Mackey Moana: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Mackey Moana: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:651;Page:510] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 Here we are once again under urgency passing through all stages yet another bill that the public of New Zealand will have no chance to scrutinise or debate. We have done a complete 180 because we have just finished debating two appalling bills that will cause serious serious damage to our economy and families. We have now done a complete 180 to a bill the Bail Amendment Bill that does absolutely nothing. I ask members to remember that we are in the 100 days of action! I am sure all New Zealanders are feeling turbocharged because we are in 100 days of action right now! Law and order was one of National’s key campaign planks on the election trail and what is the first law and order bill that comes before this House in the 100 days of action? What is the first legislation from this tough-on-criminals good-to-victims National Government? What is it? It is a bill that does nothing. It is a flimflam bill that does nothing. 
Hon Simon Power 
: Watch this space. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: I am watching this space I say to Mr Power and at the moment it is completely empty. That is a shame because the member could have been a very good Minister if he had been given more senior portfolios. 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: Steady on! 
MOANA MACKEY 
: I am feeling generous. We have been in urgency for a few days I am sleep-deprived and I am feeling generous. He should have been the Minister of Police. He would have been a good Minister of Police. 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: No that would have been Chester. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Oh Chester Borrows. Minister of Corrections would have been good for Mr Power. Chester Borrows would have been a fantastic Minister of Police. 
Hon Phil Goff 
: Because he knew everything. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Well of course. When we were in Government and Mr Power was in Opposition he knew everything about corrections. We knew nothing and he knew everything. So if he knew everything I ask why National did not make him the Minister. 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: Because he was too scared. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Well that is right. I will come back to the bill. Some of the contributions from the National members were interesting. Apparently because they now form the Government we no longer need select committee processes. Craig Foss called it “the select committee of New Zealand”. That is an interesting constitutional change in New Zealand’s history. 
I welcome Melissa Lee to the House and I congratulate her on delivering her maiden speech. She is certainly an extremely eloquent and intelligent member of this Parliament and I welcome her here but again she suggested that somehow because National won the election no bills need to be referred to select committees any more. The people of New Zealand should be very worried about this new approach to open honest transparent inclusive Government. Apparently according to the new National - ACT - Maori Party Government “open transparent and inclusive” has meant shutting the public out of discussion on every single piece of legislation that has come through the House in its first week in office. If that is the way it intends to go on then I think this will be a very very short-term Government indeed. 
The reason Labour will not be opposing this bill—but we are going to have our say—is that during the election campaign law and order was an extremely hard-fought issue. National members of Parliament got up on the hustings and accused Labour members of doing nothing. They said we had done absolutely nothing. Let us look at that claim because of course it was the present leader of the Labour Party the Hon Phil Goff who made all the changes to our sentencing bail and parole Acts that toughened the law. Tony Ryall who was the Minister of Justice before Mr Goff said that our laws were too tough. Do members know that under Mr Ryall’s and National’s laws for preventive detention—the sentence given to our worst offenders those on whom we have to put a sentence saying that if at any point in their lives they breach it they will have to go back to jail; effectively a life sentence—criminals could be sentenced to preventive detention only on the second offence. They got the first one free under the National Government. But as we know that would not have been the first offence; it would have been just the first time they were caught. Who knows how many offences these people got away with before they were sentenced to preventive detention. 
It was the Hon Phil Goff and the Labour Government that said no that if preventive detention was to be an effective sentence it needed to be available on the first offence if that offence was serious enough to have brought that sentence down on the second offence. It was a Labour Government that did that. It was a Labour Government that got rid of Tony Ryall’s automatic release at two-thirds. Under the last National Government criminals were automatically released at two-thirds of their sentence and it was the Labour Government and the present leader of the Labour Party the Hon Phil Goff when he was Minister of Justice who said no it should be based on the risk to the community. 
The context in which we find ourselves having this debate is that of a National Party that consistently when in Government did nothing on law on order and did nothing to increase sentences against a previous Labour Government that stood up and made the tough choices because we do not like the fact that there are a lot more people in our jails. We think it is a failure of our society that we have so many people in our prisons. Every person in our prisons is wasted opportunity. But we stood up listened to the public and said we know that people want to feel secure. They want to feel that the sentences people are being given for the heinous crimes they commit reflect those crimes. We listened and we did it. 
If we compare that to this first law and order bill of the new National - ACT - Maori Party Government what do we find it does? It does nothing—absolutely nothing. Not one person will be safer because of this Bail Amendment Bill. Nothing will change and it just goes to show that here we are all over again facing the same tired rhetoric from the National Party. 
Why did Melissa Lee not draw the comparison or connection between the two bills we have already passed? One of those raises taxes for our most vulnerable families and reduces their income after retirement. The second was the 90-day probation bill which means that people can be fired for no reason—perhaps their boss does not like them—and they could be sent back on to a benefit. And she does not draw the connection with crime. She does not think that the policies in the legislation they are passing—policies that will whack our working families in the guts that will lower incomes for those who are most vulnerable and that will drive people into poverty—might be part of the reason that people commit crime in the first place. 
David Garrett 
: Wrong! 
MOANA MACKEY 
: “Wrong!” says Mr Garrett. Apparently poverty has nothing to do with crime! When are we going to have a law and order debate in this country that deals with the causes of crime? Do members know why we do not? It is because there is no immediate political pay off for doing that. We are not going to see the benefits of the last 9 years of a Labour Government that poured money into early childhood education into at-risk families and into dealing with children in the first 3 years of their lives which we know is when they are set on a path that it is very difficult to bring them off without huge resources. We are not going to see the benefit of that for perhaps another 5 10 or 15 years. 
Let us look at where we are now. We are dealing with 17 and 18-year-olds who are committing heinous crimes. These are the 17 and 18-year-olds who were born after the 1991 “mother of all Budgets”. These are the children whose families were plunged into poverty overnight by a National Government whose slogan was “going for growth”. What was the slogan from Mr Key in the Speech from the Throne? It was “going for growth”. If we never learn anything in this country if we are going to drive our poorest families into poverty if we are going to remove people’s rights at work as the National Government has just done today if we are going to raise taxes on the lowest families and cut KiwiSaver if we are going to cut growth because we have just got rid of research and development tax credits—which the rest of the world has—just like the National Party has done today if we continue to do these things we will be here in 20 30 40 or 50 years’ time having exactly the same conversation and passing legislation that will do nothing to prevent crime. It might make victims of crime feel better afterwards—this bill will not—but we pass legislation to make the victims of crime feel that there is appropriate punishment for what has happened but none of this will prevent there being victims of crime. 
Ultimately that should be what all legislation in this House is about. All legislation in this House should be about preventing more victims of crime from being created. How do we bring these young people off the path to crime and when will we give up the short-term reactionary knee-jerk responses—those responses that do nothing to actually lower the crime rate those responses that do nothing to bring those young people who are on that path off that path and into a productive life those responses that do absolutely nothing to reduce our crime rates and keep our communities safe? I say to this National Government that it is on notice because the last time it was in office it plunged families into poverty and everything we have seen in this urgency motion shows that its intentions have not changed that its colours have not changed and that it will do exactly the same thing again. And it will take a new Labour Government to mop up its mess again.