Locke Keith: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Expiry and Application Dates) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Locke Keith: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Expiry and Application Dates) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 22 June 2010. Volume:664;Page:12073. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 One of the problems with the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Expiry and Application Dates) Amendment Bill—and it is a problem with the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Act which it amends and which came into force under the last Government—is that it gives the impression that victims are getting serious financial compensation. In fact they are not. It is just crumbs from the table for a few victims. The real question of proper compensation for all victims of crime is not addressed in the bill. 
It is interesting that when the original bill came through under the Labour Government and became an Act the victim support organisations were amongst the harshest critics of it because they saw that it would give some pretence that there was real compensation for victims when there was not any universal scheme for providing appropriate financial compensation. There has been some development—and the police have done a good job in this area—of victim support immediately after a crime is committed when people are suffering badly from psychological trauma. There is a great volunteer system across the country of people who give freely of their time to help the police and to be with victims at their time of greatest trauma. But when we come to the follow-up system of proper financial compensation to put people back on the road and to compensate them for what they have suffered we find that it is not really there. 
In fact as has been commented before there is a perversity in the legislation in terms of the crumbs from the table that some victims might get. Victims almost have a vested interest in criminals in jail being beaten up then making a compensation claim because the victims will get a little bit of the compensation themselves. It is a twisted way of a victim of crime getting compensation. The whole concept of punishment is distorted by this bill. When people commit crimes they are sentenced to be punished by a term in prison. That is the punishment—the term in prison. They are not sentenced to have other things done to them like being beaten up or anything like that. There is almost a concept behind this bill that they deserve a bit of beating up a bit of punishment because if that happens they will not be rewarded so much in terms of any compensation. 
There is the concept that prisoners are lesser beings in fact with lesser rights and that is a very bad concept that eats away at our ethics. The root of all prejudice is defining a category of people as lesser beings and perhaps subjecting them to mistreatment and beating. In extreme cases we have fratricidal conflicts and ethnic conflicts where people beat up and kill each other because they treat the other lot as lesser beings. Prejudice in this society towards prisoners—and Tariana Turia mentioned this in her very good speech—carries over to prejudice against other races particularly races that are more highly represented in the prison population. This bill by treating prisoners as lesser beings with lesser rights including lesser right to compensation is feeding that stereotyping of people in a negative way. It cannot be tolerated and that is why the Green Party is voting against the bill.