Tanczos Nandor: Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee 
Tanczos Nandor: Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee 
[Volume:618;Page:14146] 
NANDOR TANCZOS (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will also be seeking leave to split its vote on this bill. That is an indication of how seriously we take the issues raised in it and how contentious and significant we consider them to be. What we are asked to do here is to balance very carefully the need to protect some important principles of justice with the compelling need to protect children from sexual offenders. That is something we should not take lightly whatever position we end up taking on the bill. The bill addresses the problem in two ways. First of all it creates an extended supervision regime for child sex offenders who have reached the end of their finite sentence and who therefore cannot be subject to any supervision orders or restrictions but who are assessed as being of high or medium-high risk of reoffending. The other thing the bill does is to put in place a system of electronic monitoring for people released under conditions such as parole or extended supervision. Electronic monitoring is not a new thing in this country. We use it now for home detention but this bill allows the door to open to an extension of the idea—that is the use of the Global Positioning System to monitor more closely what people under the regime are doing. The purposes of course are to verify compliance with release conditions detention conditions or conditions of extended supervision to detect non-compliance and to provide evidence of non-compliance so that people can be held to account if they do breach those conditions. 
I consider that the use of electronic monitoring has the potential for great benefit if it is used with some clear restrictions and some clear safeguards. It does allow for the proper monitoring of people and it therefore opens the door to the use of less restrictive conditions because those conditions can be more closely monitored in a more sophisticated way. So I consider there is a potential that people could be subject to less restrictive conditions as a result of electronic monitoring. But without restrictions on its use electronic monitoring could lead to a draconian imposition. It could easily become a gateway for the State to impose more restrictions on people in an unjustified way—for example by restricting political activity in the way that bail conditions are used right now today when arresting people who are engaged in protest in order to clear them away from areas where the police consider they do not want them to be. My colleague Keith Locke will talk more about that when he speaks on this legislation. 
But it is important there are some safeguards concerning electronic monitoring and that is why the Green Party supported the inclusion at the Justice and Electoral Committee of some conditions around the use of it. In particular new section 15A(1) inserted by clause 6A states that a condition requiring an offender to submit to electronic monitoring “may be imposed only on an offender who—(a) is subject to a sentence of preventive detention; or (b) is subject to an extended supervision order; or (c) is or will be on parole and electronic monitoring … is necessary in order to provide the supervision required to ensure that the offender does not pose an undue risk to the community …”. The Justice and Electoral Committee came up with that provision because we felt that there should not be open slather and that there should be some restrictions on the use of that power. We are concerned to hear that the Government seeks to remove that clause in a Supplementary Order Paper and we will oppose that. 
The other part of the bill deals with extended supervision which seeks to address a greater problem and a more serious threat to civil liberties—that is the people released at the end of a finite sentence who are assessed as being of high or medium-high risk. The law allows no restriction on them yet we know with certainty that almost half the people assessed as high-risk will reoffend. Should we just wait for them to make new victims or should we act? That is the issue this Parliament has to address. The bill would allow the chief executive of the Department of Corrections to apply to a court for an extended supervision order of up to 10 years and that would allow conditions to be imposed whether intensive or standard. But some supervision would be allowed over those people. As Richard Worth said that is an infringement of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. We had a big discussion about whether that is punishment. Certainly I think it is punishment but I believe it is justifiable if we are to protect the young people of New Zealand.