Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. Unless I'm interrupted by my co-leader to correct a vote—ha ha!—it is again with dismay that I rise to speak to this bill.A lot has been said about the rehabilitative aspects of parole. And yes sometimes parole is rehabilitative. A lot of times the supervision aspects of parole—and I think most people and all courts agree certainly—have a punitive aspect to them: reporting conditions curfews various other types of things are there as part of the punitive sentences; they are there for reasons that are not necessarily proven to be rehabilitative.But I think if we were to be honest and I speak this to the courts as much as to us here—when rehabilitation works best is when we do a personalised individualised risk assessment of offenders. That's exactly what we do in a sentencing process that's where the sentence is meant to go to—in a lot of ways as much as it is supposed to go to deterrence and to community safety it's meant to also take into account the individual circumstances of the offender and the offending the causes of offending. That's what parole is meant to do.One of the submissions and recommendations of the Law Commission when this Act went through its not-quite-formal—but at least it did go through it—review process in 2019 was that the Law Commission criticised and recommended that we change the one-size-fits-all bulk approach to the way that we treat returning offenders in this law so that we do change that approach in law to require an individualised risk assessment.The reason I bring that up is that's one of the recommendations that would go towards what we are all saying is the spirit of this law which is to keep communities safe to bring down crime rates and to ensure that reoffending by returning offenders isn't happening—or at least to reduce that risk. That's not why we're here today though; all we're doing is fixing the retrospective application of the law. So that's why urgency is particularly offensive with this. We've had a review process we have recommendations in that process and yet we're here under urgency debating this tiny little change that we know breaches rights that we know breaches rights unduly and being all miffed" about why we have to do that.What would have been better is if we actually acknowledge that we shouldn't be comfortable with this urgency process because this law was always passed under urgency. It never had a proper select committee process. We've never properly responded to the review. We've not adopted any of the expert recommendations or what we heard from the public. All we're doing is fixing this one thing that's come out of the High Court decision to apply the law retrospectively in breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and the principle of legality and we're turning our back on what the evidence is of what actually rehabilitates people what actually keeps our communities safe.We're seeing the desperation and the harm in our courts every day on our streets every day because the 501 returnees are largely in those communities now suffering from more and more grave mental health addiction risks addiction harm reoffending—because what else would we do? And we're ignoring all of those indicators. We're ignoring that principles like that of fairness in terms of the application of the criminal law are there also not only because fairness is important transparency's important in our law but because dignity is important. If we say it's Australia that has harmed well why are we doubling down on that harm? Retrospective sanction is never good because we wouldn't say to a New Zealander in New Zealand that we are going to change the law to apply certain conditions to you for doing something that when you did the thing was not in fact criminalised or was not in fact subject to sanction. We wouldn't do that and we don't do it to anyone coming back from any other nation in fact. That doesn't exist by the way. We don't do it. We only do it to these particular returnees. It's a scheme that has never quite made sense and we're just doubling down. That harm is heart-breaking but the urgency in this process makes it doubly—well it makes for bad lawmaking in a bad process and it means that we're not actually taking account of the evidence. So it's not only harmful; it's a little bit dangerous it's a little bit backward and it's kind of disappointing that we've come here with all of that evidence and we're criticising the High Court instead of looking at ourselves and looking at the evidence of what keeps communities safe.It's not that we as the Green Party are uncomfortable with urgency only but urgency in changing a law that we know is breaching the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act was originally passed in urgency and is particularly perverse especially in the criminal justice context especially in the context of the most pervasive the most punitive of our justice system sectors. I don't think we would do it in any other sector. I don't think we would do it to people who were less marginalised than the 501 returnees. And I do think we should look at the stats of who Australia returns because it's not everyone who is convicted of the same type of offending that has returned. So the policy is doubling down on the same prejudice that our justice system suffers from and this is bad lawmaking so we don't commend it to the House."