Logie Jan: Bail Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Bail Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 27 August 2013. Volume:693;Page:12887. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): I would like to start my speech today just by questioning the use of urgency for this Bail Amendment Bill. The first reading of this bill happened 3 days after the bill’s introduction in May of last year and then there was 6 months between the Law and Order Committee’s report back and the second reading. Now we find ourselves in urgency. It is hard to see actually what the urgency is and it does seem to be that this is possibly more a case of poor House management than the actual urgency of this bill.For more than a decade the Green Party has stood in this House and spoken up for a justice system that is consistent with our human rights obligations based on the best evidence fair and principled. We have often been in a minority taking this position and it seems that today again there is no exception in this situation as we are in a minority opposing this Bail Amendment Bill.This bill is another dog whistle to the “Get tough on crime” brigade who have been feeding the myth that getting tough on crime will make us all safer. If only it were that easy I suggest that we probably would have eliminated crime altogether back in the Dark Ages but it did not happen. This bill has an admirable purpose—to improve public safety and ensure the overall integrity of New Zealand’s bail system. It is hard to argue with that as a purpose but sadly by examining the evidence we know that it is not going to achieve these goals. These piecemeal reactive changes do not serve theintegrity of the system. We need a much more strategic integrated approach to ensuring justice and safety in this country.Despite the small likelihood of success this bill does considerable mischief to some key tenets of our judicial system such as the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise. It also erodes the importance of judicial discretion. These erosions of the central tenets of the legal system must be resisted. This bill seeks to further erode these tenets so we will continue to oppose it.We oppose this bill because it is another ad hoc measure that is not supported by evidence or sound principles. We oppose this bill because it reverses the burden of proof so that now someone with a previous conviction will have to prove to the court that they will not offend while on bail. I ask this House: how do you prove a negative? It is really a very difficult thing if not impossible. We oppose this bill because it significantly reduces judicial discretion when hearing bail applications despite the exercise of discretion being a very basic principle of judicial practice. We oppose this bill because it compromises the presumption in favour of bail for those aged 17 to 19 who have previously been sentenced to imprisonment.This reverse burden of proof is a breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and this was noted by the Law Society. Within the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act it states that there is “the right not to be arbitrarily … detained.” There is a right when charged with an offence “to be presumed innocent until proved guilty”. There is the right when charged with an offence to “be released on reasonable terms and conditions unless there is just cause for continued detention;”. This bill undermines those core rights. It changes the goalposts. There is a provision in this lawmaking process to override those rights but there needs to be a strong justification for doing so and in this case there is not.The Human Rights Commission noted in its submission that the case for changing this law effectively relied on a reverse onus preventing less than one instance of serious violent offending a year—less than one instance of that. When I say that I am not undermining the huge impact of that one instance on those families and clearly that person themselves but we do need to hold that in balance with the rights that are being taken from all the other people who will be affected by this law change. I need to remind this House that currently 60 percent of people remanded on bail are found not guilty. By extending this provision of not providing bail to people we are denying them liberty and freedom when they may not be found guilty. That is a very serious matter.Removing the strong presumption in favour of bail for 17 to 19-year-olds who have previously been sentenced to imprisonment breaches a raft of our international obligations: the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice the United Nations Guidelines for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency and the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child. All of these conventions emphasise the well-being of the young person and the avoidance of detention wherever possible.We signed up to these agreements as a country because we recognised that they are in the best interests of our children and young people and our society as a whole. Yet this bill seems to have forgotten that and it has forgotten all of the research that we have done as a country and that has been done around the world to find out what actually works to reduce youth crime. In 2000 the Ministry of Youth Affairs as it was then commissioned a meta-analysis of all the research that had been done into the causes and solutions of youth crime. This research found that persistent young offenders started young and started committing serious crimes fairly early and were likely to keep offending.The dog whistle brigade will say “Well that is just cause for this bill. We need to lock them up.” but what that research found was that persistent young offenders comefrom families overloaded with problems and under-equipped with coping skills. Young offenders show a range of problems that include “substance abuse criminal behaviours accommodation difficulties poverty unemployment mental health problems violence neglect and abuse of every type imaginable poor education and more.” and I am quoting from the report when I give that list.With so much going on they found that effective solutions need to use multiple techniques and touch on the four corners of a young person’s life: family school/work peer group and neighbourhood. They need to provide these young people with skills in how to avoid offending. This “lock ’em up throw away the key” attitude does nothing towards that vision.That same research found that residential interventions—of which locking them up is clearly an example—have to work so much harder to succeed and that getting tough with young offenders almost always fails. The Law and Order Committee already verified the failure of the prison system to address youth offending when it noted that young defendants who have served a prison sentence offend while on bail at a much higher rate than those with no history of offending. So why—why—when we have a chance to intervene and actually make a difference in the lives of these young people and reduce their chances of offending would we forget everything that actually works and respond by removing the fairness from the system and keeping them locked up longer?