Ardern Jacinda: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8034. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I want to begin by acknowledging that as the Minister of Justice set out she has indeed involved the Labour Party—in the last week or so—in the final stages of the drafting of this bill that is coming before the House. I will share as will my colleagues some of our misgivings over the content of this bill. We appreciated the opportunity to raise those with the Minister directly. I appreciate her giving direct responses to some of those misgivings but unfortunately on some of them we have not yet reached common ground. I would say though that in principle we absolutely see the need for a piece of legislation like this. We continue to question though why it is that we are debating this bill in such a rushed way when it was clear for many many months now that this was going to be an issue that needed to be addressed. That is a legitimate issue that we raised obviously in question time today.Before we begin this debate we need to be absolutely clear that there are two issues at play in debating the context of this bill. There is the debate around who is being deported and why. We will continue by the good work of Kelvin Davis and of Andrew Little to question the legitimacy of the policy that has been adopted by our Australian counterparts. Because of course offenders from overseas have been deported back to New Zealand where they are legitimate citizens for years now. Of course they have. But the operative word there is “citizens”. What we have seen at play in recent times is a real muddying of the waters over when one determines someone to be a citizen—or not.We have individuals now who for all intents and purposes are not New Zealanders in their minds. They identify as Australians their families are Australians they have grown up in Australia in some cases they are born in Australia and they are being deported to this country. We will continue to battle on that point on behalf of those who are resident here in New Zealand and whom it does not serve well for these individuals to be deported back here but also on the principle of human rights that these individuals are encountering themselves. That is a point that needs to continue to be raised by all sides of this House at the highest level.I have to say that this is not an issue that is newinternationally. There have been examples of this happening in the past. Tonga Samoa—they know policies like this. They have a growing population of people from Los Angeles Salt Lake City San Francisco and Dallas. These are individuals who grew up in the United States who have no recollection of life in Tonga who identify as Americans and have no family in Tonga but have found themselves deported to that country and have found a difficult path of reintegration let alone rehabilitation. Because we know this is a policy that has been adopted by another country in the past we can learn the lessons of a country like Tonga that has tried to then deal with the fallout of such a policy.First the lesson should be to battle the policy and we will continue to make that point. The second lesson then is in lieu of being able to successfully do that how do you ensure that your country is prepared for those who have been deported back here? And there will be a range of categories: those who sit in the minor offences category and those who do legitimately require—for the safety of the community—to be monitored within that community. But nothing in this bill speaks to the issue of proper reintegration and rehabilitation.And yet we only need to look at our own experience with offenders being released from prison to know that key to someone’s successful rehabilitation is their access to housing is their access to community support is their access to employment is their access to full health and well-being. That is fundamental if we want someone to be reintegrated successfully into a community. Why else for instance does the Department of Corrections have a policy of locating offenders in a prison close to their family and their community? Why else do we have Release to Work programmes? Why else do we ensure that parole boards do not release people from prison until they have appropriate accommodation? And yet here we have a policy where we already know people are walking out of an airport with nowhere to go and nothing that I have seen in any of the Government’s preparation for this bill speaks to that point. That serves those individuals poorly but primarily it serves New Zealanders poorly. They are the ones whose safety we should be ensuring when we are looking for answers in a piece of legislation like this. We know that we need to be prepared.The Minister raised that of course we have had people deported to New Zealand over a number of years—but not to the scale that we are seeing now and not for the range of offences that we are seeing now. In fact we are looking at five times the level of deportation per month than we have seen in the past. We know it is an incredible increase because those who are working in the community with these individuals have spoken of their struggle to manage that influx of individuals. What they have received? A paltry $100000 I believe it might be Mr Davis? PILLARS? A small amount of money in order to try to manage this huge increase in offenders.Yet what are we doing in this bill? We know that the Department of Corrections to be able to just make sure that it does the bare bones of monitoring—just checking where people live—needed an extra $5 million. So if you are going to do a proper job of wraparound and reintegration you are going to need a lot more than that and yet there is nothing in the preparation of this legislation that speaks to that point.I want to speak briefly to the time line of this bill. We had a short exchange in the House before this bill came before Parliament about when the Minister first instructed Parliamentary Counsel Office. Of course there would have been a bit of back and forth with officials before that point but we know that drafting began in October. My question is why were we able to identify that overseas offenders returning to New Zealand and going unmonitored would be an issue—in April 2014—and yet we did not begin this piece of work until October or at a stretch February? At the beginning of 2014 that is when we debated the Parole (Extended Supervision Orders) Amendment Bill.I want to read an excerpt from a definition in that bill. Section 107C of the Parole Act replaced by clause 7 of that bill sets out the meaning of “eligible offender”. It states: “(1) In this Part ‘eligible offender’ means an offender who— …(b) is a person who (i) has arrived in New Zealand within 6 months of ceasing to be subject to any sentence supervision conditions or order imposed on the person for a relevant offence by an overseas court;”—by an overseas court. We knew in April 2014 that we needed to apply a regime for the serious end of offenders coming in from overseas and yet we did not use that opportunity when we identified that gap in our legislation to put through a broader monitoring regime. Yes we did not have an agreement with Australia around information sharing at that point. That did not stop us from doing the preparatory work. We all know what issues there are when you put through a last-minute piece of legislation.This side of the House wants to ensure that we have a monitoring regime which is why we have said that we will support the bill. But we also proposed via David Parker and Andrew Little that we have a dual bill process: that we put a sunset clause into this rushed piece of legislation for a year and that in this House while we pass this bill today we also conduct a first reading of a duplicate bill. That bill could then go through a full select committee process a full second reading process and a full final stage—all in time to replace the rushed short-cut version in a year’s time with a bill that has had full consideration. We believe that would be a much better more robust process to undertake rather than waiting 2 years and simply having a select committee review that piece of legislation. We stand by that suggestion. We think it was a constructive one to make.Any bill where you are putting in place the potential to curtail civil liberties should at the very least have a decent process through a select committee. The public should be able to have their say. The legal fraternity should be able to have its say. That is how we make good law in this House. Not by trial which is essentially what this piece of legislation is about to go through. I will use my second reading contribution to talk about some of the areas where we have concerns that we are leaving gaps open; where we are relying on the Department of Corrections to highlight in some cases offenders who need monitoring regimes. We know it is a pressed department but I will leave that to my second contribution.