Mark Ron: Criminal Justice Reform Bill — In Committee 
Mark Ron: Criminal Justice Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:640;Page:10534] 
RON MARK (NZ First) 
: 
 It clearly must have been a very good dinner Mr Mapp. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: You were there—you were there! 
RON MARK 
: Don’t tell lies Tau— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Please be seated. We will have some order please. The member has not even started his speech. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. I thought that it was a tradition in this House—in fact the Standing Orders say that we are not allowed to accuse a member of lying. That member accused me of lying and I ask him through you to withdraw and apologise. 
RON MARK 
: Tau Henare said I was at dinner with him and Wayne Mapp and if Tau Henare is going to stand up now in this Chamber and put his hand on his heart and say that he was telling the truth then I will withdraw and apologise. But he is not—he told a lie when he said that. And that is the truth. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Please be seated. The member knows that he cannot call another member a liar. 
RON MARK 
: No I did not. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: The member used the word and the member cannot say that. The member has to stand up withdraw and apologise. 
RON MARK 
: Madam Chair this may result in my leaving the Chamber and not completing my speech because I am asking your indulgence. The fact of the matter is that I was with a group of people over dinner time and I can prove quite categorically where I was. Mr Henare told a lie. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Please be seated. I am on my feet—please be seated. No the member cannot dispute what I have said. I have made a ruling. The member clearly said that and he must withdraw and apologise. [ 
Interruption 
] I am sorry; I have ruled on the matter. The member has said that to another member. He knows that he cannot say that. The member must withdraw and apologise. 
RON MARK 
: Madam Chair I accept that and I will comply with your instructions. But let me ask you this— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: No no. I am sorry. Please be seated. I will give the member one more opportunity to just comply with my order to withdraw and apologise. 
RON MARK 
: I withdraw and apologise. 
The CHAIRPERSON 
: Thank you. 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. I seek your guidance. You have suggested rightly—and the member has complied—that the member used an unparliamentary word. That is accepted I think by all and sundry. But you have another problem which is that you have the word of a member the member Mr Henare who got up and made a claim. You have the word of Mr Mark that that was a false claim and the language used may not have been appropriate. In effect Mr Henare has misled the Committee. I take offence at that. He has misled the Committee but there is a remedy and I ask you to rule on that please. 
The CHAIRPERSON 
: If the member is disputing that it can be dealt with as a matter of privilege. It is not up to me to deal with that. I have dealt with the previous point; I am not going to relitigate that. The member said that so the matter can be dealt with as a matter of privilege. 
RON MARK 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. My understanding of your ruling is that if I wish to contest the veracity of what Mr Henare just said I must take the case to the Privileges Committee of which Mr Simon Power is the chair. And he being a National member is the person who will be hearing that case. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: No no please be seated. I am on my feet. No the member as I indicated must raise it as a point of privilege with the Speaker. 
Simon Power 
: Point of order— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: No I have ruled on that. Is this a new point of order Mr Power? 
Simon Power 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. I have two points if I may. Yes they are points of order. First of all the member should know that if he wishes to raise a matter of privilege he does that with the Speaker not with the Privileges Committee. Secondly I take absolute offence at the insinuation that as the chairperson of the Privileges Committee of this Parliament I would hear any evidence or matter before that committee and have a biased view of it because of the political party I belong to. 
The CHAIRPERSON 
: I am on my feet—there will be silence. Mr Power we have dealt with the previous matter and I have made it very clear to the member— 
Simon Power 
: I have taken offence. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: —no please I am just dealing with the first one—that the member needs to raise that with the Speaker as a matter of privilege. On the second matter as the member Simon Power has said he has taken offence—a clear offence—that the member has insinuated that Mr Power would not act honourably as chair. He has taken offence at that and I ask the member to withdraw and apologise. 
RON MARK 
: I withdraw and apologise if Mr Power is in any way offended. Mr Power is an exceedingly honourable member of this House and one who has been judged as being so on many occasions. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: The member wishes to continue his speech now? 
RON MARK 
: Yes. Let me say Madam Chair— 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: Ha ha! 
RON MARK 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. Is there something wrong with Mr Mapp—does he need assistance? 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: No that is not a point of order. I say to members that somebody is going to go out in a minute if members are not quiet while a point of order is being dealt with and that includes you Mr Henare. 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. I did take exception to what Mr Mark has been saying. Actually to be fair it is a little unusual for him but he has made two statements. The first one I let go; it was actually untruthful. The second one I do take exception to and I would ask him to observe the decorum of the House and withdraw and apologise for his statement. 
RON MARK 
: Speaking to the point of order Madam Speaker the decorum that Dr Wayne Mapp seeks would have been best demonstrated by Dr Mapp himself at the outset of my attempt to start a speech. In fact this whole debacle has ensued as a result of his absolute lack of decorum which is totally unbefitting Dr Mapp in my 11 years of experience in this House of observing him. The fact that he is getting some sort of assistance from the back from the Hon Tau Henare does him no good whatsoever in the eyes of anyone who has been watching this entire thing roll itself out on the television screens over the last 10 minutes. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Well Dr Mapp I certainly did not hear the remark but I think there was a lot of interchange previous to that. I ask Mr Mark to withdraw that remark. 
RON MARK 
: I withdraw. To sit as a centre-party member and listen to the debate between National and Labour on the Criminal Justice Reform Bill does give one cause to reflect a little on what has transpired in this House since 2002. It is interesting to hear Mr Chauvel say that the legislative changes to the parole laws enacted in 2002 did not actually taken effect in 2002 and that they happened in 1999. That is not how New Zealand First recalls it. We welcome the changes in this legislation to return ourselves to the situation where people must complete two-thirds of their sentence before they are eligible for consideration for parole. But the fact of the matter is that we are in this position only because in 2002 the Hon Phil Goff came to this House with legislation called the Sentencing Act and the Parole Act which were supposedly the answer to the problems raised by Norm Withers in his nationwide petition for longer and harsher penalties. The result this Government gave the people of New Zealand was to reduce the time required for eligibility for parole from two-thirds of a sentence down to one-third. 
Now we are back where we were in 2002 when we said that that was wrong. That is interesting because at the same time in that legislation we had discussions about periodic detention. Periodic detention as we knew it was virtually repealed and in this legislation we are now going back and redressing the problems that were implemented as a result of the law change in 2002—a law change that New Zealand First opposed and I know that the National Party when it had sensible members in Parliament—before it brought in waka hoppers like Tau Henare—also opposed. We voted against that. 
We welcome the changes to home detention. The point the Committee needs to be reminded of is that New Zealand First led the charge against home detention particularly back-end home detention and its implementation. It is quite interesting to hear members say that home detention has a low reconviction rate and a low re-imprisonment rate. The fact that it is highly successful—and people have trumpeted its successes for many years now—belies the evidence that New Zealand First tabled in documents time after time in this Chamber showing where it was failing. 
How can we say that home detention is effective when the National Government of the day brought it in saying that it would not be applied to serious offenders to violent offenders to wife beaters or to drug dealers yet New Zealand First revealed over a 3-year period that not only were wife beaters getting back-end home detention not only were people who assaulted children—one man with a rifle—getting back-end home detention but also drug dealers were getting back-end home detention? We exposed the fact that a drug dealer was manufacturing P and killed himself on an overdose of P whilst on home detention—back-end home detention. And people have the nerve to stand up and say that home detention is successful and that it is administered well? Well I am sorry but it is not. 
This change to make home detention a sentence in its own right is something that New Zealand First has lobbied and fought hard for. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Why aren’t you doing anything about it? 
RON MARK 
: In answer to “Mr Taurekareka” the Hon Tau Henare we are doing something about it and this legislation proves it. For those who have sat in the National Party— 
Hon Tau Henare 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. The term Taurekareka although being the name of my great-grandfather is not my name. My name is Raymond Tau Henare. I prefer to be called Tau Henare. Taurekareka to me and to some people means “slave”. I am no one’s slave especially not the slave of that little man over there. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: All members know that they must use a member’s correct name. 
RON MARK 
: I did; I called him the Hon Tau Henare at least three times and  
Hansard 
 will reflect that. But the question of who is a slave and who is not is a highly debatable question and some could say that someone who goes from being an Alliance Party member to being a National Party member in support of right-wing free-market economics has to be a slave to something—whether it is ideology or something else we shall never know. All we know is that the man hops from party to party like a bird on a tree looking for a crumb wherever it may be in the hope that there is a Cabinet position at the end of that rainbow. 
The question Mr Henare put was what we have done about the situation. What New Zealand First has done about it is that it has lobbied and worked hard. We are pleased with the result in this legislation of seeing home detention now as a sentence in its own right. 
Let me tell Mr Henare one of the other advantages. Under the old system when a judge gave leave for someone to apply for home detention that person got a deferred sentence. And what did we see from a deferred sentence? We saw that an individual up in Auckland—and I know that Mr Worth now recalls this because I can see the look on his face—was given a deferred sentence and disappeared. The police investigations looked for that man to charge him again and hello he was nowhere to be found—he had gone. 
That issue has been addressed. We will no longer see people given leave to apply for home detention given a deferred sentence and then not being able to be found by the police because it will now be given as a sentence in its own right. New Zealand First rightly claims credit for that. 
We will just conclude this particular contribution by saying that we are pleased we have finally redressed some of the anomalies. We have our concerns about home detention but we are prepared to allow this regime to go ahead because we think it is a far better regime than that introduced by National in 1998-99 remembering of course that when National introduced that regime it promised that no violent offenders would ever be put on home detention. The problem is that that is all we have seen since then. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: You were there Ron. 
RON MARK 
: Mr Henare says that I was there like he said I was at the dinner with Mr Mapp which I was not. I was not in the National Government when this legislation was passed. New Zealand First had left but unfortunately Mr Henare had been attracted to the baubles of his office—and had other personal circumstances that we will not go into now—and took the bribe from Jenny Shipley held his ministerial warrant jumped the waka and stayed in National with Jenny Shipley. Mr Henare’s reward was to be booted out of Parliament. He should remember that he said he would never be a list MP. Well let us look at him now. 
Progress to be reported presently. 
House resumed. 
The Chairperson reported the Appropriation (2007/08 Estimates) Bill without amendment and progress on the Criminal Justice Reform Bill. 
Report adopted.