Collins Judith: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Collins Judith: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Sitting date: 29 January 2013. Volume:687;Page:7529. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Justice) 
: 
 I would like to offer you Mr Deputy Speaker and the House a happy New Year and best wishes to everybody. I hope everyone had a great summer break and has come back ready to work. I thought actually having listened to all the speeches so far this afternoon that I would give a weeny bit of advice and a bit of feedback. Mr Shearer you have taken 20 minutes of my life—20 minutes that I will never get back and 20 minutes that you owe me. Having said that Mr Shearer had a good effort and that good effort was that he was trying not to for once plagiarise Ed Miliband the leader of the UK Labour Party and was for once trying to actually say something himself. Who knows what it was. I have to say that some of us had to have a cup of tea part-way through just to keep going. 
Then we have got Metiria Turei from the Greens. She would like to make this country a great country. Well I have got news for her. Her job is over. It already is a great country. It is the best little country in the world bar none and it would be even better if she and some of her friends stopped bagging New Zealand from one side of the world to the other. It is disgraceful the way that some New Zealanders and some members of Parliament think it is quite all right to go overseas bag New Zealand try to destroy our tourism markets try to destroy our economic stability and then come back here and say “I’m here for New Zealand.” Well actually no they are not. New Zealand First—well Mr Peters is always entertaining. Always entertaining—he does not say a lot but he is entertaining. When he talks about justice—I notice he did not really today and there is a good reason. He would not vote for the search and surveillance legislation in there with the Labour Party and the Greens on that one. He would not vote for the alcohol reform legislation. At least the Labour Party came to the party eventually. So I would say to just remember those Mr Peters. The Mana Party Hone Harawira—actually I have said his name. That is enough; nothing more. 
Let us talk about where we are going this year in justice. But actually before I do that just a word of advice. I will now quote someone and I will name them—I will not plagiarise them like Mr Shearer does—Martin Luther King Jnr. I am looking at that coalition of the four parties opposing the Government. “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Well that sums up the Opposition and it sums up their supporters. 
So what we have got in justice is a year ahead that is pretty fantastic really. We had a great year last year. Search and surveillance legislation got through by one vote. Crime is at a 30-year low despite the Opposition. Things are moving very well. The police corrections and justice are working really well together sharing resources where they need to and trying to make sure that we have the same goals in mind which are all about keeping the crime rate down reducing the number of prisoners who come out and reoffend increasing drug and alcohol treatment increasing education for prisoners and making sure we have fewer victims in the first place. And it is succeeding. It is succeeding even better than many of us thought it would. Last year there was another 6 percent drop in the overall crime rate and that is on top of other significant drops since we have been the Government. 
And despite all of that great work there was no extra money this last year in justice; we have had no extra money but we have had to make better use of what we have. Part of that is actually making use of technology freeing up the front-line staff to be able to do their job properly. In the police a lot of it is around preventing crime in the first place—thinking outside the square and not just reacting but actually changing the environment in which people live. The police have shown time and time again that they are absolutely the people to lead this sort of work. They are people who understand their communities and they are people who can make a serious difference particularly for young people and particularly for the victims of crime many of whom are repeatedly victimised by the same people the same families over and over again. But the crime rate is coming down—a 30-year low. By the way the road toll what is that? That is at a 50-year low. There is increasingly better policing smarter policing and excellent leadership. 
We are also going ahead with new legislation this year with the help of our support parties and partners. One of the things we are going to do is make it harder for those accused of serious offences to get bail. I would like to hope that we would get some support around the House for this. Time and time again we see someone accused of a very serious offence go on to commit another extremely serious offence—in some cases far worse. I think there should be some reasonably good cross-party support for that. At the same time we recognise that bail is something that most people would think should be available for someone before they have been convicted or before they have even had their hearing. 
Also we are going to be reducing the number of parole hearings for prisoners who are very unlikely to be released at that parole hearing. We think that is a sensible use of the Parole Board’s time. It saves a lot of time and effort for corrections but more important it saves victims coming year after year after year to listen to parole hearings when there is little or no chance of someone getting parole. This has really come about primarily because of the fact that we understand what Michael Choy’s mother went through time and time and time again listening to it. There were six or seven parole hearings a year no chance of these people getting parole and victims having to turn up. The fear would be—and some people have asked me why they bother turning up. Well just imagine the fear that if you do not turn up they get parole. She would go and blame herself for the rest of her life because she had not turned up. 
We are also introducing a new type of restraining order to protect victims further from harassment. It was really brought about by the situation that happened in Invercargill the year before last that I am sure people will remember when an offender came and decided to live right next door to the victim of sexual assault. Of course that caused a tremendous amount of fear in her and because of the time that had elapsed and the time that he had been released from prison there was nothing that could be done under the law. 
We are also increasing the penalties for child pornography. I actually think that this is a very important piece of work. We know that over the years child pornography has proliferated particularly through the use of the internet the cloud technology that is used for storing these images and all sorts of high technology to further victimise the children who are utterly destroyed. Their lives are utterly destroyed by this sort of behaviour. I think hopefully that most of the House will understand just how important it is for us to be in fact leading this as part of the global alliance that we now have against child pornography. In December just this last year I was very privileged to be part of the Global Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Online which was set up in Brussels. It is led by the US Attorney General Eric Holder and also the EU commissioner Cecilia Malmström. We are part of that alliance and with other countries coming in and being able to state what they are doing I am proud to tell this House that we were in fact one of the leaders of this. We are also obviously using technology to assist the police and to assist corrections to be able to do their jobs more effectively and also to be able to free them up from some of the tasks that might otherwise take their attention when they could be putting more work into preventing crime and rehabilitating prisoners. 
In the justice area it would not be right not to mention the reform of the Family Court which is long overdue. I have had some very heartening responses from former Ministers of Justice commenting about how they would have liked to have been able to get this through but of course there are very effective lobby groups amongst the lawyers. Having been one myself I know just how effective they can be. But we do need to encourage people to sort out their problems in the best ways possible through a better use of dispute resolution and more targeted counselling. There is a way forward on this and the way forward must be to understand that when children are involved these parents once loved each other enough to have children. They must in fact put their children first and try wherever they can to sort out their differences. At the moment their children suffer the taxpayer pays through legal aid and through all the other services made available and in the end I cannot think of anyone who has ever been through the Family Court system who has ever felt that they were better off for having gone there. The Family Court needs reform. It does great work but we need to update it upskill it and we need to be more responsive to the needs of those who use it. 
Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I am looking forward to an extremely busy year. I think we have something like about 30 pieces of legislation that we want to get through. I hope that other parties will be able to work with us in a spirit of some consensus understanding that some of you will want something for it and that there might be some concessions. But I think we can work together have a great year and actually make this country an even greater country than it is now. Metiria Turei this is the best little country in the world.