Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's my pleasure to speak on this urgent piece of legislation before us tonight The Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill which we in the National Party will be supporting. Now I think the Minister of Justice has explained the background to this bill: obviously we're dealing with a piece of legislation that enables New Zealand authorities to impose probation-like orders on returning prisoners from Australia primarily—although it can be from elsewhere—from the 501 prisons. There was an obvious public safety issue that arose in around 2015 and 2016 when Australia—in a rather unfriendly manner I think—started the process of sending prisoners back to New Zealand. Even though they may have only lived in New Zealand for a couple of years and been in Australia for most of their life they're still being sent back after their prison sentence if they've had a sentence of more than a year. So putting that to one side—the rather unfriendly nature of the manner in which it's been carried out by the Australian Government for a while—we've been left in New Zealand with a real public safety issue in terms of having serious criminals returned to this country and not wanting to just have to sit back and wait for them to re-offend before they are dealt with by the New Zealand justice system. So the bill was passed back in 2015: the Returning Officers (Management and Information) Act. Then we've seen a High Court judge come out with a judgment late last year in effect severely curtailing that Act—saying that it shouldn't apply to people who were convicted prior to the imposition of this Act in 2015. The judge has said a number of other things: that it doesn't comply with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act around double jeopardy and process issues around how it should be imposed.Now in an ordinary course of events—and I'll be certainly asking the Minister about this in the committee stage—you would expect the approach to be taken would be to appeal the decision in the High Court to the Court of Appeal which indeed has been done and to wait for the Court of Appeal to bring down their judgment on it. The Government has decided that it's not prepared to wait for that judgment and doesn't want to risk the judgment going against the Crown presumably and the fear of the stay—which is to say that when the High Court make their judgment it doesn't take effect until we've heard from the Court of Appeal and so we haven't had to set aside the arrangements in place for the 40 or so former 501 prisoners from Australia who are affected by this piece of legislation. So I will be asking during the committee stage exactly why—or just to run through the logic of why they're not prepared to wait. We're still supportive of the legislation because we agree with the fundamental principle. The court case I do have to say—I did read the court case and found some of the logic somewhat tortuous in it to be frank. The legislation was passed under urgency in the House to deal with what was regarded by Parliament as an urgent issue and the very purpose of doing it under urgency was to capture those deportees who had come from Australia who had already been convicted. So if the interpretation that the judge has applied—which is to say that it shouldn't apply to anybody convicted before the Act was passed. Well that would mean that Parliament had sat under urgency to pass legislation that wouldn't take effect for more than a year after it was passed. So nothing would have happened until somebody had been convicted served a year and then been released and then sent to New Zealand. So you would have the ludicrous situation of Parliament jumping up and down under urgency to stop prisoners arriving on the boat tomorrow—and the judge implying that we were doing that in order to wait more than a year for it to take effect. That was not what Parliament had in mind—nobody thought that—and it was rather I think frankly a tortuous logic to apply to the legislation.That is why I think it's absolutely appropriate that Parliament should assert itself by this piece of legislation today to say No that's not what Parliament had in mind". It's clear from the bill and the manner in which it was passed under urgency that this was always intended to apply to the criteria that's outlined in the legislation: people that have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment for more than one year—or two or more terms that are cumulative totalling more than a year—returning to New Zealand within six months of his or her release from custody during the end of the sentence. So that's the criteria. It didn't say anything about whether the sentence had to be after the legislation was enacted. Then when you looked at one part of the legislation as the court case actually referred to—in that amending the Parole Act it specifically stated that the section had retrospective application: "offender may be an eligible offender even if he or she [has] committed a relevant offence … or became subject to release conditions [for extensions] … [but] before this Part [or] any amendments … came into force." So it is surprising that the judgment was as it was and Parliament it seemed to me was reasonably clear about its intentions for this legislation which was in order to improve public safety in New Zealand by setting up a system of parole which was akin to what serious prisoners in New Zealand would expect to see in order to keep the public safe and to aid with rehabilitation and the many other things that are part of it. Secondly the case argued that there were some breaches of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act in terms of double jeopardy and constraints on the liberties of the prisoners. Of course as has been stated many times in recent times in legislation in this House there will be—and there will continue to be—many pieces of legislation passed in this House that contradict elements of the Human Rights Act. It's not a black and white thing; sometimes bills do impinge upon the rights of New Zealanders. The only relevant question is whether that impingement on human rights is justified and as the Attorney-General's report—rather good I think—into this piece of legislation points out yes there have been places in which this regime can be argued to have gone against the requirements of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act but can that inconsistency be justified? The answer is absolutely on the basis of protecting the public safety. And is there a rational connection between the limit and the objective? Is the impairment of right greater than the reasonably necessary to achieve the objective? No. Is the limit in due proportion to the importance of the objective? Yes. It is for Parliament to make that judgment and stand by it. The courts can point out an inconsistency but they do not have the opportunity to overturn legislation passed by this House. We're not the United States; we don't have a separate branch of Government where the court can overturn legislation passed in this Government and I don't want to see that happen—that's not how the constitution in New Zealand operates. So I stand in support of this legislation and I look forward to the discussions that we'll be having during the course of the evening."