McKelvie Ian: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMcKelvie Ian: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4239. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei):Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. You got it right this time. It is a pleasure to get up to take a call on the Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill—[Interruption] That is not what I meant. The bill removes legislative barriers to the electronic monitoring of offenders released from sentences of imprisonment of 2 years or less and offenders sentenced to intensive supervision.I want to talk a bit about one or two of the comments that have been made around the House tonight because I think it is interesting that every party in the House supports this bill I think in one form or another. I think some of the points made particularly by Catherine Delahunty are quite interesting and some of the challenges that the select committee is going to have as it puts this bill through its paces so to speak will be interesting. I guess if you look at electronic monitoring it is something that is relatively new to the world and to New Zealand and it is something that we need to test in all sorts of communities. One of the challenges that the select committee will have is in understanding how this might work in remote parts of rural New Zealand where of course we do not have the same types of connectivity that they have in the cities. That will be one of the issues of course that affects it. The other one will be the remoteness of some of those locations and the places that some of these people choose to live.There are some significant advantages to this bill. I guess that if you look at it in the broadest possible manner it is supposed to—and will I am sure—assist the lot of victims in that it will keep a much better track of people who have committed crimes and it will hopefully ensure that the victims are protected from those people where necessary. I think it will also make a difference to the rehabilitation of those people who are the beneficiaries of this electronic monitoring because it is quite clear from the results of the last few years that everything we do in corrections to improve the reintroduction into our community of prisoners or people who have committed crimes makes a difference to how they I guess react and it also makes a difference to the success rate in reintroducing them.The Government has had some pretty significant success in this area in the last few years. I think it was David Clendon who talked about visiting Rimutaka Prison a couple of weeks ago and it was really a very interesting visit. I had the good fortune or otherwise to visit that prison a few years before with a previous select committee and it was really interesting to see the changes that have happened even in the 2 or 3 years since we had been there last. There are some pretty amazing things happening in our corrections sector. I think of the retraining and the work that is done around drug and alcohol counselling and the work that is done with violent offenders. David Clendon did mention the progress that was made at Rimutaka Prison and we did get to talk to a couple of people who had been through the programme. The result that the programme had got with those two people was pretty amazing. I hope they were not unusual and that that result is able to be achieved with more people than just them.There is obviously all the work around the Release to Work programme and that is where this electronic monitoring comes in to some extent because Release to Work enables these people to be released and the Department of Corrections to keep track of them and understand what is going on. It also protects those prisoners to some extent because it protects them from I guess making the same mistakes twice. Well hopefully it does anyway.The other thing that I found really interesting in the corrections sector is the way that parole hearings have changed and the way that staff pay so much attention to where prisoners who are being released on parole are going to be released to how they are going to be released where they are going to live where they are going to work and what they are going to do when they are not working. It is a very good process and I think we are making some really good progress in that area. Actually it has led to a significant change in the number of reoffenders we have. Since 2011 there are some 1850 fewer reoffenders than we had prior to that. There is the stabilising of the prison population—I think there is a population of about 8600 in prison right now which is a pretty good result. The figure in 2008 was estimated to be 10500 by this stage so clearly at that time there was a significant increase in the number of people going to prison and in the number of people committing crimes. We have of course had a significant drop in the number of crimes being committed too and I will get on to that in a few minutes.Chris Bishop: I can’t wait.IAN McKELVIE: It will be very good Mr Bishop—it will be very good. In fact as I said a minute ago we were up in the Hutt Valley just last week or the week before inspecting some of the work that has been done by the Department of Corrections.Chris Bishop: Great part of the country.IAN McKELVIE: There was not a lot of sun there. In the last few years the Government has passed a lot of law that I guess to some extent is playing around the edges a little bit but that is where we are at with a lot of this stuff. The more small adjustments we can make to legislation that impact positively on both victims and prisoners the better off we will be. In the last year or two I can think of the Parole Amendment Act and particularly the Bail Amendment Act that have had a significant impact particularly on victims.The Government has a Better Public Services programme in place and some very ambitious targets have been set to be achieved by June 2017 and this goes a long way towards achieving what we have been talking about in respect of the Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill. By 2017 we are hoping to have 600 fewer prisoners 4000 fewer community reconvictions and 18500 fewer victims of crime. If that can be achieved there is some significant progress being made. That is an overall reduction in reoffending of some 25 percent and of course this bill goes a little way to assist the Department of Corrections to lessen the amount of reoffending that goes on. I think that is really positive from our perspective very positive for the Government and it has got to be good for New Zealand.The effects of the bill are as I said earlier twofold really in that it gives more protection to victims and it enhances the opportunity for offenders to be successfully reintegrated into society and to successfully find work and a place they can live where they are not tempted to get back into their old ways. Peeni Henare in his talk on this bill talked of this issue and he also accused the Government of failing to spend enough on rehabilitation. Well I would take him up on that because I think that the Government is doing a great job in respect of the rehabilitation of prisoners. There are so many programmes in place; there are so many opportunities for us to get prisoners trained as Jacqui Dean said earlier while they are in prison and consequently when they are trained to work they can then find gainful employment when they leave a prison.In my electorate Rangitīkei I have obviously Manawatū Prison at Linton which has about 260-odd prisoners and very close to my boundary is the Whanganui Prison which has about 500 who all came from somewhere else of course. The thing about Whanganui Prison is that it has a number of programmes where it is training people in nursery and concrete work—all sorts of stuff like that—and it makes a big difference to these people. They can get out and get jobs either in timber mills or with roading contractors in the district. For them to get out and be able to do that—to get out and work—while they are in prison they are released to work and then these monitoring systems if necessary can be utilised at that point.So I think that this bill has got a lot to offer the people that it concerns. It will be very interesting to see it go through the select committee process because there are a number of issues even in a small bill like this that will arise during the course of the select committee process. A number of them have been raised around the House tonight so I think members have done a pretty good job of that.I want to comment on just one other thing and that is about the Ministers of Corrections. I think that our current Minister of Corrections is doing a great job but interestingly in the House I think that there are probably six Ministers of Corrections. You could have an old boys’ or old girls’ society of former Ministers of Corrections. I notice one over in the back row on the other side—he has probably forgotten he was the Minister of Corrections. But it is obviously a pretty important role. With those few words I have a great deal of pleasure in commending this bill to the House and I look forward to the process as it goes through.