Goff Phil: Parole Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Parole Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1525. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):The Labour Party supported this bill at its introduction and it continues to support the bill. I think this bill makes small but useful changes to the major piece of reform legislation in this area which is the Parole Act 2002 which I am very familiar with. I have got to say that when we look back over the period of 12 years that have elapsed since that legislation went through I am very pleased with the results of the Parole Act of 2002.The regulatory impact statement for this bill states clearly that consequent upon the passage of the Parole Act in 2002 the number of offenders who reoffended while on parole halved—halved. Mr Bakshi talked about the importance of victims. There is nothing more important than stopping a person from becoming a victim in the first place. The Parole Act 2002 not only halved the number of people offending while on parole but it also halved the seriousness of the offences that were committed. Both of those points were made in the regulatory impact statement. It was successful because we built into the Parole Act 2002 the principle that the safety of the community had to be the paramount consideration for the Parole Board. The Parole Board was not to act in a way that would subject the community to undue risk. I guess I copped a bit of flak from the Minister of Finance at the time that I passed this bill through Parliament because the number of people in prison went up because people were staying there longer. But it did have an impact and I do not think anybody would doubt that that Act has been effective.The Act has also been effective because of the really good way in which the Parole Board has operated first under Sir David Carruthers. I acknowledge the work that David Carruthers has done in this and so many areas. I think he has made a massive contribution to our justice system. But the select committee looking at this bill—Mr Chair you will remember because you were on the committee—had Justice Warwick Gendall and former High Court judge the Hon Marion Frater before it. It was interesting that those making submissions on this bill ranging from the Sensible Sentencing Trust at one end to people who wanted to reform prisons on the other all had a good word to say about the way in which the Parole Board operated. I think most members of the committee actually had the unique opportunity as outsiders to sit in on the Parole Board’s hearings. I sat in on a couple of cases at Auckland Women’s Prison where the people applying for parole were murderers and I was incredibly impressed at the way the proceedings were conducted.I think we have got a system that has worked really well—good people and good law—but after 12 years there was a need for change and the predominant change that this legislation makes is to change the section in the original Act that requires parole hearings to be held within 12 months. It meant that generally they were held after 11 months. It also meant that there were a lot of people who were simply never going to be paroled the first or the second or the third time they were up for parole. The offender knew that the victim probably knew that and the system knew that. We wondered why we were putting people—particularly the victims—through the unnecessary trauma of fearing that perhaps the person would be released and might be a threat to their safety and why we were raising false hope on the part of the offender. For about a third of the parolees they had four or more parole hearings before they were released. It seemed to the Ministry of Justice and it seemed to the members of the Law and Order Committee that that was a sensible change to make.Interestingly—and I refer to the Greens on this because the Greens’ minority report still opposes this legislation although I do not think vehemently; I think they took a rational view on the committee—the interesting point that came out of the hearings in the committee and from the Parole Board itself was the statement by the Parole Board that the bill would probably result in people spending less time in prison rather than more time in prison. It would reduce the number of parole hearings by about 800. Yes that does make a saving of $700000-odd but that is not the primary purpose of this legislation. The primary purpose of this legislation is to have a parole system that works more effectively and efficiently and is fairer to all of the people who appear before it.There are a lot of parole hearings. There are somewhere between 5000 and 6000 parole hearings a year and that obviously does impose a lot of pressure on the Parole Board and on the people who service that board. So the major change in this legislation which is sensible is to give the Parole Board itself the ability to extend the time between hearings to up to 2 years and that will result as I said before not in people spending longer in prison but in people having to attend fewer Parole Board hearings before they are actually released. It did not make sense to have somebody who had not yet completed their rehabilitation programme appear before the Parole Board when they and the Parole Board knew that they had not completed the programme that they had not dealt with the causes of their offending and that they were not going to be released. It was just time consuming it interrupted the rehabilitative programmes and it served no purpose.In the original legislation we recognised that there would be some people who simply were not going to be ready for release on parole and therefore we allowed for the existence of what was called a “postponement order” which meant that for people serving determinate sentences there could be a 2-year postponement between parole hearings and for people on indeterminate sentences life sentences or preventive detention it could be up to 3 years. Consequential upon the change to give more flexibility to the board to vary the period between hearings postponement orders will now largely deal only with indeterminate sentences and with determinate sentences of more than 10 years and in this case the bill allows for the period between parole hearings to be extended by as much as 5 years.I have got to say that having been through every prison in the country and thinking that there is hope in most prisons that people can change that people can be released and that the people there are not necessarily ogres there was one prison where I had a totally different view and that was Pāremoremo maximum security prison. Frankly for the people I saw in the maximum security wing who were psychopaths it did not actually need to be 5 years; there are people there who ought never to be released. I am not a person who says: “Lock ‘em up and throw away the key.” I think there is redemption in most people but in some people there is no prospect of it and they will always be a threat. That is why it is important to have that postponement order and that can and will be used I am sure for periods of up to 5 years.The select committee did not make a lot of major changes to the legislation. We did replace the term “risk milestone” with the term “relevant activity”. That might seem a bit esoteric to those listening. The real problem with the term “risk milestone” was that it implied that if you said a person had passed the risk milestone they had succeeded in all of the objectives and the Parole Board itself said that that was not the right term to use because it could be misleading. So we have changed that term.In respect of the major recommendation—I bring it to the attention of the Minister in the chair the Hon Amy Adams because she was not the Minister whom we referred the initial advice to—the information we got from the Parole Board was that its decisions could only be as good as the information it received and quite often it was not being given information on civil protection orders which because they were civil orders were not within the criminal system and it was not aware of things it should have known about when it was considering a person for release on parole. So if I can use this opportunity Minister just to draw that specifically to your attention—Jacinda Ardern: In my speech.Hon PHIL GOFF: —as Jacinda Ardern did—and say that really across the board in the select committee—it was not a partisan issue—we felt that that was an issue that needed to be addressed by your ministry and we hope that action is taken on that.Apart from those two things there were no major changes that were made. I draw to the Committee’s attention that there can be early consideration for parole. You can bring parole hearings forward in cases where that is justified.