Graham Kennedy: Courts and Criminal Matters Bill — First Reading 
Graham Kennedy: Courts and Criminal Matters Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:663;Page:10996] 
Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party has given extensive consideration to the Courts and Criminal Matters Bill. It is always difficult we think to form a single policy on such a wide-ranging omnibus bill and I acknowledge the work initiated in this respect by the Hon Rick Barker earlier. Forming a policy is difficult because the bill’s key provisions would amend various pieces of legislation and in particular four Acts. So let me consider each one in turn. 
First the bill would amend the District Courts Act 1947 to make it easier to recover civil debts by setting up mandatory deductions from wages and benefits. The mandatory fines deductions could disproportionately affect low-income and beneficiary families. If a system were developed to means test convicted defendants it could be a worthwhile proposal. 
Secondly the bill would amend the Land Transport Act 1998 to allow for drivers’ licences to be suspended for failure to pay traffic fines. Suspending licences for failure to pay driving fines could also be seen as excessively punitive if the incidence of malfeasance rested disproportionately on the poor. If not an argument exists for suspension. Those two proposed changes raise the whole matter of the degree to which legislation rests on empirical evidence. In the explanatory note of the bill the Government provided no evidence about which income groups were primarily affected by fines. 
The issue of the facts that we have at our command as a country on this kind of issue is quite frankly unsatisfactory. Green members have for example sought to research the question of whether fines exacted on convicted defendants in New Zealand fall disproportionately on lower-income groups overall. Neither the Parliamentary Library nor the Ministry of Justice was able to ascertain that fundamental fact pertaining to social equity within our judicial system. 
Reports we are told indicate that young people have difficulty in paying their fines presumably in part because of their lower incomes. But that presumption is not based on any rigorous research. Indeed no research along those lines appears to have been done. Yet through our collective intuition we strongly suspect even if we cannot prove it conclusively that fines are exacted disproportionately on the lower-income group. That of course correlates with two categories: age—young people—and ethnicity. With regard to youth it is a telling story. As of June 2008 we find that over half a million individuals—about 16 percent of all Kiwis over 15 years of age—owe fines. That is one in six. The amount owing as has been noted totals $783 million. About 7 percent of the individuals owe 52 percent of that sum. Half of those are under 30 years of age. Most of them we are told cannot afford to pay those fines so the fines remain uncollectable. Some who can afford to pay choose not to do so until resource-intensive enforcement action is undertaken. Some 54 percent of fines by value are passed to the courts for enforcement action. About 41 percent by value of those unpaid fines is owed by people under 25 and 60 percent of that relates to just two categories of offence: vehicles that are unlicensed or lacking warrants and drivers who have violated their licence permits. 
The Ministry of Justice concludes that with young people default is partly due to inability to pay but more fundamentally to a matter of inability to deal with the regulatory system. Let us set aside for a moment the major crimes of violence drugs and property. Let us simply take traffic offences which are after all the most likely specific crimes to result in a fine—about 55 percent result in fines. For traffic offences we are given statistics relating to ethnicity and gender but not to age. What is more the statistics date back only to 1998. Setting aside that shortcoming we find that fines as opposed to other penalties are imposed less frequently on Maori and Pasifika than on Pakeha. With Maori it is 34 percent with Pasifika it is 49 percent and with Pakeha it is 58 percent. The conclusion is that other sentences either more severe such as preventive detention or less severe such as community service are imposed relatively more frequently on Polynesians than on Europeans. So what is to be our conclusion with regard to those two proposed amendments? The Green Party finds that there is an unacceptable shortcoming in the data pertaining to means testing for fines. But we conclude that there is strong indirect evidence that incapacity to pay is correlated with lower-income groups and that it affects particularly both young people and our Polynesian people. 
The third change introduced in the bill would be to amend the Summary Proceedings Act and it would do so in three ways. First it would authorise the release of the amount of overdue penalties by the Ministry of Justice to potential creditors and the release of credit applicant information to the Ministry of Justice to assist with fines enforcement. The release of credit information to and by the Ministry of Justice seems to us to be reasonable. Secondly the Summary Proceedings Act would give courts priority over secured creditors for seized property when the overdue penalties could have been discovered before finance was advanced. In that respect giving courts priority over secured creditors if they knew about overdue fines makes sense to us. Thirdly the Summary Proceedings Act would authorise home detention or prison sentences to be substituted for “unaffordable and unenforceable” reparation orders. In that respect the provisions that would allow prison sentences when people cannot pay reparation orders seem to us Draconian and inappropriate and they would place a further burden on our stretched prisons. Putting people in jail also increases the likelihood that they will commit further crimes. It will add to an already overstretched prison population and an already overstretched public purse. 
The final change that would be introduced by the bill is to amend the Sentencing Act 2002 and various other Acts to improve the operation of reparation and vehicle confiscation as penalty regimes. The Green Party has previously opposed the vehicle confiscation and crush regime as being ineffective and in breach of human rights. It follows that we would oppose those sections of the bill. 
Given the dubious implications of some of the provisions of this omnibus bill the Green Party will vote against it. Thank you.