Franks Stephen: Children Young Persons and Their Families Amendment Bill (No 4) — First Reading 
Franks Stephen: Children Young Persons and Their Families Amendment Bill (No 4) — First Reading 
[Volume:618;Page:14450] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I was quite prepared to fill in the gaps after Judith Collins who I am sure would have given a speech based on direct personal experience of and a long familiarity with the criminal justice system. Listening to my colleague Nandor Tanczos someone who intends to support this bill was an interesting exercise. The ACT party will not support this bill not even its referral to a select committee. We think it is a waste of time for the select committee and for this House. What the bill does is commonly referred to as tinkering but we believe using the word “tinkering’ demeans the criticism of the bill. The problem with this bill is that it maintains a pattern that fills our jails. If there is a message that ought to be sent by the youth justice system it is that the community is serious about crime that it does not tolerate silly excuses and that it is not easily gamed. The sort of exercise that we see not with first or second offenders for whom the family group conference system was developed but with people who have had four five six seven eight nine or 10 second chances shows the system is entirely unsuitable. 
It does not matter to me or to the ACT party that the international community has been persuaded to applaud the family group conference on the basis of its fine objectives. A justice system should be measured by its outcomes. The measure of those outcomes should not be recidivism or reoffending rates but the offending rates because the purpose of criminal law and criminal law procedures is not simply to meet the needs of offenders. Instead it is to persuade a whole lot of people who may conceivably tip the balance and decide to offend that it will not be worth doing that. So to have a youth justice system that sends out a message that the community is a mug and the police and the social workers are drips driven by drippy rules simply encourages people to choose crime—let us not call it by that neutral term—to hurt their fellow citizens to steal from them to attack them to threaten them to write graffiti and to trash and vandalise property. We say that is a choice. Young people are quite capable of knowing the moral quality of that choice yet we are in a society that patronises them by treating them as if they have no capacity to understand the nature of their actions. This pitiful attempt to introduce some more elements of the adult justice system into youth justice just highlights how patronising we are towards young people. 
I know it is easy to mock the process of drawing on personal experience but I cannot go past personal experience in my case. I grew up in a State housing area. Until I was 13 my father had not bought a house for our family so we were one of the many families with five children surrounded by families of a similar size in a State housing area. We ran in gangs and our pleasure in running in gangs turned partly to vandalism because that was how we made our mark. When I think about what restrained us from a lot more serious offending it was actually very simple: the fear of being caught and punished. The punishment that we all most feared was being sent to a borstal. I am not claiming some sort of New York slum background; I was a very privileged child. I had loving parents and I found school easy. I am not trying to say that I came out of a criminal background but certainly in our community there were plenty of occasions when we broke the rules. But we did not expect the police to go easy on us. We expected the entire community to dump on us. 
This bill now states that the principal focus of the criminal justice system for young people is on the offender. The principal focus of the criminal justice system should be on the victims on those who have not offended on those who may be thinking of offending and on those who need to know that it is not worth offending. To recognise the central role of the victims what does this bill do? It refers us to the utterly effete provisions in the Sentencing Act. I remember what happened when I tried to get a definition of victims’ interests put into the Sentencing Act: the Greens and Labour voted it out. They wanted to have only a slogan in section 7(1)(c). That is the reference in the Sentencing Act to victims that the Minister is now proudly boasting that he will incorporate in relation to youth justice. That reference states: “The purposes for which a court may sentence or otherwise deal with an offender are— … (c) to provide for the interests of the victim of the offence;”. We have no idea what those interests are; this Government has refused to define them. This Government has suddenly found that it hates judicial activism but has left it to the judges to decide from the context what the interests of the victim may be. Perhaps those interests may be in victims not being confronted with a family group conference where they see an insolent family that thinks the whole affair is a waste of time. 
What is this Government doing? This bill states that one does not need to hold a family group conference if certain things are satisfied. What are those things? One requirement is that a family group conference is to be held within 6 weeks of a previous one. Would we not think a simple rule would be that such a person has been given a second chance? Such a young offender has had everyone hanging around waiting for every precious drop of remorse that falls from his or her lips and for agreement to do something else so what are we having a second family group conference for? One can think of a family that has been in a conference where the family members all undertook to make sure that the youngster did not fall off the rails again. Must they do that all over again? What possible point is there in doing that? I go further: the introduction—what is called the explanatory note—of the bill states that a family group conference need not be held where: “… previous offending is identified or a young person offends after being charged in a Youth Court …”. In other words the young person has reached the level of seriousness in his or her offending of the 2000 people a year who are held to have had offences proven against them in a Youth Court. I should say that that occurs in 2000 out of about 40000 apprehensions. 
We lean over backwards to tell young people that their offending does not really matter that it is not taken seriously and that the State and the community accept feeble excuses and only want young offenders to put those excuses persuasively. Under the provisions in this bill young offenders do not need to have a family group conference if they have been in a Youth Court yet when we look at the substantive provision we see there are a whole lot more conditions. One is that the whanau must agree. There is a whole provision that states that we may not need to have a family group conference if it will be a waste of time but only if the whanau agrees not to have a family group conference. People will soon work out from folklore whether a family group conference is a soft option—and which whanau will not agree to one. 
The measure of a youth justice system should not be what the anointed experts tell us about it. It should be our youth offending rates. This morning I was lucky enough to take part in a video conference with police chief Bratton. Chief Bratton was the man who brought the New York crime rate down by nearly 80 percent—over 60 percent in every category of recorded crime. He is now the chief of the Los Angeles police and he made the point that Los Angeles’ youth crime has fallen dramatically. In fact at a time when the US youth population has increased from 26 million to 34 million serious youth crime and ordinary youth crime has fallen in every category by more than 30 percent. In the same period our serious youth crime has increased by nearly 100 percent. So this vaunted system is a piece of tripe. The praise that we hear is self-praise. A whole bunch of people who had very virtuous intentions and who thought there may be some benefit in being more understanding of young people are now desperately trying to persuade themselves that they were right all along. It is only the unthinking offenders who have not realised that.