose—