Goff Phil: Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 18 June 2014. Volume:699;Page:18682. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):This bill is entitled the Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill and the reason we have it before the Committee tonight is that there is currently in place no long-term mechanism that the police or the courts can use to prevent an offender coming into contact with a victim in the absence of a domestic relationship or evidence of deliberate harassment. This bill was designed to address a gap in the system. The Domestic Violence Act provides protection orders for people usually women who have been the subject of domestic violence. The Harassment Act provides protection for the victim against those who continue to harass them. But there is nothing in the current legislation that deals with the situation where a person who has been the offender against the victim can harass them silently if you like by their presence.What this bill tries to do is prevent things such as the following or the watching of the victim and the loitering near and the prevention or hindering of access to or from the victim’s place of residence business employment educational institution or other place that the offender knows the victim might visit. It is about stopping a person from following or accosting the victim. It is about stopping people making contact with the victim that is unwanted contact.Some people might say that when an offender has served his or her prison sentence then their rights need to be upheld alongside the rights of anybody else in the community. My view is somewhat different from that. Yes of course offenders do have rights but those rights cannot be superior to the right of the victim not to relive the suffering that they have had inflicted on them by the offender by seeing the presence of that offender in their community near their place of residence or at their place of work or education.There was a gap in the law. This bill closes that gap but let us not exaggerate the impact of what this legislation actually does. The Law and Order Committee found that there are 1000 people each year released from prison who would meet the sentencing criteria for being covered by this bill but equally officials have said that this bill will apply to a very small number of people. We do not know what it was. As the Minister of Justice had originally drafted the bill it would have applied to just 10 people. I have got to say that when I read the regulatory impact statement I was really worried about everything that I read in that statement that suggested that what the Government was doing and the officials were doing was premised on what the costs might be of extending the rights of the victims. Indeed when you look through the options that were put up the Government said: “This would be quite costly. We cannot do it.” Well let us start to think about the costs that are inflicted on the victim and the need to protect the victim which is what this bill is supposedly about.But I want to say that although this bill as the title suggests is about orders against violent offenders it is a drop in the bucket in terms of the actual problem of serious violent offending and serious sexual offending in our community. I had the terrible task earlier this week of visiting the family of the dairy owner Arun Kumar who was murdered in his shop in Henderson. Talk to the family and try to find words that are adequate to match the suffering of that family—an elderly dad who has lost his son; a wife Anita whose husband has died before her eyes and in her arms; and two children who know that their dad will never be there to be the grandfather for their children—and you realise that when we talk about victims we are not simply talking about statistics. We are talking about people real people and the enormous suffering that so many people have inflicted on them in our community—the suffering of violence and the suffering of sexual assault.It is time that we in this House made more than just the token effort of saying that we will patch the system here or we will patch the system there. It is time to look fundamentally at what is going wrong in our society and to build the fence at the top of the cliff rather than trying to make sure the ambulance at the bottom might arrive on time. When the offenders as in that case in Henderson are of the age of 12 and 13 you know fundamentally that something is happening that is wrong in our society and if we think that we can fix that by passing small pieces of legislation like this we are sadly wrong.We have to do more to address the causes of offending. That requires much more than legislation. We have to do things that ensure that the system works. In that case in Henderson you have got to ask the question of why a 12-year-old and a 13-year-old were not at school and what was happening to make sure that they should be at school. You have to ask the question of why a 13-year-old whose father is in prison and whose mother is constantly before the courts is left to his own devices and why there is nothing in the system to put him on the right track which might have prevented him from stabbing the dairy owner in the neck as alleged. That is why we need something more than simply this piece of legislation.We need a change in the system. In terms of sexual offending we need a system that will respond to individuals in a way that does not frighten them away from the system but that allows them to come into the system in order to see justice done. When only one in 100 of those who are victims of sexual violation get justice through the system that we have at the moment we know that the system is simply not good enough.So the Labour Party has come into the House at each reading of this bill and has supported the bill for the small but useful things that it will do for a small minority of victims. We will always support the victims but this bill as the title suggests is no panacea no widespread solution and no answer to the fundamental problems that after 6 years have not been addressed by this Government. It is not the time to make this into a political football but it is the time when this House should come together and say: “Let’s do something more than pass tiny pieces of legislation that apply sticking plasters.”Let us do something to make sure our system works. Let us do something to create a society that addresses the causes of offending. Let us do something to have a policing system where the police do not have their budget cut as they have had in every Budget for each of the last 5 years so that we now have fewer police staff out there working in the police force and fewer police stations. That is the track record. In Henderson the thing that people told us on the ground as we went from shop to shop was: “What we really needed was a community police station in this town. What we needed was to see our police out in the street. What we needed was some intervention when we could see the problem out there.” They needed to know that the system would respond to that problem and prevent the problem because after the damage has been done it is too late.So I say to the Minister of Justice that it is fine to have this small narrow piece of legislation. We will support it—we would support it if it helped just one person—but it is time to have a system that actually works for the greater good of a greater number of people. We need to address the causes of offending have a policing system that is visible on the ground and that works properly and have a justice system that encourages people to come into the system and see justice done because for far too many people today justice is not being done.