Williams Poto: Public Safety (Public Protection Orders) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Public Safety (Public Protection Orders) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1008. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East):Thank you for allowing me to take a call on the Public Safety (Public Protection Orders) Bill. A little later on I hope to also speak on the Parole (Extended Supervision Orders) Amendment Bill which is a bit of a compendium I guess of pieces of legislation designed to cover off various aspects of looking at our most serious offenders.The main purpose of the bill that has been introduced is to empower the High Court to issue public protection orders that allow for the detention in a secure facility of people who have been through the prison system and who have come to the point where they are being released into the general public. However due to non-compliance perhaps with their rehabilitation and through stringent assessments they still pose a risk of serious harm to the public. That is where I believe that in this bill—and my colleagues have already spoken about it—there is a very delicate balancing act between what we would consider to be issues under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and the paramountcy of keeping the general public safe.We are talking about a very limited number of people who would be a party to these public protection orders and quite stringent measures to ensure that we have got it absolutely right in terms of those people who will be detained under these orders. We are talking about violent offenders and some very serious sexual offenders. These are the people for whom our prison system has not had the desired effect of rehabilitation or perhaps those who have refused to take responsibility for their offending and who do in that regard pose a threat to the public.I know that the Green Party members raised the issue of human rights and whether this legislation does actually breach the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and whether it is appropriate to continue to in their words detain a person for longer than the sentence prescribed by a court of law. I suppose that the basic principle of a decent and fair society is that we determine what is right and what is wrong and we set the punishment accordingly. We have an expectation that those punishments are completed by offenders.But what is very significant about this particular bill is that we are intending to protect the public from some very serious offending so it is a balancing act. The bill is very prescribed in how a court will deal with a public protection order and in the criteria that we need to use to actually approve those public protection orders. The assessment needs to be done by at least two health professionals and it is weighted on the balance of probabilities that the offender poses a very high risk of serious sexual assault or serious reoffending.That is a much different level of evidence required than if we were looking at a criminal court and looking at a different level of evidence which is currently that under the Solicitor-General’s prosecution guidelines. So we are moving the jurisdiction from the criminal jurisdiction into the civil jurisdiction through the High Court and using the weight of evidence that we have through professional assessment to determine whether this individual will be at risk of reoffending.I do have some questions though for the Minister around the process of rehabilitation for our serious offenders and what is being done to rehabilitate them particularly our serious sexual offenders. I also have a question for the Minister about whether the New Zealand public can have confidence that other offenders going through the prison system are actually rehabilitated to the point where they no longer pose a risk to the public. There are some issues that concern me about our process for supporting offenders through our prison system so that we can be assured that when they are released—