Little Andrew: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Continuation and Reform) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLittle Andrew: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Continuation and Reform) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 08 May 2013. Volume:689;Page:9745. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW LITTLE (Labour): I do not want to disappoint Tau Henare but our support for this bill is highly contingent. We have considerable reservations if indeed not anxieties about this bill the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Continuation and Reform) Amendment Bill.We understand the origins of this legislation. The origins of the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Act go back to the previous Labour Government. It dealt with a very confined very specific set of circumstances but it was to foreshadow a more comprehensive review of our victims’ rights regime.This legislation is not actually victims’ rights legislation. This places victims’ rights on the level of a lottery. If you happen to have been violently abused mugged harmed or injured by a prisoner or by a perpetrator who then on serving a penal sentence is himself or herself beaten up abused tortured or whatever and is successful in a claimagainst the Crown for that abuse then you might have a claim as a victim. Well that is not a victims’ rights piece of legislation at all.We understand the confined nature of this legislation. It originated under a Labour Government and we continue to support it for that reason. But we have also done so because we were given an assurance and an undertaking that there would be a proper review of our victims’ rights regime. This Government made that undertaking. It said it would consult with other parties including us and it has not done so. It has not fulfilled that undertaking. So that work still remains to be done.My colleague Phil Goff talked about the impact of this legislation since it was originally enacted. It has led to a total of $47000 worth of compensation being paid to victims out of a total of nearly $250000 awarded to prisoners for the abuses they have suffered at the hands of the State. That is hardly a great rallying cry for a successful piece of victims’ rights legislation. It simply is not because it is so chance-based and really requires some considerable degree of misfortune on the prisoner’s side and you might say luck on the side of some victims. That is not taking victims’ needs seriously. That demand that need remains and it remains unaddressed in this piece of legislation.So if by passing this legislation we can give the Government room to continue to consider the issue of a proper regime of victims’ rights it will have our cooperation in doing that. I lay down that challenge and that invitation to the Government. We know that that work still needs to be done the Government knows that work still needs to be done and we should be concentrating our efforts and the efforts of this House on that.None of that means that we do not also ensure that the way we treat prisoners—those who are serving prison sentences those who have been incarcerated by the State as a punishment for the conduct they have visited on other citizens—fulfils our international human rights obligations. We treat those who are in the custody of the State properly and with humanity knowing that merely by being incarcerated they are serving their punishment. Their simply being sentenced to prison does not justify other abuses behind prison walls out of the public gaze. We understand all that and that is a crucial part of our total criminal justice and corrections system.But when it comes to victims’ rights let us not deny that there is something repugnant about the idea that somebody who has been the victim of the serious violence of a criminal—or indeed as Phil Goff has pointed out somebody who has been ripped off by a white-collar criminal to the tune of tens of thousands hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars—has to stand by while that criminal is able to recover considerable compensation from the Crown for wrongful treatment because a misguided prison manager or a misguided corrections officer has mistreated the criminal leading to a recovery for the prisoner while the victim gets nothing. That is unjust and that issue still needs to be addressed. This bill is a start towards addressing that injustice but it does not go anywhere near dealing with it and addressing it fully. So as I say that work remains—that work remains.The impact of this legislation since its inception and the impact it will continue to have means that those who do recover from the State in the rare instance when that happens—we have theTaunoa case and one or two others that have followed it but not many others—when the prisoner does recover compensation it then gets paid to the State. The various claims that can be made upon it are paid out including the recovery of some of the costs that the Crown incurs in bringing a prisoner to justice and then money goes to the prisoner. It is important if we are serious about victims’ rights that victims have a claim regardless of whether or not the prisoner is able to get some sort of windfall payment as a result of an abuse by the Crown.A proper victims’ rights regime—and indeed a proper system of criminal justice—would say not only that those who have suffered at the hands of a criminal are able torecover once the criminal has served a term of penal servitude if that is what the justice system demands but also that the victim can claim and seek and reliably expect to receive some sort of reparation or compensation for the material harm done to them. That is what a real victims’ rights regime would provide for. That is what this legislation when it was enacted under the Labour Government ought to have led to—a proper deliberate consideration of the needs of victims and reparation for victims as opposed to this stop-start lurching from one remedy for a confined set of circumstances to simply rolling over the same remedy for the same confined set of circumstances. That work needs to be done.So let the passage of this bill through this House at this time be a clarion call to this Government and any future Government to say: “Let’s get on with that work.” If we are serious about victims’ rights and we understand the impact of serious crime on victims whether it is violent crime or whether it is white-collar crime in the nature of fraud and generally ripping people off let us have a proper and serious considered look and conversation about what might be done to more reliably give an assurance to a victim that they can get justice beyond simply seeing the perpetrator of the crime against them banged up in jail for a period of time and deprived of their liberty. That to the victim is of limited use when they have been deprived of their ability to go about their ordinary business in their life or deprived of their future if their funds have been ripped off them. That is the real challenge laid down by this bill.We are up for that challenge. We are up for that conversation with a Government that is interested in doing that and I know that other parties will be as well. Let the passage of this bill at least lead to that process. Let us hear from the Minister in the chair that he is prepared to give that assurance so that we can at some point in the near future look back and say: “We have a world-class system not only of criminal justice but of victims’ justice and victims’ rights as well.”