McKelvie Ian: Parole Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMcKelvie Ian: Parole Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 24 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1869. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Just before I get on to the facts of the night I thought I would mention a couple of other things. Firstly I guess I wanted to pay tribute to Celia Lashlie. I had a lot to do with her in my time with the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs. She was an amazing person who had an amazing way with young people and certainly played a large part in the very topic we are talking about here tonight in respect of our law and order community. That was the first thing I wanted to talk about. The second thing was the fact that Chris Gayle just hit 200 in a world cup game—the first time it has ever been done. I think that is pretty significant given that the world cup is very topical at the moment. I thought that was very important. Right on to the Parole Amendment Bill—you can talk about only so much fact in one of these things so I needed to talk about a few other things. During the course of early discussions on this bill I went to—Kris Faafoi: Heaven forbid you get weighed down with facts!IAN McKELVIE: Mr Faafoi interestingly was part of the early discussions on this bill. He was a member of the select committee when it was introduced I would imagine. But I want to talk about the structure of the Parole Board and how that works and then I want to get on to one or two other things that we found during the course of the investigations into this bill. We had the opportunity early in the piece with this bill to visit a parole hearing. I was fortunate enough to go to Wanganui where I attended a parole hearing of one of our most notorious parolees. It was a really interesting process. You get to see how the process works. There are three people on the Parole Board: a convenor and two others. They bring the prisoner into the parole hearing and they present the evidence. The prisoner can have a representative with them they can have a lawyer with them or they may choose to be there on their own. Certainly the whole process for me was very impressive. I think that to see how the parole system worked made a big difference to the understanding of how this whole bill proceeds. So that was the first thing we found out.The second thing we found out was that the Parole Board does not necessarily have access to all the information that we felt it needed. It certainly did not have access necessarily to any protection orders that had been given to those prisoners who were appearing before the Parole Board. We felt that was necessary. Our understanding now is that the Judicature Modernisation Bill that is coming into the House right now in fact will take care of some of those issues. It was a significant process. Prisoners were going into these parole hearings but at times the Parole Board did not necessarily have all the information that gave it the background on that prisoner. So that was a bit of a challenge we felt for the Parole Board and we made some inquiries into that. I think we have now got to a point where we are satisfied that it creates an environment where the Parole Board can operate fairly.There are as Jonathan Young said an average of some 5000 parole hearings—in fact there were over 6000 parole hearings in the last year we had statistics for. That is a lot of parole hearings. This bill will relieve us of about 800 of those parole hearings. To appease New Zealand First which always wants to put more money into everything that will save us about $700000 in the Parole Board’s operational costs. I think aside from the fact that it is saving money it is easing the situation for victims firstly because they get notified as parole hearings come up. There will be 800 fewer notifications of victims a year if you look at it from that perspective—[Interruption]—kicked the bucket. That will make quite a lot of difference to the—now I have lost my concentration as well. So having the saving of that money and the information that needs to come to those parole hearings will make a difference to the victims. It will also make a difference to those prisoners who are constantly dragged before parole hearings at least on an annual basis. They sometimes end up with up to four or five parole hearings—in fact I think the average may be four parole hearings before they are released. So that will alleviate that problem quite a bit too so it will probably take at least two hearings out of that.I think that there are some really good features of this bill. Although this bill affects only 6000 parole hearings I guess it is really probably affecting only 1000-odd people a year—so it is a very small part of New Zealand’s overall well-being—it does none the less have a positive effect on all of those victims and certainly on those people who come before the Parole Board.So there are a whole lot of other things that came up as part of this. The select committee considered some 12 submissions in the course of this bill—almost all of them positive; some of them pointing out as they always do some of the pitfalls that I guess you find with this kind of legislation and obviously human rights becomes a factor in all these sort of things. You get these submissions on those lines but on the whole the submissions were positive and supported the bill so I think it came out pretty well from that perspective.So there are some other things that the bill created. The Parole Act interestingly was initially introduced in 2002 by the Hon Phil Goff who was on that select committee as well. It just shows that you can be here for a long long time and you get to change the bills you started with. He has certainly achieved that on a number of occasions. The bill requires that when the Parole Board declines a parole application it sets the next hearing date. That gets set and those parolees—the people whom it applies to—get a set of conditions that they must I guess comply with. So they have either got to go through some kind of alcohol and drug programme or they have to come back with some form of employment as they leave prison or they may have to come back with accommodation that they can go to when they leave prison. There are a lot of things that they can be required to bring back to the next parole hearing. If of course the offender achieves these early the case can be brought forward.As I said earlier it provides that the victim offender or other authorised person can attend a parole hearing remotely such as via video link or phone. I certainly have not seen that in action. The parole hearings we attended were all right there. The bill also provides that as well as the victim the prison managers and police must be notified of hearing outcomes. They are also to be notified of the next parole hearing date and any milestones as I said earlier that the offender has had set for them. So there are some conditions that make the thing much sounder than it was before. So I think we are getting on pretty well with a lot of the changes to this bill. The board after the initial appearance must consider the prisoner for parole at least once every 12 months—so that is what happens now as I said. Once that has happened every 12 months and once the conditions are imposed then I guess the Parole Board will make a decision as to when they come back before the board for the hearing. Chris Gayle is at 220 now.Brett Hudson: Give Symonds a go.IAN McKELVIE: He will get there shortly. It was a very interesting bill to be a part of. I think that during the course of it we did turn up some information that was well worth discovering and certainly it helped us to get through and come up with what I think is a very good conclusion. So I have a great deal of pleasure in supporting this bill as it goes through the House and it will very soon be through the House.