SpeechDAVID CLENDON (Green): In recent times we have seen some useful members' bills from the National Government. They have had substance they have identified gaps or flaws in legislation and they have sought to put those right. Sadly in the view of the Green Party this is not one of those bills. Its great virtue is that it is succinct. It is a brief bill. If brevity be the soul of wit if Polonius had it right then the drafter of this bill is a man of remarkable acumen is all I can say. I have not seen a bill before where the title exceeded the substance. The title of this bill runs to 11 words; the substantive change manages only six words and three numbers. That is a remarkable balance in terms of the content of a bill.The bill rests essentially on three assumptions. The first one is that the penalty for providing explosives to commit crime is not comparable to similar offences. That is not a view shared with any enthusiasm by justice ministry officials. The Minister of Justice was kind enough—it only took a month—to respond to an Official Information Act request for a document entitled Comments on a Member's Bill; Crimes (Increased Penalty for Providing Explosive to Commit Crime) Amendment Bill. The opening line from a senior official in the ministry states: Our original assessment of the bill is that the bill is not outside the range of comparable offences." OK. The point has been made quite rightly that individuals carrying or possessing dangerous weapons if that is the charge are liable to longer sentences. But the official goes on to say that section 202 of the Crimes Act which the member referenced broadly defines offensive weapons to include explosives. So anybody carrying explosives could be subject to those higher penalties. Indeed the police are fairly bright in this sort of stuff. They would almost certainly bring charges under the Arms Act which do carry significantly higher penalties. So the opinion of the Ministry of Justice is that their primary assumption fails—that there is an issue of comparability. There is no such problem.Secondly one would expect to see with a bill of this sort in front of the House that there had been some upsurge in offending that there are people all over the country busily providing explosives to commit crimes. Our friends at the Parliamentary Library provided a very useful table showing the number of convictions against section 272 and specifically convictions of people who were charged and found guilty of providing explosives to commit crime.In the year 2015-2016 the most recent year for which we have numbers the number was zero; there were none. There was a dramatic increase in the year 2014-2015. There was one conviction for that offence. We then had a rather dry spell. In the 5 years from 2009 to 2014 there were no convictions for this offence. There was a real peak in 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. In each of those years there was one conviction. What we are looking at is three convictions for this offence in the last decade. That to me is not a crime wave. I do not actually see that we have a serious problem with the criminal element thinking they can get away with this because after all it is only a 2-year penalty.The third assumption made here is that longer sentences are a deterrent. We have known for at least the last 15 years that all of the research says that longer sentences are not a deterrent. The first substantive bit of work done around 2000 2001 by Canadian researchers challenged that. In fact they started to indicate "Hang on. What's going on here?". More recent research done right here in New Zealand indicates that longer sentences almost invariably lead to higher recidivism rates. So the connection between longer sentences and the deterrent effect has been broken for a number of years.The reason we put people in prison for a long time is to keep them off the streets. That is the only deterrent value and actually it is disabling them from offending. There is no sense of deterrence in it. There is no evidence. In fact the evidence is all to the contrary—that in fact putting people away for longer is not a helpful thing. This bill in our view addresses a problem that does not exist and offers a solution that will not work. So sadly we cannot support it."