Warren-Clark AngieANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. It's my pleasure to take a short call on this member's bill the Oranga Tamariki (Parent's and Guardian's Responsibility) Amendment Bill. I congratulate the member Barbara Kuriger for having her member's bill drawn. However I share what we've said on this side of the House: we feel sorry for you because this bill is a bit of a dog.DEPUTY SPEAKER: I hope you don't feel sorry for me.ANGIE WARREN-CLARK: Oh sorry—I feel sorry for the member because this bill is a bit of a dog.Hon Jacqui Dean: Oh too young to be arrogant.Kieran McAnulty: Well that's not very nice. She's older than she looks. Ha ha!ANGIE WARREN-CLARK: This is a very short clause bill which essentially amends the Oranga Tamariki Act of 1989 and gives the Youth Court judge the ability to impose conditions on parents or guardians—I'm 46 thanks—of young people against whom a charge has been proved.The second part of this clause also gives the courts powers to impose the liability on those parents where the orders are not complied with. The liability will be a fine or imprisonment because parents of youth who are in the youth justice system are best criminalised in the justice system—surely not. I mean really. Let's make parents criminally liable—I suggest that this is a nonsense. Let's make things harder for families by making these parents into criminals!We all know that the prison route is a failure and that keeping people out of prisons is better for society. The Youth Court works in a unique way in that it can be mutually restorative for the young person and their parent or guardian. I have worked with lots of young people and I can tell you that those children—even though they don't like the behaviour of their parents they still love them and they still want to be with them and eventually hopefully with intervention from the youth justice system or some other system prior to youth justice our children won't go down this path.So this bill seeks to insert new section 240A into the principal Act. I'm going to get a little technical here and look at the specifics of the wording of this bill. Firstly the bill in clause 5 refers to Where a child … is released on bail … the court may make … orders in respect of the young person's parent or guardian where they are lawfully"—that's right lawfully—"entrusted with … care or custody:". So what this bill therefore says is that even though these parents or guardians are lawfully entrusted with care and custody they're actually not trusted or in fact good parents. What this bill says therefore is that a group of parents the ones who have young people in the youth justice system are to be blamed and not helped.I hope that across this House none of the members here ever have a child in this system but if a member has that great misfortune your duty of care is therefore in question and we as parents in this country—we may have conditions imposed upon us. Remember we too can be grandparents caring for these children.Let's look at these kids. The youth who offend are 80 percent male 73 percent are aged 15 and 16 and 63 percent are Māori. They most commonly commit burglaries theft assault and robbery. We have heard from the member Jan Logie about domestic violence and I think she covered that area well so I won't talk about this. These are actually a group of kids who need the support from all of us. They need to be held to account for their behaviour—and that's the youth justice system—but also supported to make better choices helped to get jobs to attend school to deal with addictions to get help with mental illness—all the areas that have been woefully neglected by the last Government; all the areas we're working on on this side of the House.The idea that we want parents to be home we want them to provide a loving and stable home we want them to be free of addictions—these are things we can agree to. We need to build the capacity of those parents; we need to offer help and support not punitive or criminalisation. I therefore cannot commend this bill to the House."