Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Kia orana Madam Chair. It's a pleasure to rise to speak on the justice sector. It's a sector that's close to my heart having worked for most of my working life before sitting in this Chamber in that sector. It is an expensive sector both in real terms in the cost to victims to their whānau to their communities and in terms of broad social harm as we're forced to remove more and more people and lock them up. And it is expensive in terms of the bottom line. So to know all the failures that came through this sector as the previous administration refused to change tack as the evidence mounted against its tough-on-crime approach to imprisonment in particular is heartbreaking.In fact all that approach did was make politicians look tough. It did nothing to keep our communities safer. It blew up our prison populations costing us billions upon billions that could've been spent on preventing crime on treating addiction mental health—all the things that we know cause people to commit crime.While I watched our justice system be gutted while the previous Government's legal aid policy was declared unlawful by the Court of Appeal while community law centres lost most of their mandate and funding—the stats speak pretty loudly against all of that. In the annual reviews earlier this year we found that serious crime went up in almost every category: serious sexual assault and violent crime including homicide went up; illicit drug offending went up. In fact methamphetamine offending—in terms of supply manufacture and importation—is about to overtake cannabis offending in our courts. Imagine if we'd taken an addiction healthcare approach to drug offending and treated the source of the problem which is addiction. But we didn't. Robbery and theft went up and offences involving offensive weapons went up by a whopping 20 percent.Our communities were being made less and less safe as we were locking people up and that's callous policy. Recidivism was at about 50 percent. So we know that we weren't taking the opportunity while we had people in custody to help them overcome the issues that had led them down that path. So we locked them up in Serco-run prisons often—in Auckland at least where I'm from—and I know that rehabilitation programmes weren't really there. I know that people were essentially being unlawfully held because they weren't able to become eligible for parole because they weren't able to complete the courses they needed to complete. That's courses as simple as literacy courses but also in terms of drug and alcohol treatment in terms of anger management treatment. What a lost opportunity.So now we are changing that. I am delighted to see that instead of building the American-style mega-prison at Waikeria we're actually building a smaller prison that includes a mental health unit. So we are investing in what we know will make our communities safer once we release people instead of holding them for longer and longer and longer and then releasing them as more hardened criminals—again callous policy-making. Ignoring the evidence is dangerous.We're investing in probation officers in service managers and in psychologists to make sure that people on bail and on parole are supported into a crime-free life. We're putting 20 percent extra money into community law centres reviewing their mandate and consulting with the actual sector because we know that access to justice is important at that level. We're also investing in youth justice and this is a subject that's close to my heart because it is actually one of our biggest violations in both the justice and the child rights sector. We're investing in finally—finally—facilitating a move of 17-year-olds—children—out of the adult criminal justice system out of adult prisons and I welcome that. Thank you.