Tanczos Nandor: Children Young Persons and Their Families Amendment Bill (No 4) — First Reading 
Tanczos Nandor: Children Young Persons and Their Families Amendment Bill (No 4) — First Reading 
[Volume:618;Page:14448] 
NANDOR TANCZOS (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will also be allowing this bill to go to the select committee. The bill contains a number of provisions that we think are worth supporting and we would like to see them progress. However we have concerns about a number of provisions. There is quite a mixed bag of provisions but on balance we decided that we would allow the bill to go to the select committee where we can look at it. There is a lot of detail to be worked through and we will see where to go from there. 
I would like to address the comment in the explanatory note that the bill is about implementing what came out of the ministerial task force on youth offending. It states that the task force found that overall the legislative and philosophical underpinnings of the New Zealand youth justice system were sound. That is something that the Green Party does concur with. It identified that major areas needing attention were sector coordination information gathering and operational practice especially with regard to young people with serious offending patterns that were likely to persist into adulthood. 
Again that is something that the Green Party agrees with. We feel that the philosophical foundations of the youth justice system are extremely sound. In fact the New Zealand youth justice system is hailed around the world as being at the forefront of good practice in terms of youth justice. I note also the comments made by Judge Becroft when he was the head of the Youth Court that there has been a lot of media and political hype around youth offending. But if one looks at the evidence at the facts—and that is something that we here in the House should be more prepared to do—we find that youth offending has not increased disproportionately and that youth offending patterns have been fairly stable. The big panic about young people seriously offending is not borne out by the evidence. 
It is interesting that one of the provisions that the bill proposes to put into the Act is a better recognition of the reduction of reoffending. That is extremely important. It is so obvious as to go almost without saying but it concerns me that often our debates around justice issues focus on punishment to the exclusion of all else. I do not say that punishment has no place in a criminal justice system—of course there is aplace for it and we must make provision for it—but it is not the most important aspect. The most important aspect has to be to reduce reoffending. It has to be to reduce the numbers of victims in the future and the severity of the harm caused to victims in the future. Therefore a clear focus on the need to reduce reoffending is absolutely vital and we think it is important that that should be in the bill. We also support the better recognition of the role of victims and victim reparation in responding to offending. 
 I sat on the Justice and Electoral Committee when we looked at the Sentencing Act and the Victims’ Rights Act and sought to put in place some rights for victims in the system. We think it is absolutely vital that the same rights for victims should be extended to the youth justice system. That is absolutely important. 
When we talk about reoffending we are talking about rehabilitation and Dail Jones mentioned that in his speech. I am not sure the Green Party would share his view that the way to achieve that is through military boot camps but we agree that rehabilitation is absolutely important. It is interesting to go back to the Roper report and look at what it said about the need for habilitation centres. It made a very valid point which is that there is no point in talking about rehabilitation for people who were never habilitated in the first place. What we have to do is find ways of teaching people how to be effective and functioning human beings because it is the tragic case in Aotearoa in 2004 that there are people growing up who are not being socialised properly into being human beings. They are treated worse than we would treat an animal and that is the tragedy. 
With those people there is a pattern set up of intergenerational cycles of offending and it is absolutely vital that we start to address that and break those cycles. That is where we have to look at habilitation and whether it is possible to socialise someone into humanity at that stage. I believe that it absolutely is possible for the vast majority of cases. There are always some cases where it is simply too late but that is a rarity and I think we have to put all of our resources into ensuring we do everything we can to make that happen. 
We are concerned about some of the provisions in this bill—for example automatically sending a youth to the district court who breaches a community-based sentence and allowing a youth under 15 years of age to be sent to the district court for sentencing on purely indictable offences. The Greens are concerned that this is part of a broader push to bring young people into the adult justice system and to bring the same kind of “tough on crime we will be meaner than you are to criminals” rhetoric—that I think is motivated by politics more than evidence of what will actually work—to bear on young offenders. We think that is entirely inappropriate. We have seen the problems that happen when young people are treated in the same way as adults. I notice that there is provision in terms of the detention of young people and there are real concerns about that. We do not think that the way to approach this is by taking that “tough on crime” approach to young people. We think that our international obligations require us to recognise and treat young people distinctly. Once again the boot-camp approach is not the one that we would support. 
As I said at the beginning we are supporting this bill to select committee. As I have said there are areas that we think are of serious concern and we will be addressing those in the select committee. We will be talking with the Government to see what changes we can achieve but we also recognise that there are a number of things in here that are useful additions. They are about making the youth justice system work better. One of the things that I do not think this bill effectively deals with is the question of enforceability around family group conferences. This has brought family group conferences into the greatest disrepute because young people apparently express remorse—perhaps genuinely do so—but when they come out and find that the agreements are not enforceable in any practical way then they have no incentive to fulfil those agreements. We think that that is the key thing that needs to be addressed. I know that Stephen Franks is concerned about that. Judith Collins was also nodding her head. Stephen Franks has talked about this with restorative justice and it is the same issue. 
We think that is absolutely vital. The philosophical approach is the correct one and the concern for us is how we extend that more fully into the adult justice system through the use of restorative justice Maori justice processes and the like. But it can work only if it is properly enforceable and if it is able to maintain the respect and the regard of the public. We have to remember that in the vast majority of cases family group conferences are extremely effective and it is only a small minority that have the problems and that is really what we have to tidy up.