Turei Metiria: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTurei Metiria: Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8060. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): I think Mr Bishop is wrong. It has been a very measured debate and rightly so. It is a very serious issue which we are having to deal with very quickly. I have appreciated the analysis from all sides of the House—probably bar that one—so far each of which has shed some light on both the process and the content of this legislation and why it is so important.I just want to reflect on two issues raised by the Minister of Justice Amy Adams. One was about the process. She described how a great deal of policy work goes into an issue like this and that criticising the 12 days of drafting—it sounds funny when you say it like that—does not acknowledge the amount of work that goes into policy development. I agree. When you are working on new policy and in particular complicated policy it takes a lot of time and a lot of work. The actual construction of the final legislation does not take as much time once you have got the policy settings right.The concerns from the Opposition have been that in the process of developing the policy the Government has not looked outside of its own confines to find out what the right options might be. My own colleague David Clendon offered in July to talk with the Minister about those policy settings and was refused. The Government did not want to talk with any of the Opposition members about this. I am not sure whether Labour was able to have a direct conversation about the policy as it was in operation. There is no indication from the Government that its members talked with agencies outside of Government agencies like the Law Commission the Human Rights Commission—agencies that they can trust to keep information confidential. These are major institutions in New Zealand and they are just as capable of keeping information confidential.But the point of policy development is you get new ideas about how to deal with the problem and you find as many different ideas as possible—constructive ideas of how to deal with the problem—and then you try to build the best policy out of it. That is why you talk with other people outside the confines of your own office. That is why you go and find experts from outside the parliamentary process who are less invested in the politics and the pressure of the issue and much more interested in the effect of the legislation on the community as a whole.That is why we have a select committee process. We have a select committee process because we want New Zealanders to tell us how this legislation will affect them. What are the areas of their lives that we do not know anything about that will be affected? How could we improve it if the effect is bad? What might we want to support more if the effect is good? That is the point of the democratic process of discussion and consultation.A wiser process would have been something like Ruth Dyson used to do when she was a Minister. She would call in the spokespeople on the particular issue she was dealing with as Minister. We would all go from across the political spectrum to her office to hear where the policy development was going what she was thinking about doing and what the pros and cons were. We could talk to her about that collectively so we could hear each other’s ideas and better policy was developed as a result. But early on in the process and on something as critical as this legislation that would have been a wiser course. We have had the entire year to enable proper consultation across the Parliament and with the experts outside of Parliament and none of that happened. That is why we have a bill where already there have been some issues raised.I would touch on Kelvin Davis’ example his story of a young man who is currently being detained where it is completely unclear what part of this legislation he would be covered by. Would he be a returning prisoner because he has been detained and there are some complications around his detention? Would he be a returning offender which has less oversight? How does that young man know where he fits in the legislation? Legislation that deals with the criminal law that deals with the coercive powers of the State to detain and question you should be as clear as possible for every single New Zealander particularly those who are going to be subject to that law. This is the kind of example that would be raised in the select committee. Experts would be able to have a look at how the law applies to that situation and perhaps another few to see where the gaps are in the legislation that need to be filled and provide that advice to the Parliament so we can build better law.That is why the Greens have said so strongly that we need to have at least a short period of a select committee inquiry to investigate that. We do not want to be supporting bad law that does not work bad law that is confusing bad law that captures people who should be not captured and infringes their human rights and bad law that fails to capture the people who pose a significant risk to the public safety of New Zealanders but manage to fall outside the cracks. We do not want to pass law like that. We want to pass good law. We cannot do that in a circumstance where it has been drafted hastily the policy has been developed without any consultation and there is no chance of an external review from the experts who deal with this sort of stuff every day on the ground.I would just end on Amy Adams’ own words where she said that the drafting of this policy of the law could have gone one step too far or could have been one step too low. The problem of course is that we do not know that. We do not know whether the balance has been struck because we have not got any advice or any information from anywhere but within the Minister’s own office. That is not adequate when you are in the lawmaking process. It is not what the democratic lawmaking process should be about. Thank you.