Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): My life's work has been in the criminal justice system all over the world and also in children's rights so a fair and effective system of justice is for me of the utmost importance and I see it as a measure of the health of any society. I was delighted that this Budget makes allowances for not just making our system of justice more fair and accessible but specifically for the youth justice sector.Our system of justice across the board is in crisis. We know that. It's failing victims. It's failing to keep our communities safe. It has bloated our prisons to record numbers—some of those prisons being corporate ones run by Serco. It has meant that the rates of reoffending—of prisoners returning to prison—within five years are almost at 50 percent. So it is a complete and very expensive failure.This Budget makes allowances to change that. I do want to focus on youth justice but I also want to note specifically the $13.5 million for victim support services. The new family and sexual violence budget: an extra $2 million which is an incredible win for my Green Party colleague Jan Logie. Community law centres: I was delighted that finally after being starved for nine years and having most of their mandate cut they are now getting an extra $2.2 million so ordinary Kiwis can actually access their legal rights by just walking into their community law centre and having access to quality legal services and advice. The Independent Police Conduct Authority is getting $2.7 million so that we can ensure that our police force is more accountable and is actually upholding our rights rather than breaching them.But the Youth Court is where two of my passions in human rights collide. The Youth Court I was delighted to see is getting $13.4 million to lift its capacity to deal with 17-year-olds. In New Zealand 17-year-olds are always excluded from the youth system. They're always tried and detained as adults. The child rights sector has been working to change that since 1990 since we ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. I've worked with the likes of UNICEF and Action for Children and Youth Aotearoa on the last two of New Zealand's non-governmental child rights reports to the United Nations and I think most people would be really surprised to know that some of our most grave and persistent breaches in child rights occur in the youth justice sector. We excluded ourselves from the internationally accepted obligation to keep children in separate prisons from adult criminals. We promised to work on it but since 1990 this is the Budget that actually does anything at all to try and comply with that standard.We're also in blatant breach in defining children in all sorts of ways as adults when they're under 18. We treat children as young as 10 as being adults if they've been accused—just merely accused—of certain types of offending and we don't stop there. The 13-year-olds 14-year-olds and of course 17-year-olds are always excluded. We've been criticised for this on the international stage repeatedly and it is worth noting that the Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most unanimously universally accepted of human rights documents with the United States being the only country that has not ratified.Now the science says that our brains aren't developed enough for us to have adult capacity in terms of risk assessment—a really important component to being culpable for any kind of serious crime—until we're in our 20s. So to pretend that anyone under 18 can be held responsible for the types of really complex intent requirements of something like any serious crime—but it's specifically for things like murder which we do for 10-year-olds—is intentionally ignoring the science and treating kids as being responsible for things they physically cannot be responsible for as an act of vengeance almost. You put that together with our now proven knowledge that adult prisons don't even work to rehabilitate adults or keep our communities safe and it makes no sense.I came to the child rights sector through an incredible experience that I had as a young lawyer—a young baby barrister ending up on the defence team of a 14-year-old and the most frightening sight I've seen in all of my years working in that system of justice was this child sitting behind an incredibly large desk at the Auckland High Court where some of our most notorious criminals have sat. You know as adult trained lawyers we had trouble communicating with him. We had trouble discerning his defence. He had suffered all sorts of what I now know are standard traumas for children who come in conflict with the law. His Child Youth and Family file included all sorts of things as you can imagine. He'd suffered from behavioural disorders learning disabilities. I now know that 92 percent of young offenders suffer from what's described as severe learning disabilities. So they've been alienated from the school system they've ended up in the Youth Court and we're treating some of them not as even being young people at all. We know that girls who come into the criminal justice system have more often than not suffered a very immediate trauma and they suffer from mental illness as a result of that. So this can be sexual violence a death in the family—and we treat them as adults.So this Budget sets aside some allowance for growing our youth justice system—for even investing in more culturally appropriate ways of dealing with our young people in our rangatahi and Pasifika courts that have been incredibly successful in bringing down the rates of reoffending for young people. So in light of what we know what the evidence shows I am delighted that now the Green win—what the Green Party has campaigned for for years and years which is to make our justice system for young people more fair to bring up the age of criminal responsibility and in this case to raise the jurisdiction age of the Youth Court.Now in my neighbourhood back in Auckland where some of our busiest courts lie children are going to be treated as children. When they come into the criminal justice system they will be treated fairly. The system of justice needs to be fair because it is the measure of the strength and the goodness of our value system—of any society's value system—and now we are treating children as such which is exciting.If these young people these incredibly traumatised damaged young people were treated in a child protection model in a child-appropriate model we would be taking advantage—and we will be taking advantage now after this Budget—of a great opportunity to intervene in their lives where it has gone wrong to make things better. And that's good for us all.I do want to note from an expert and quote the Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Yury Fedotov who said in 2011—and I think this really encapsulates the chilling context that we are operating in every time we deal with young people who've come into the criminal justice system. He said On any given day children in conflict with the law encounter violence including from [the] police … [from] security forces from adult detainees … from their … peers while some even attempt suicide. These are the invisible children; our role is to bring their misery into plain sight." I'm proud that this Government that stands now for compassion for evidence-based policy-making is moving not only to support victims directly but supporting us all in actually keeping our communities safe and developing a justice system that we can all be proud of because it actually delivers justice for all. Thank you."