Bennett Paula: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Bennett Paula: Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:8777] 
Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister for Social Development and Employment) 
: 
 I move  
That the Children Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill be now read a second time 
. This bill represents New Zealand’s biggest commitment to improving front-line youth justice services in many years. Our more serious youth offenders will get more attention. They will get greater support they will face stronger discipline and there will be greater expectations of change. 
The legislative changes will give Youth Court judges new options by providing for tougher and longer orders for our most serious young offenders. These are young people who are on a fast track to prison if we do not turn their lives round. New Zealanders have been appalled that some of these offenders are as young as 12 or 13. This bill extends the jurisdiction of the Youth Court so that these young people—a tiny minority—can get the intensive support offered by this Government’s Fresh Start reforms. Their behaviour needs special attention if they are to be saved from a lifetime of crime. 
All serious young offenders will be subject to longer and more intensive sentences but they will at the same time receive support and rehabilitation opportunities unequalled in New Zealand’s history. This Government is serious about tackling youth offending and we are putting $84 million into the Fresh Start initiative over the next 3 years in order to do just that. 
I thank the Social Services Committee for its diligent and careful consideration of this bill. I especially thank the chair Katrina Shanks for the outstanding job she did. I am pleased that the committee received 51 submissions on the bill with most people giving up their time in order to make oral submissions. The committee made a number of excellent recommendations and I thank it for that. It is clear that there is a great deal of interest in getting this legislation right. 
The bill introduces longer and more intensive sentencing orders. It doubles the maximum time that a serious young offender can spend in a secure residence from a standard 3 months to 6 months. I have talked to many professionals who work with young offenders and their families and there is general agreement that 3 months is not long enough to make a lasting change. One mum told me that she had just started to see improvements in her son’s behaviour before he was home again and back to his old ways. A longer time spent in a residential programme will help to embed good habits and boundaries and better prepare young offenders for their return to their communities and families. 
We will not just dump these young people back into the community. The bill also doubles the maximum amount of time—from 6 months to a year—that a young person will be supervised and supported in the community after release from a secure facility. Under this bill Youth Court judges will also have new options to compel young offenders and their families to complete parenting education mentoring and drug and alcohol rehabilitation programmes. These orders will address the root causes of offending. 
Every single serious offender who appears before the Youth Court will have a comprehensive plan that addresses her or his particular crime triggers. We know that these programmes work. A young man sentenced for aggravated robbery was linked to a mentor who by encouraging the boy into kapahaka helped him reconnect to school. That young man is now crime-free and looking forward to studying business and information management at university. 
Young offenders will be intensively monitored kept busy and focused and held to greater account if they fall from the straight and narrow. The bill will for the first time see young offenders kept under the scrutiny of the Youth Court. It has long been a defect in the legislation that young offenders cannot be compelled to come before the Youth Court to answer allegations that they are in breach of their sentences. Also on occasion sentences have expired without young people being held to account for their breaches. This has actively undermined public confidence in the youth justice system. 
The Social Services Committee has proposed amendments that will enable the Youth Court to issue arrest warrants for young offenders who breach orders or go into hiding from the system. The amendments will also enable the Youth Court to suspend the operation of an order while it deals with breach allegations. Police are granted powers to ensure that the curfew conditions of intensive supervision orders can be enforced by arrest if necessary. 
Our plans for 12 and 13-year-old offenders who commit serious crimes have attracted a lot of attention and debate. In my view it is absolutely necessary for the Youth Court to have jurisdiction over this very small number of young people if they are to be saved from a life of crime. The Family Court simply does not have the tools and solutions to deal with these extremely complex cases especially when there is often little buy-in from these children’s families. 
Let me be very clear—we are talking about only those young people who have a record of offending well beyond their years. These are 12 or 13-year-olds who are out of control and are a danger to our communities. Let us take the case of a 13-year-old boy whom the system is struggling with at the moment. He has been in trouble with the police since he was 8 years old and he has a fully fledged drink and dope habit. His most recent offending involved threatening with a weapon assault and burglary. As the second-eldest of six children his behaviour is now impacting on his younger brothers and sisters. 
The bill gives us more choices as to how we address the issue of serious child offenders. Police will have the choice of taking action in either in the Family Court or the Youth Court. The Youth Court will have the power to refer a matter back to the police if judges feel that a matter would be better dealt with by the Family Court. I believe that this approach will protect those very young offenders—those 12 and 13-year-olds who are to be dealt with by the Youth Court. I want to be clear that the Youth Court is specially designed to deal with young offenders. I have no doubt whatsoever that Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft and his fellow Youth Court judges will take a balanced and sensible attitude towards the small number of 12 and 13-year-olds who come before them. 
The Social Services Committee has recommended several changes in relation to child offenders. In particular it has tightened up the rules that determine which child offenders should be subject to Youth Court jurisdiction. Many submitters were also concerned about the current inadequacies of the Family Court to deal with child offenders. For example the Family Court has no power to impose bail conditions and has limited options when a child first comes before the court. The Fresh Start reforms will be better supported when we can fix the way that the Family Court deals with child offenders. As such I welcome the Social Services Committee’s inquiry into child offenders. I am confident that the committee will identify practical ways to improve the ability of the Family Court to respond to child offenders. 
An important feature of Fresh Start is our plan for our 40 most serious youth offenders to participate in military activity camps. These are kids for whom the system is just not working. These young people have no respect for the law people or property. They are notorious in their neighbourhoods and many adults will have tried and failed to help along the way. 
New Zealand’s armed forces have a long and proud history of working with young adults. Since 1993 thousands of young adults have participated in Limited Service Volunteers schemes. Seventy-five percent of those who have completed the military training life skills course have succeeded in getting work or have gone on to further skills training. The mix of traditional values—team work self-discipline individual responsibility pride and discipline—has turned round the lives of thousands of young New Zealanders. It makes sense to incorporate some of these elements into a programme for those who until now have been seen as hopeless cases who are tracking an almost inevitable path to prison. 
The recent pilot run by Child Youth and Family at Burnham shows what can be achieved. I am aware that getting that camp up and running in such a short time has placed some limitations around it. Nevertheless it has provided valuable lessons for future camps. In November I attended the graduation at this camp and it was inspiring to hear the stories. Some families were moved to tears by the changes they saw in their boys. It was pretty incredible to see a patched gang member dad apologise to his son for not being there for him in the past. All the young people made a real connection with their army supervisors. The programme challenged them physically and psychologically. 
These camps have nothing remotely in common with the old sentence of corrective training. They are a modern innovation that incorporates army-style discipline with cognitive behaviour treatment and a full range of rehabilitation programmes including alcohol and drug counselling mentoring and intensive supervision. I commend the bill to the House.