Ardern Jacinda: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Ardern Jacinda: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:9324] 
JACINDA ARDERN (Labour) 
: 
 After so much debate I personally see the third reading of the Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill as an opportunity to say some most important things and to reflect on the core of what this bill represents and what the Government is truly proposing. First I want to acknowledge something that the Government has continually thrown back at Opposition members as we have contested the prospects of this legislation proving to be successful. Opposition members continually face an assumption by members in this House that we do not understand that some people in our criminal justice system just cannot be reformed. 
I say to Government members that we acknowledge that that is the case. In fact I grew up with someone who worked in our criminal justice system. I have always been very open about the fact that my father is a policeman. While growing up I watched as he dealt with some of the most horrific criminal offending that I think a human being would ever want to see. We acknowledge that there are people in our criminal justice system who are beyond help but we have always argued that we cannot tarnish our young people with that same brush. We must acknowledge that we have a tiered system in New Zealand for good reason and that 17-year-olds and under and 12 and 13-year-olds should not by default be moved on in our criminal justice system before it is right to do so. 
I want to reflect on why we have that core principle in our legislation. Why is it that we deem our young people to be different to be a special case as it were? I think it comes down to a very simple reason. It is one that I think even Minister Power would acknowledge; he is after all the Minister who hosted the Drivers of Crime meeting here in Parliament. If we put all of our young offenders even the top 1000 whom the Government claims it is trying to deal with into a room we will see the same characteristics in each of them. We will see young people who are disengaged from education and/or employment. We will see young people who have been subjected to violence either in the home or gang-related violence. We will see young people who have been subjected to drug and alcohol abuse 80 percent of whom would have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time that they committed their offence. We will see social deprivation: young people who claim that their families have not had enough to enable them to get by. 
I find it utterly abhorrent to hear the ACT Party member Mr David Garrett claim that a decade of Labour policies as he put it is to blame for all of those factors existing in a young person’s life and that that is the contributing factor to those young people’s offending. 
David Garrett 
: 25 years of welfare is what I said. 
JACINDA ARDERN 
: I say to Mr Garrett that I grew up from a young age in a town that demonstrated why our young people end up in the situations that they are in. In the 1980s I lived in a small place called Murupara which will be known to Todd McClay. That town suffered under the weight of privatisation and a central government that at that time did not care for its most vulnerable families and young people. When I was young the seeds were being sown for our young people’s future criminal offending. The Salvation Army the Youth Court judge and any number of other people who work in the social sector acknowledge that Rogernomics has a lot to answer for and so do the policies of the 1990s. I am not saying here that that situation is the entire contributing factor to the youth offending encased in this bill but that the bill is a blunt instrument for dealing with a much deeper problem which goes back decades beyond our own time. 
Because we know of all of those causes and because we know of all of those catalysts the obligation sits on us and on our communities to turn lives round. We know what the contributing factors to youth offending are and if we ignore them it means that we are ignoring our responsibility as well. I believe that when communities know about all of these factors that exist it is up to us to make sure that we intervene at the right point. This issue goes beyond the age at which young people enter our criminal justice system. If we already know that 80 percent of our young people are under the influence of drugs and alcohol when they offend why are we waiting to issue court orders on those young people when they hit the Youth Court? What are we doing to intervene before criminal offending occurs? I have seen no deep financial investment into that area. In fact if we speak to the people at Odyssey House they will tell us that we are waiting until it is too late. We must do more. Members on this side of the House would happily work with the Government on any initiative to proactively intervene at an early point in those young people’s lives. 
I do believe—and I have heard the explanations often very rational ones from Chester Borrows about why 12 and 13-year olds are being shifted into the Youth Court—that inherently this is a shift in criminal responsibility and I stand against that. I stand against the notion that the issue is just about expediency; I think it is much more symbolic than that. I believe we are giving away one of our greatest powers here which is to deal with families at the same time as we deal with young offenders. As Lianne Dalziel has pointed out numerous times none of us would claim that a 12 or 13-year-old who is committing an indictable offence with a criminal penalty of 14 years or more is doing that in isolation and has come from a perfect background or family. So why are we disempowering ourselves and taking away the ability to deal with that young person’s family as well as the young person when we know that there are care and protection issues at play? This is a fundamental shift. I acknowledge what the Minister has said; I agree with her. That is why we oppose the bill. 
The second most significant part of this bill that has been discussed probably did not need to be included in legislation. It is the policy change around the much-disputed term “boot camp”. Anyone who is listening to this debate might question why the Government is upset with us using that term although I still maintain that it was the Prime Minister who first used it publicly to describe the Government’s direction on youth justice. I believe he did that just after the election in February I think. Perhaps we called the policy that because it looks very much like corrective training which had a 92 percent failure rate—a 92 percent occurrence of reoffending amongst those who graduated from it. Perhaps we called the policy “boot camps” because almost every submitter who came to the Social Services Committee also believed from the description that National’s policy would be close to corrective training or like every other failed initiative of that type overseas. Perhaps it was because the providers came to us described to us the programmes that they already offer in New Zealand and said that if the Government really was going to do a wraparound programme the providers already did exactly what the Government was describing: getting to the core of offending and issues working with families and trying to move young people into employment. It was misleading to the public for National to claim that its policy was something different from what providers were doing. That was what caused the confusion. 
Whether it was an intentional move or not the cynical part of me says the term “boot camps” came out because it appealed to people. It sounded good. Now we hear the Government disputing that that is what it is trying to do. I believe that the confusion can rest only at the feet of the Government on that. But if the National members are genuinely trying to create a wraparound programme that incorporates all of the elements of multi-systemic therapy for instance why did we not invest in the kinds of initiatives that the Minister has already referred to: those of the people who are already working closely in their communities who already have that experience and who have demonstrated that they are the one person who can turn a young person’s life around? Why did we start something completely new with the army? That is where the confusion has come from. Closing down Te Hurihanga proved only to reinforce that in my mind. Let us evaluate what we have and invest in what we have. That is exactly what we could have had with Te Hurihanga and that is exactly what I think would have led to a successful path forward in our criminal youth justice system. 
To sum up I say youth justice is one of many areas that I feel quite passionately about but I have felt let down by this bill. I feel that it has shifted what was incredibly forward-thinking legislation and changed it fundamentally. I acknowledge that changing it back in a political sense will always be very difficult. I ask that in future debates perhaps Government members may consider a situation where next time instead of talking about those young kids whom they perceive to have already failed we start to talk about how we can intervene earlier and turn those kids’ lives around.