Leary IngridINGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): I stand not as a member of the Justice Committee but as a huge fan of first responders and also as a lawyer with high regard for jurisprudence and the integrity—and also as somebody who has experienced firsthand the impacts of extremely violent crime and yet I refuse to take the stance of lock them up and throw away the key.I recently attended the St John Ambulance awards with my colleague Dr David Clark from the Dunedin electorate also with the Mayor of Dunedin Aaron Hawkins and myself—it showed the regard that we have for St John as an organisation. We were watching people receive awards for five years for 10 years for up to 45 years of service and I have stood in this House to tautoko them and to advocate for more funding for the incredible work that they do. For first responders the work they do is not just work; it is a vocation and we leave our lives in their hands. I have the highest respect for them and that is for all first responders—the police fire prison officers and the ambulance. But I do take offence to the minimum sentence of six months' imprisonment. It is seductive simplistic us-and-them politics it is populist and what it does is it seeks to differentiate between categories of people. It doesn't address why these assaults happen and importantly it won't prevent them happening in the future.I have experienced the fallout from very violent crime. I shared a very personal story of my own on Facebook last night and I want to thank all the people who have given me their support for that. As I was leaving the building I saw a van with the words Grouse Lighting" on it and it brought to mind an event that I haven't thought of for quite a while. My ex-boyfriend Paul Anderson was violently stabbed to death by the killer Graeme Burton. Graeme Burton was locked up and when he was out on parole within months he went out and he killed again. As much as the hurt is there for the family of the other person that Graeme Burton killed and for all of the victims of Graeme Burton I know firsthand that locking him away and throwing away the key with no rehabilitation and creating us-and-them categories through our corrections and through imprisonment and our justice system simply does not work. If it did work I would support this motion but it doesn't work and I won't go over the reasons why we believe it doesn't—it's already been traversed very capably by my colleague Ginny Andersen.What I will do is just really support the police tell them what we have done to reassure them that we are supporting them that we are supporting first responders and there are many things. We have a strong record in supporting them we've invested $450 million into the police since we came into office. As a result the total workforce for the police is the largest it has ever been it has surpassed 14000 officers. We've already delivered on our commitments of 1800 new police officers and we are well on our way to meet our growth target of 1800 over five years. Last year the police launched the Frontline Safety Improvement Programme and that has six work streams to boost safety. These are training valuing front-line responders and their whānau equipment and capability command and control framework response models and operational safety systems. May I also at this point commend the St John Ambulance for resisting pressure to not introduce double-crewing. Double-crewing was going to be an expensive option but they chose to do it because it is the right thing to do for their workers around worker safety but also around first response incidents so tautoko to them. The programme that the police have launched with front-line skills will give 1200 constables with at least two years' experience an extra week of training this year and it will aim to improve their tactical and operational skills. They have also had other work being delivered including safety reminder videos increased tactical training at the recruit level and greater scenario-based cognitive training and de-escalation techniques.De-escalation is what we must be looking to for all of these incidents involving first responders. I know that I have family members who have been assaulted in the course of their work as medics as doctors and as nurses. They do not agree with this offence because of the way it creates an us-and-them scenario. Ginny Andersen has pointed out the hierarchy of aggravated factors in offending and she has also pointed out the fact that aggravation can be taken into account in sentencing. We don't want to become a society that just slaps mandated sentences on to groups of people because we think that's an easy sticking plaster for the conditions that create these situations in the first place. The conditions that lead to offending are complex they involve lots of whys they involve lots of equity issues and there is a mechanism for the judges to look at all of those facts and take all of those facts into accounts when sentencing. That is the correct approach.When we start to create categories of offences like this even with the changes around cumulative sentencing that have been proposed by National members it doesn't allow the judiciary to do its job in terms of taking into account the full set of circumstances in that particular case. It forces us to lump groups of offending together and to start to make assumptions about members of society that fit populist politics and that make for easy solutions. There are no easy solutions when it comes to criminal justice. They are complex situations that we need to look at both in terms of how we respond with the criminal justice system but also the preventative measures that stop people from doing assaults in the first place and getting themselves into those situations. So as tempting as it could be for people to think that this is a nod to our first responders this proposed legislation it really isn't. It is a way for the Opposition to continue to create a divisive society a society that creates gangs of us and them they even use the word "gangs"—the last speaker did in his presentation—and it doesn't lead to inclusion it doesn't lead to social cohesion. We know that societies that are not inclusive ultimately end up with more crime less security less productivity. We in the Labour Party are about an inclusive society. When we look at people we look at them as individuals with equal rights and we then look at their behaviours. We don't lump them into categories which is what the Opposition is trying to do. The fact that the Sensible Sentencing Trust has earned the participation of the member that previously supported this bill makes me even more secure in the fact that I would not want to support it. The Sensible Sentencing Trust themselves take a very punitive approach to the justice system. So for these reasons we cannot support a bill that is divisive that plays into populist politics that tries to create an us-and-them mentality that doesn't have merit that has not been able to be corrected despite two processes through the select committee and that when you take out the mandatory sentencing element of it really doesn't have anything left to offer this House. I cannot support this bill."