Ardern Jacinda: Reports — Inquiry into the Identification Rehabilitation and Care and Protection of Child Offenders 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Ardern Jacinda: Reports — Inquiry into the Identification Rehabilitation and Care and Protection of Child Offenders 
[Sitting date: 29 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:4938. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JACINDA ARDERN (Labour) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to speak on behalf of the Labour Party in response to the Inquiry into the identification rehabilitation and care and protection of child offenders. This was an inquiry in which Labour participated actively on the Justice and Electoral Committee. At that time the committee was chaired by Chester Borrows. I am very pleased that he now has a role as a Minister which allows him to carry forward the recommendations of this report and I look forward to working with him as he takes on that role. 
But there are a couple of things that I want to highlight from Labour’s perspective that were of concern while debating this issue at the select committee. Labour’s focus when it comes to child offenders has always been very very clear. For us it has never been about just dealing appropriately with children when they are found to criminally offend. As Mr Lotu-Iiga has pointed out those children are defined as being over the age of 10 but under the age of 14 because of course beyond that they are dealt with through our youth justice system. But Labour’s concern has always been about what we can do in the early stages of a child’s life to prevent them reaching our criminal justice system whether it is a hybrid form of care and protection or youth justice. For us there were several issues highlighted in this inquiry that demonstrated that we were not making the most of our early points of intervention and that in fact our threshold for intervention was particularly high. 
There are three areas in particular I want to highlight that are part of the recommendations of this report that I think deserve further scrutiny. The first is the agency that holds accountability when a child begins criminally offending. We had examples from the Family Court in particular. Peter Boshier very kindly created a mock Family Court situation using real examples to demonstrate to us the delays that happen in the Family Court. Often those delays are caused by the agencies involved either not taking a primary role of accountability for a child because there is confusion as to whether or not it is primarily a care and protection or a justice issue so accountability was an issue there but also delays generally within the Family Court process. I am very pleased that my colleague Charles Chauvel will be taking a call to flesh out how actually recent changes in our Family Court system may in fact make that situation worse not better. So the Family Court has a strong role to play here and there are some very strong recommendations in here on how we could utilise that process more effectively. 
The second point of debate is the quality and effectiveness of our interventions when we do identify a child offender. Are we using well-researched evidence-based programmes that are fit for purpose in the New Zealand context? I do think there is more work to be done to make sure that we have quality evaluation of the programmes that are being used. We have a very ad hoc approach to contracting at present. The third area as I have already touched on is the issue of our threshold for intervention. Let me give you an example. Early on in my political career when visiting a school I met with a school principal who was talking about issues amongst her student body. She raised the issue of I believe it was at that time an 8-year-old child who she said clearly had had issues at home in the past. These were not clear care and protection issues but issues that led her to believe that that child and their family needed assistance. That was manifested by the child one day going out of the school grounds and lying in the middle of the road. That school principal’s only choice was to call a police officer and ask for their assistance. The threshold for intervention for that child because it was not a clear case of neglect or abuse was not high enough for Child Youth and Family to be involved yet the trajectory that child has since taken was one that would lead them into the criminal justice system. 
 My point is that we have a child protection system that is under strain. There were 150000 cases reported to the Child Youth and Family last year 58000 of which required follow-up. We have in this country 1200 social workers. By default they are dealing with the most serious end of care and protection issues. We do need a system that responds as early as possible to the needs of our most vulnerable children before they enter into our criminal justice system. If we are to truly make effective use of taxpayer money and care for those vulnerable children I would suggest that that is where our attentions thus forward need to be paid.