Hague Kevin: Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 19 June 2014. Volume:699;Page:18764. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green):I rise to take probably a shortened call on behalf of my colleague Dave Clendon who has followed the Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill through from the start and has I know appreciated the opportunity to be part of progressing and improving the bill. I am mindful of colleagues’ comments about some inadequacies that still remain—costs that will still fall on victims who want to avail themselves of this right for example.The Green Party has had a long interest in victims’ rights. Indeed it was Nandor Tanczos who led the call for a select committee inquiry on victims’ rights some years ago. There are a number of aspects of our policing and criminal justice systems that are fundamentally broken and I listened with interest to Phil Goff’s comments towards the end of his contribution to the effect that we need real and fundamental change to the system. Well we agree with that. There are an awful lot of places where we could start. We could start for example by addressing the drivers of crime. We have actually done pretty poorly on that and it is interesting that in the House today we have been talking about vulnerable children. We have been talking about child abuse and here we are now talking about crime and punishment. Actually the same things that drive poor outcomes for our kids the same things that drive poor health outcomes and the same things that drive poor educational outcomes are the things that drive crime.Successions of Governments—I am not saying it is this Government particularly—have been poor at addressing those drivers of crime. Weirdly the solutions to improving our crime rates are the same things we need to do to improve our child abuse statistics to improve our health data and to achieve better educational outcomes. We need to empower communities that are vulnerable and empower communities that are marginalised. We need to give them a sense of and actual control over their life circumstances and we need to address the environments that surround them: the physical environments the social environments and the political and economic environments.There have been any number of reports on how to address the drivers of crime and yet we are still not making those fundamental changes. We need to address access of prisoners to the educational services and to the health services they need. We have any amount of data that says that people who are in prisons have high rates of intellectual disability of learning disability and of physical disability—extremely high deafness and hearing loss rates—and yet we do nothing about that or effectively nothing. We have extremely high rates of alcohol and drug dependence amongst our prisoners and yet we are still not at the point of ensuring that all of those people who need those services have access to basic health services including the alcohol and drug dependency treatment services they need.Well what do we expect is going to happen? Of course we are going to see high rates of recidivism and people leaving prison unable to rehabilitate. And rehabilitation services are the next part of the puzzle. Actually we have not learnt anything it seems from the Scandinavian countries which understand that the fundamental point of someone being in prison is to repair the relationship they have with society to ensure that when they come out of prison—because almost without exception they are going to—their relationship with society will be different and they will not offend again. That is another one of the fundamental changes we need to make.But this bill addresses one of the other areas and that is the area of victims’ rights. Mr Goff commented that it is a puzzling aspect of perhaps the Westminster system particularly—and Simon Bridges will know the answer to this—that at the point that a crime is prosecuted the offence is seen to be against the Crown rather than against the victim. For far too long we had a system where victims were almost entirely shut out of the picture. We have made some progress towards recognising and respecting the rights of victims. Again there is still a big way for us to go. The particular aspect that this bill addresses is the aspect that enables the rent in a victim’s life caused by the offending against them to be continued by further victimisation and revictimisation by offenders. It is obvious that this facility should exist and the Green Party will vote for it as we have done at all previous stages. Thank you.