Goff Phil: Public Safety (Public Protection Orders) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Public Safety (Public Protection Orders) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 17 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13445. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): As my colleague Andrew Little said Labour will be supporting this bill the Public Safety (Public Protection Orders) Bill going through to the Justice and Electoral Committee. Notwithstanding the fact that it was an election promise and therefore some may be sceptical about the motivation of it I think there is a need to reflect on the fact that there is a small group of people in the community who are very likely to reoffend.One of the hardest things that I found in 6 years as Minister of Justice was dealing with people who had committed crimes and who were often of low intellectual ability. They were most frequently paedophiles. They behaved in a way that would be totally irrational to all of us in this House. They were compulsive in their behaviour and I worried a lot about some of those individuals. I can still think of the names of some of them—that were released publicly. Lloyd McIntosh was one of them. He was responsible for sexual violation of a baby. It is not normal behaviour. He had low intellectual ability. He had served his time and we could not do anything with him. It was that particular case that led me to think very seriously about what we do in that minority of cases where people who have served their time and would normally be released to the community are not actually safe to have in the community.We did a range of different things all of which were effective to deal with most of the cases that we confronted. One thing we did was make greater use of preventive detention rather than sentencing somebody after they had effectively already served their time. As you are aware when you are sentenced to preventive detention usually for a serious sexual or violent offence you can be detained indefinitely. You are released only when the professionals consider that you are safe to be released and once you are released you can be recalled at any time that you show high-risk factors indicating that you are likely to reoffend. So we extended the use of preventive detention so that we could deal with that category of people—who in some senses werebarely culpable because of low intellectual ability and compulsive behaviour—and keep the community safe from them.In the case of people who are sentenced to life imprisonment—which is for a restricted number of offences of course such as murder—again when you release people you have the capability to recall them if they look to be at risk of reoffending. But that does not cover the sorts of people whom we were concerned about. Normally when somebody has served their sentence right to the end you can keep them on parole for 6 months past the period of their determinate sentence but again some of these people clearly were not safe to be in the community.There is the Intellectual Disability (Compulsory Care and Rehabilitation) Act and that gives the authorities the power to detain people for up to 3 years. But I accept that notwithstanding the range of things that we put in place there is still a number of people—said in the regulatory impact statement to be between five and 12 over a 10-year period—who fall through the cracks and are not even adequately dealt with through the system of extended supervision which can last for 10 years which was perhaps the most effective measure that I introduced to try to deal with people who were very high-risk reoffenders and reoffenders in terms of serious offences that had dramatically bad impacts on their victims.I accept that this bill is not about punishment; it is actually about protecting the community. Protection of the community in this small number of cases is a valid consideration against which to balance the longstanding principle of justice that you do the crime you serve the time and when you have served the time you are released and you are a free person. What we are actually proposing in this bill is that when people have served their time they will actually keep on serving time indefinitely. That is a significant step to take.Most countries have indeterminate sentences such as preventive detention. That meets the criteria of the United Nations Human Rights Committee. It meets the criteria followed by the European Union’s human rights court. But the concept of detaining people after they have served the sentence imposed on them by the court is pretty unusual. We can be pretty certain that it will breach the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. We can be pretty certain that it breaches the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. You do not lightly take action and legislate in this way when you know in advance that you are going to be in breach of significant pieces of legislation and international obligations.When I have looked at what is done internationally actually there is not that much that goes this far. In some of the Australian states people can continue to be kept in prison mainly for crimes of sexual offending and often sexual offending against children. In England and Scotland there is a form of close supervision for sexual and violent offenders but that is in the community. In the United States there is a form of civil detention. So we are taking a very significant step here which is why the select committee will be obligated to look very closely at what this bill actually means. I accept that there are safeguards put into this legislation quite appropriately. There will be regular reviews of detention by a review panel and by the High Court there will be an independent inspector there will be ombudsmen’s visits and there will be annual reporting to Parliament. But notwithstanding all of those things this is a pretty dramatic step to take.The objective as set out in the regulatory impact statement is to deal with people who present “a very high risk of imminent and serious sexual or violent re-offending”. What does that mean? Well “very high risk” means that offending is considered to be extremely likely. The judgment will be made by professionals such as psychologists who have worked with the individuals over a significant period of time. “Serious”means that if you put this small group of people out into the community you are putting individuals at risk of really serious physical and psychological harm—people who are innocent victims. You do not really want to have those people victimised when you take the step of waiting for an offender almost inevitably to offend and then put them away. The damage has been done. “Imminent” is also an important word. It means that offending is expected to occur when the offender is provided with a suitable opportunity and the offender would immediately inflict serious harm on a vulnerable victim. When you consider those criteria when you consider that the people whom you are dealing with are a real problem to the community there needs to be a way to protect the community from those individuals.I have talked about international practice and looking at the regulatory impact statement it is difficult to find a lot of precedent for what is being proposed to the House so I think the select committee if it decides to proceed with this legislation will need to ensure that the safeguards are very clear and are very reliable. The final thing is in terms of human rights. I want to come back to that. The regulatory impact statement does make it clear that this bill will breach human rights legislation in this country and internationally in a number of different ways. The challenge that we will face in examining this legislation—first of all the select committee examining it and then us in the House—is to ensure that any action that we are taking can be justified on the basis of an intense risk from a very small number of people. And on that basis the select committee and the House may subsequently find that this legislation does need to be put into place.