Goff PhilHon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): I want to first say that the Labour Party is in favour of this bill. It is supporting each of the clauses of the bill. Basically what the bill does of course is it enables us to extend electronic monitoring to categories of people who were not included in the original legislation that I passed back in 2002. If we look at Part 1AA of the bill we see—and this was a change made in the Law and Order Committee itself—that we are extending the potential for the Chief Executive of the Department of Corrections to require electronic monitoring of people who are temporarily released from custody which is under the amendment to section 63 and those who are temporarily removed from the prison under section 64 and the amendments there. The purpose of it is quite clearly that we want to deter people who are out in the community on parole or under intensive supervision or who may be out because they are released to go to a funeral or some other purpose for which they can legitimately be released from breaching the conditions of their release and going about doing things that they should not be doing and offending in a way that they should not be. It also enables us to monitor the compliance. The Labour Party will support anything that means that any offender who may be at risk of offending and creating new victims in the community will be deterred from doing that and brought to justice if they do do it but I have got some questions that I would like to ask the Minister in the chair Amy Adams. It is all very well for us to legislate in the Committee today to say that we are putting a condition on offenders that they have to wear an electronic bracelet if in fact these electronic bracelets can be and are being readily removed. Kelvin Davis and I were in the Law and Order Committee's Estimates hearing earlier this year when the Minister of Corrections came in with a great deal of fanfare and said: Here is the old electronic bracelet and here is the new one. Now I can cut through the old one. That's easy. But I'd have to take a chainsaw to cut the new one off. They'd lose their leg rather than losing the monitor." This is not making it up. This sounds like a fairy tale but this is actually what the Minister came to the select committee and said—that these things were practically impossible to remove. Well I was watching television that night and I saw Billy Weepu get a pair of scissors and cut through it. This was an ordinary pair of scissors and he cut through the electronic bracelet as easy as that. I have got a workshop at home that is full of tools that would cut through it: pliers and side cutters and hacksaws or whatever. But to take a pair of scissors to a new bracelet that the country is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in getting and they could remove it that easily when the Minister gave her commitment to all of us on that select committee—Todd Barclay was there. He saw it. He was there saying: "What a great Minister we've got. Look she's come in with this irremovable bracelet." It was no such thing. The Minister was making it up. So we are engaged tonight in the Committee stage of this bill in very serious legislation that will extend the conditions under which we can require people to wear bracelets that they can readily cut off. I want to ask the Minister whether she can give us the assurance that we are not wasting our time in the Committee tonight. I want to ask the Minister this as well. I saw a comment from John Key and it was last year. He said it would be ludicrous—"ludicrous" was the word—if a person who is under electronic monitoring could readily remove the bracelet. Well it is ludicrous. My question to the Minister is: if it is ludicrous as her Prime Minister describes it why are we passing legislation to extend the use of electronic monitoring when it can so readily be removed? You might say this happens only on very odd occasions. Well the world is a very odd place because in the last 6 years it has happened on 15500 occasions when people have been in breach of electronic monitoring. We then heard from the Department of Corrections Mr Chairman and I think you might have heard it yourself because you were on the select committee. You heard—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): No no.Hon PHIL GOFF: —it say that there are 27 to 40 people out in the community at any one time who should be electronically monitored but they have removed their bracelets and they have not been apprehended. I want law that protects New Zealanders. I think that is what we all want in this House. That is why we are supporting this legislation but what we have not had and I hope the Minister will take the call is an assurance that when we pass this law it is going to have some meaning and that we are not going to have a law that we pass—because we do that in this House; we pass law every day—that will not mean anything because the person whom we have just extended electronic monitoring to will take out their fingernail cutters and snip the bracelet off. When we were at the centre that was responsible for monitoring I asked a question of one of the people there. I said: "Why don't you make these practically impossible to take off?". He said: "Oh what if it gets caught in a piece of machinery?". That is what the answer was. Well frankly that is a nonsense. We should have a form of electronic monitoring that is extraordinarily difficult to remove. We are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace the existing bracelet with a bracelet that is just as useless and then we expect the public to take us seriously when we say we are going to get really tough on these offenders we are going to monitor them and the community will be safe because we know where they are and what they are doing. Well that cannot come about unless we have a system of bracelets that actually work and unless we have a system that actually has some sort of sanction for the 15500 people who have decided that they will breach the condition of their parole or of their intensive supervision or of their home detention or whatever. The current situation is not good enough. And one of the worries of the people who submitted to us on this bill was that the fact that offenders are wearing a bracelet does not mean to say they will not reoffend and we saw that dramatically and tragically in the case of Tony Robertson who was wearing a GPS monitor at the time he ran down raped and murdered Blessie Gotingco. When people see something like that they also worry that maybe this Parliament is complacent—"We'll put them on an electronic monitor and everything will be fine." Well clearly in that case it was not fine and that family lives with the tragic consequences of the failure of our system every day of their lives. So they are serious questions to the Minister. I approve of the groups that we are extending electronic monitoring to but I remain totally unconvinced that we have a system that is actually working when you can use a pair of scissors to cut off your electronic bracelet and where if you are relying on only the electronic bracelet—as we apparently were with Tony Robertson—the person can still go out and commit a grievous crime. So what we are doing in theory looks very good; how this translates into practice is the question we should be asking as we work through the Committee of the whole House. What will the Minister say in explanation of the assurance that the Minister of Corrections gave to us as parliamentarians that these things were practically irremovable when that was clearly absolutely inaccurate. Judith Collins—she—Hon Damien O'Connor: "Snipper" Collins. Hon PHIL GOFF: Yes not "Crusher" Collins but "Snipper" Collins. We actually spent 10 minutes of our valuable Estimates time going through this role playing where the Minister said: "This is how tough it is." and the bracelet was passed around the committee. It was not tough at all. We were misled and I do not want to mislead the country tonight by saying that we will pass this legislation and therefore we will be safer from the activities of these offenders. Why cannot we in the 21st century have a form of technology that means that these things cannot be readily removed? That is a valid question. Legislate yes but if it means nothing it is not taking us anywhere. I invite the Minister now to take a call and give us an explanation as to why we were misled that these were irremovable and what she is now doing about that problem."