Goff Phil: Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 19 June 2014. Volume:699;Page:18761. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):The Labour Party supported the Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill on its introduction and of course the Labour Party will always support legislation that is designed to protect and enhance the rights of victims. For too long in our system the victims have been the forgotten people. The way our British system of justice is set up is that we have the Crown against Smith where Smith is the offender the Crown is the State the State prosecutes the offender but people forgot about the victim. Under Labour Governments in the past we have had the Victims of Offences Act and the Victims’ Rights Act. Labour has consistently supported bringing forward the rights of victims putting them at the centre of the system and providing them with the protection that they need.We supported this bill but as I said on its introduction it was a deeply flawed piece of legislation. Mr Deputy Speaker you are from Invercargill. The case that led to the introduction of the bill was in your electorate. You will be very familiar with it. It was a case of a young woman who had been the victim of sexual violation. The offender was charged. He was convicted. He was imprisoned. The woman felt probably that justice might have been done. But one day she came home from work to find that the person who had sexually violated her had moved into the house next door. She had absolutely no power to do anything about that fact. It is hard for any of us who fortunately might not have ever had the experience to imagine what it would be like to be the victim of a sexual violator and to find that that person was now living on your doorstep and every day you would be reminded of their presence and the act that they had committed against you.So the Minister said she had solved this problem and she brought in a piece of legislation. Well the tragedy of that piece of legislation is that it would do absolutely nothing for the woman whose case apparently led to the legislation being introduced. For reasons that none of us on this side of the House understood the Minister of Justice said: “This will apply only if the offender has been sentenced to at least 5 years’ imprisonment.” In this case the offender had been sentenced to 4 years’ imprisonment. I for the life of me could not understand why you would not provide protection across the board for any victim of a serious violent or sexual offence. I said in the debate on the introduction of this bill that this will not do. I said that there is in the Parole Act a definition that separates serious offending from less serious offending and that was 2 years.Well the select committee members looked at this and heard the submissions and they said: “Yes we’ll change it. We’ll change it to three.” Why three? That is just another figure plucked out of the air. I pushed for it and I approached the Minister personally and finally we have got a threshold that makes sense—finally we have a threshold that makes sense—and I welcome that.We got other changes that made this legislation more useful. The bill as introduced by the Minister meant that you had to wait until the offender was released from prison before you could get a non-contact order. For many people they would find out that they needed that order only after the person had been released from prison and by then it was too late. They were in contact with the person and they had that sense of fear and dread that the victim will often feel when they are confronted with the person who offended against them. So we got another change made to the bill that said that the non-contact order could be applied for at any time after sentencing.We heard from submissions before the select committee that often the offender will not be responsible for creating fear on the part of the victim but the offender will delegate that to an associate who will turn up at the workplace turn up at the educational institution turn up at the residence of the victim and the bill would not have been able to do anything about that. Well we changed the bill again so that where there had been an instruction from the offender to an associate to act in that way where the person had acted and where there was a fear on the part of the victim we could deal with the associate.So in the end we made this weak and insipid piece of legislation a little bit more effective. But I want to say this to the Government members of the House. In my hand here I have got the regulatory impact statement. With this piece of legislation which was introduced with such flourish do you know how many orders they anticipated they would make a year?Le’aufa’amulia Asenati Lole-Taylor: 10.Hon PHIL GOFF: Ten. Do you know how many inmates are released each year who have been convicted and imprisoned for serious sexual and violent offending? It is 1000. It is 1000 a year and we were dealing with 1 percent of them. Maybe with the changes in the bill we will deal with a few more. But the fact of the matter is that this sort of legislation is only sticking-plaster legislation. It does not go to the cause of what we need to do to prevent having victims. Having the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff does not stop the pain. It does not stop the hurt.I mentioned in the debate on the last stage of this bill that earlier this week I had been to see the family of Arun Kumar the Henderson dairy owner who was murdered in his dairy by a 13-year-old child. What struck me about that experience was that nothing I could say nothing that Rajen Prasad or Phil Twyford could say could in any way ease the pain and the tragedy that that family was suffering. When we see an elderly man who has lost a son when we see a woman whose husband died in her arms as Arun Kumar did when we see the children who will never have a grandfather for their own children you know that you have got to do something more than provide an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. You cannot bring back a life.These are all of the facts that we have seen that have come out of this. There are young kids in the streets of Henderson who are not at school when they should be there is a truancy service that is not apparently working and there are kids who were demanding money and had been around the shopping centre for months years and nothing was done. There was no community police station and not enough police seen on the street. I noticed that it was the Minister of Police who led the third reading of this bill. Well that Minister appeared before the Law and Order Committee last week and had excuses only excuses for the fact that six Budgets have been brought down by this Government and in every Budget the policing money that is expended on protecting our community has been cut in real terms—cut in real terms every year. Since 2009 $114 million has been cut out of the police budget. It is no wonder the president of the Police Association Greg O’Connor says policing will get harder this year.So the sticking-plaster legislation is OK but what about the fence at the top of the cliff? What about decent policing? What about the fact that 16 community police stations have been closed by this National Government? And what do the people of Henderson say they most wanted? It was a community police station in the shopping centre so there was a presence there. Labour introduced 1000 extra police officers in its last term in Parliament—Le’aufa’amulia Asenati Lole-Taylor: New Zealand First.Hon PHIL GOFF: —in conjunction with New Zealand First. In the last couple of years our police staffing has been cut. I do not want to keep going to the funerals of people who have been murdered when that was a preventable situation.I want to say something finally on the other side of this legislation about sexual offending. I was talking to Kim McGregor who runs and has done for many years a group that works with the victims of sexual offending. Do you know what she told me? She said that for every 100 women in this country who are sexually violated one—just one—will see her offender convicted and imprisoned for that offence. She said: “I deal with women every day of the week who will not go through our adversarial court system because they do not believe that they will see justice done. They believe that they will be revictimised.” I say to the Minister and I plead with the Minister: no more sticking-plaster legislation; let us do something real. Let us change the system. Let us have an inquisitorial system where the victim is not the person on trial. Let us have a system that prevents people falling through the cracks. Let us do something more than simply address 1 percent of the victims of those offences which is what the sum achievement of this bill actually is.