Clendon David: Prohibition of Gang Insignia in Government Premises Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Prohibition of Gang Insignia in Government Premises Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 07 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:12477. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green):We are all familiar with the adage that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Sadly the drafting of this bill the Prohibition of Gang Insignia in Government Premises Bill and those people who are supporting this bill today are demonstrating their inability to learn from indeed quite recent history—10 or 15 years of history. The lessons have not been learnt. The key lesson that has evidently not been learnt is that one-off narrowly focused pieces of legislation are not the solution to complex multifaceted social problems or to the manifestations of those problems. It is not a difficult proposition. It is one that has been demonstrated repeatedly even as recently as since the early and mid-1990s that one-off legislative fixes will not be sufficient to deal with complex social problems. Mr Mitchell has admitted that this is not a silver bullet. Sadly it is not any sort of a bullet. At best it is a blunt instrument. National members might get some superficial satisfaction or perhaps even a degree of short-term political advantage from seeing one or two gang members arrested for either deliberately or accidentally contravening this law because given the farcical nature of some of the provisions of this law it would actually be quite easy to accidentally contravene this law. I support Mr Goff’s comments about the lack of consistency the lack of clarity in it.But to return to the key point we need to look at long-term solutions. We need to deal with the root causes of crime and offending and we need to look at the drivers of why we have gangs why gangs are manifesting in our communities and why they are so embedded in some communities. I see it close up and personal in Northland Kaikohe Moerewa and Kaitāia. They are small towns in Northland where gangs are prevalent and where they are influential—very often in a negative way although not always. We do need to address the issues and the problems associated with their behaviours. This bill does not even begin to go anywhere near addressing the causes of the offending and of the existence of these organisations.A whole raft of legislation went through this House in the early to mid-1990s driven by a moral panic that largely came out of this debate about who is hard who is tough on crime and who is soft on crime. I have to say that sitting here watching that interchange of points of order recently about who is tough on crime soft on crime and who is a petal—really we need to get beyond that. Tough on crime soft on crime? How about we be smart on crime? Let us think about smart solutions—21st century real solutions to crime to the problems of gangs in our communities and to the social behaviours that come alongside that. The lesson of the 1990s which clearly has not been learnt by some members of this House is that legislative solutions seldom generate any measurable positive outcomes. We had law passed about criminal association. We had law that enabled local authorities and police to knock down gang fortifications. We saw changes to the liquor law. None of these had any measurable or discernible effect on the long-term deeply seated complex problems about gang membership gangs in our communities and the criminal offending associated with those problems. Why do we not actually want to address the real underlying problems? Mr Faafoi has touched on some of those which are unemployment social disadvantage and alienation.I have made this recommendation in an earlier speech on this bill but I would again recommend that members of the Government parties particularly get hold of a book calledPatched by Jarrod Gilbert which presents evidence and presents a social history of gangs in New Zealand. It points out that gangs in some form or another have beenaround at least since the 1950s. Typically they were groups of young men alienated and rebellious. They joined a gang got themselves into mischief and trouble for a few years and then essentially grew out of it. They would go and get themselves a job they would marry and they would get a house. The patched gangs that are now the cause or the target of this bill are an unusual phenomenon in that rather than the members of those gangs joining for a few years and then thinking better of it discovering there would be better ways to spend their lives than bouncing in and out of trouble with the police and jail and getting on with life in a much more communally acceptable way the difference for those gang members is of course that the 1980s—through the misguided new-right policies of the 1980s—entrenched unemployment.We are now seeing second and third-generation unemployment and second and third-generation gang membership. It is not hard to join the dots to look at the causal links between those—the attack on the structure and the fabric of New Zealand society as it was prior to the new-right so-called revolution of the 1990s and carried on into the 2000s and the fact that we have now got these embedded memberships the multigenerational memberships of gangs. That is a very very difficult problem to overcome and to address. We will not do it by little bits of one-off legislation that put some very limited constraints on the gang movements and behaviours of members of gangs.I would almost guarantee I would almost be willing to wager that there will be legal challenges to this legislation once it is passed. It will be exactly as we saw in the Whanganui gang patch legislation where members of Hell’s Angels deliberately walked around outside the police station flaunting gang insignia. They got themselves arrested and not only went to court but actually won the court case which gave great comfort and added to the mana of gangs rather than diminishing it or taking away from it. Again I think there is a lesson there that has not been learnt. I will wager that there will be legal challenges to this bill and probably successful legal challenges based on all sorts of interesting legal propositions that we have yet to see or hear.I have to say this very day at lunchtime just next door in the Grand Hall there was a launch of the Justice Coalition which is a cluster of progressive NGOs around the justice sector that have come together with common cause to endeavour to offer good solutions to the problems of crime offending imprisonment and all of the other bundle of justice issues if you like. I must say in passing that the Minister of Corrections was there and she announced a very positive policy to have an education strategy for every single inmate in our prisons. I commend the Minister on that. We will look with interest to ensure that the policy as it is on paper is reinforced with resources and funding to make it succeed. That is an example actually of a bit of joined-up thinking about criminal offending and prisons and some of the solutions to them. It is a mile away from the sort of nonsense that we are seeing in the bill we are debating today.I was interested to see how few National MPs were present at that launch. In fact other than the Minister I do not believe that I saw one. I did see Labour members there and Green members were present. It is unfortunate that some of the Government members supporting this bill were not at that launch. I recommend to them that they have a look and learn a little about the Justice Coalition which bases its operations among other things on having a vision about what sort of a New Zealand we want. It has an idea that any legislation or policy should have measurable outcomes. It suggests that justice legislation and justice policy should be evidence-based. I would challenge anybody to put this piece of legislation through that filter. Is it visionary? Will there be measurable outcomes from it? Is it evidence-based? I would suggest that it would fail on all of those measures. It would fail on that filtering if you like.Tough on crime soft on crime—let us be smart on crime. Let us look for real solutions that we know will work. They are complex and they are multifaceted. They will require us to spend money differently. We do not have to spend more money on justice; we just need to spend it differently. We need to engage with the communities. In the drafting of this bill did anybody go out and talk to the gang members about their behaviours and ask them what it would take for them to not behave in these ways? Believe it or not there are some intelligent thinkers in the gangs. Some of the older gang members have turned a corner. They realise the error of their ways. They have joined things like the White Ribbon campaign and some of the anti-violence and anti-drug movements. There is hope by working collaboratively and engaging with these offenders and former offenders rather than pretending that these little one-off pieces of legislation will have any positive effect or any positive outcome at all. It will chew up police time. No doubt it will lead to a few arrests. It will lead to legal challenges. Ultimately it will even lead to enhancing the mana of the gangs as I have said. It will become a point of pride to have one’s gang named in this legislation. This is a very poor piece of legislation. The Greens will continue to oppose it.