Clendon David: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Clendon David: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 08 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:2044. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call on this bill the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill and I just pick up on some of the initial comments made by the previous speaker Mr Goff. He observed that the last Parliament saw a remarkable number of justice bills going through and that indeed the quality did not match the quantity of those bills. So when this bill was tabled shortly before the last election it created something of a conundrum for the Greens. Here was yet another in a long series of corrections bills that we had seen from a Government that gave us the three-strikes legislation. Having seen that it had failed miserably everywhere around the world we imposed a similar regime here! The Government gave us double-bunking in prisons and legislation to deny all prisoners the right to participate in the democratic process by denying them the right to vote. This is the Government that introduced a profit motive into the management of prisons—a Government apparently committed to committing extraordinary sums of money to building more prisons despite its own Minister of Finance assuring us that prisons are moral and fiscal failures.  
So when we started to read this bill in that context and started to see that actually it seemed to be quite a sensible and practical piece of legislation that could achieve some good ends we had something of a crisis of confidence—we thought we must be missing something. But closer analysis led us to believe that this is actually a piece of legislation we can support. It does have some worthwhile aims. The content of the bill—its provisions—will improve the situation in terms of the administration of community sentences. For that reason we will certainly be supporting this bill at the first reading and with a reasonable expectation that we will support it throughout the following readings.  
All the evidence is that for the great majority of offenders community-based sentences are a better option than putting people in prison. There is a great deal of research that indicates as a rule of thumb that probably about 15 percent of people in prison actually need to be there as there is nothing else that could have been done with them. For their own safety and critically for the safety of the public we need to have those people denied their liberty. For the other 85 percent community-based sentences are going to deliver much better outcomes than the failed experiment of putting more people in prison for longer.  
The Department of Corrections is now costing us well in excess of $1 billion per year. Some $850 million of that is spent on simply containing people simply keeping people locked up inside concrete boxes surrounded by wire. This delivers an extremely poor return on that investment to the extent that we are actually spending a great deal of money essentially to make matters worse. That is not intelligent governance. That is not sensible policy. It is not good law. We do not need to spend more money to produce better outcomes. We need an intelligent sensible programme of justice reinvestment—spend less money to get better outcomes—and this legislation does take us a step towards that it would seem. We need to focus on crime prevention rehabilitation and reintegration which will deliver considerable economic as well as social benefits. Mr Chauvel earlier gave us some numbers about the efficacy of community-based sentences. A rule of thumb I have heard is that typically with community-based sentencing and treatment you can spend about half as much yet double the quality of the output. Surely that is something that every Government should seek to attain.  
This is an important bill. It is quite a technical bill it amends existing legislation and it does seek to make more effective provision for the management of community-based sentences. It is not so much complex as very detailed—quite complicated. It seeks to amend three pieces of primary legislation of course: the Bail Act the Sentencing Act and the Parole Act. It makes something like 50 amendments collectively to all of those Acts. Although none of them is a particularly old piece of legislation—they date back to the early 2000s—the passage of time has demonstrated that there are gaps failures of integration and shortcomings in all of that legislation. In some respects provisions are contradictory or opaque. They do not give a clear steer to the judiciary or to those charged with managing community services. So it is entirely appropriate—in fact a very good idea—to look at that legislation and make it better. The point has been made that the legislation does not really align well with some of the technologies that 10 years on are now available to us so bringing it up to date is a good thing.  
The regulatory impact statement identifies some of the issues to be addressed in the bill. I would like to comment on just one or two of them. One of the changes to the Sentencing Act will be around the matter of pre-sentencing reports—basically assessment of suitability for home detention. I am pleased that there is going to be some light shone on that whole question. I have recently been in some dialogue with a number of people who are seeing some serious shortcomings in the reporting. Judges make sentencing decisions decisions about whether or not home detention is an appropriate sentence based on information the reports are giving. It is clear that the gathering of some of that information about particular sites and about particular offenders is less than it could be. We are seeing poor practice both with Government agencies and indeed with private contractors. And I think this process of going through this legislation will allow us to shine some light on to the whole matter of the quality of the assessment and of the reporting upon which judges are relying to determine whether or not particular offenders are eligible for home detention. 
 In terms of further provisions the matter of electronic monitoring has been brought up and the fact that if physical boundaries and the boundaries of the technology do not align it creates problems and we need to deal with that. It seems perverse that individual offenders can be subject to two regimes of electronic monitoring that do not align with one another and it is not clear which has priority. These are the sorts of issues that the passage of time has thrown up and it is entirely appropriate that these should be dealt with to give a clear steer to those whose task it is to make sure that these community sentences do work.  
I look forward to the select committee process on this bill. I think it is even more than usually important that we engage civil society. There are numbers of very well-resourced sensible and proactive NGOs that work in this whole area of corrections and have some very good progressive ideas and I think it is important that we offer them every opportunity to make submissions. As I said this bill makes something like 50 amendments to three already reasonably complex pieces of legislation. I believe that engaging those civil society groups those NGOs will inform us and reassure us that we are not overlooking issues that could come back to bite us or more important could come back to bite those who are affected directly by the provisions of this new legislation. I do think the select committee consideration will be particularly interesting. I have some confidence that the Law and Order Committee will be very open to hearing and responding positively to input from civil society from NGOs.  
So against our general practice I am simply pleased again to say the Greens will engage with this bill. We will support it and we look forward to the conversation that it will evince. Kia ora.