Franks Stephen: Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Franks Stephen: Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:618;Page:14187] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 The title of this bill is the Parole (Extended Supervision) and Sentencing Amendment Bill. The Minister has tabled Supplementary Order Paper 229 to divide it into the component parts and of course it will be renamed then but nothing in clause 1 properly reflects the real driver of this bill. This bill is an attempt to protect the Privacy Act. It is an attempt to avoid using ordinary common sense which would allow New Zealanders to do what they have done with sex offenders for generations until now. What ordinary communities did with child sex offenders up until the last 30 years—and indeed until the Privacy Act and the emergence of the whole “we know best” movement in the criminal justice establishment—was to try them in open court. Everyone in the community knew whom the sex offenders were. They were not lynched; they were not hounded to death. They went back to their communities and the communities who knew the temptations such offenders were subject to made sure that they did not get a second chance at offending. Sex offenders did get a second chance at working at trying to rebuild their lives and at being part of the community although they were always suspected. This bill states that instead of communities being allowed to know whom the offenders are they should leave it to the justice establishmentand the experts to do the monitoring of sex offenders. 
This bill could have been an opportunity to resolve once and for all the hassle between the police the Department of Corrections and all the other do-gooders employed by the Government over whether it is proper for the police to go around a community and tell people just what kind of exposure they are facing—to go and warn people when there is a paedophile in the community who may be hanging around a school. This bill could have been a chance to confirm that it was entirely in order for people to know that. This bill could also have been the Minister’s chance to do his own version of my colleague Deborah Coddington’s Sex Offenders Registry Bill. Instead we have the Hon Phil Goff’s Supplementary Order Paper 223 which is not reflected at all in the title of the bill or in clause 1 and is a piece of bureaucratic bumf. 
This bill is the outcome—which the Justice and Electoral Committee was not allowed to see—of the dispute between the various agencies about how far they can go in sharing information about sex offenders. When we asked officials at the committee why they did not just use the provisions of the Privacy Act that state the privacy principles are subject to law enforcement purposes they told us in a sort of—I would have to say—embarrassed way that discussions were continuing. They had not resolved the proper form of the protocols that were being developed between the agencies. What protocols? Why was there the slightest doubt about that issue? What has made the justice system—which was once open court justice where the facts would have been out in public the conviction would have been known to everyone and anyone who wanted to find out could simply have looked at the court register—into a system whereby the last residues of open justice are being buried in information-sharing protocols? We have two full pages of rules about managing the risk. What about minimising the risk? 
The Supplementary Order Paper that purports to allow information sharing at the same time states that nothing limits the operation of the Privacy Act or of section 182 of the principal Act. That insertion into the Corrections Act states that the Department of Corrections the Department of Child Youth and Family Services Housing New Zealand Corporation the Ministry of Social Development the New Zealand Police and any sector agency named by the Minister can share information for some very limited purposes. If that had been mentioned and if the people had realised that Mr Goff’s vaunted extended supervision was a substitute for people being allowed to know themselves whom the offenders were—a substitute for open justice being used for the purpose for which it was intended—he would not be able to trumpet it.