Faafoi Kris: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFaafoi Kris: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8112. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): I thank the Minister of Justice for her contribution. There is an episode of The West Wing where the President’s chief adviser Leo McGarry paraphrases Otto von Bismarck about there being two things you do not want to see being made and that is laws and sausages. I think this is one of those instances where you wish you did not see a law like this being put together in this fashion. It has been rushed and I think the contribution that the Minister has made around an amendment she has just tabled and an amendment tabled by my colleague David Parker is pure evidence that the Government is rushing this piece of legislation through. It should have had time when it first had notice of the need to address these returning offenders and returning prisoners. It should have been addressed at the beginning of this year.Mr Chair I know you want me to speak to Part 2 so I will talk about it in the context of what is and what is not in this part. What is in this part is some of the easy stuff and what is not in this part is some of the stuff that there would have been questions about if this were to go through a select committee process. Some of my colleagues have talked about that stuff which includes some of the services that would help reintegrate and monitor some of these returning offenders and returning prisoners.The easy stuff is in there. I will look at an example and that is clause 13 which states that it is an offence to not comply with a constable’s direction if they feel that they have to detain you or they want to get information from you about your offending or your convictions overseas. Clause 13 is pretty simple. The easy stuff is in there. But if we had the opportunity to sit down in a select committee—and it would have been the Justice and Electoral Committee or the Law and Order Committee—we and I think some of the submitters would ask some pretty basic questions of the Government around what we do with these people when they get here. What kinds of support services do we have for them? What do we do around reintegration? It is my understanding that when the Government took a snapshot of offenders or those who had been convicted and have come back from overseas over the last couple of years the reoffending rate of those people was roughly 20 percent higher than for those who had been released from New Zealand prisons. So we do have an issue because the likelihood is that these people coming to our shores having been deported will have a much higher reoffending rate than those who are released from New Zealand prisons.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am going to interrupt the member. I am going to invite him to now move from a general second reading type of speech to a particular discussion of Part 2.KRIS FAAFOI: Thank you very much Mr Chair. I was speaking around reoffending. I guess in relation to David Parker’s amendment which changes clause 9 having more information about their offending and what level of risk they would pose would be helpful to the Government in being able to offer them those kinds of reintegration services. The fact that David Parker had to put forward his amendment shows the rushed nature and the ill-thought-out nature of this piece of legislation.For those at home who want to know what Mr Parker’s amendment is about it amends clause 9 around the identifying particulars for people who are deported to New Zealand. In clause 9 he wants to add the words “ and the details of any overseas conviction and overseas penalty for any such conviction of the returning offender”. You would think that one of the basic things in this piece of legislation would be to know not just who they are because as it stands we understand the identifying particulars just tell the authorities who this person is.To get an idea of how much of a risk they may be to the public—because this is what we want to make sure we can mitigate for for New Zealanders and this is what the Government claims it is putting this piece of legislation forward for—we want to know exactly what risk profile these guys and these women may have to the New Zealand public. But in the bill itself we do not have the mechanism to be able to find out what they may have been convicted of. So Mr Parker has seen fit to put forward this amendment to clarify what “identifying particulars” are. Are we surprised that we have had to do this? Well no. Within the regulatory impact statement we find a statement that is becoming all too common.