Street Maryan: Victims of Crime Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStreet Maryan: Victims of Crime Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 April 2014. Volume:697;Page:16951. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour):I rise to speak to the Victims of Crime Reform Bill as a new entrant to the Justice and Electoral Committee having sat on that select committee only since September or so of last year. I have not had the privilege of hearing submissions on this bill and here we are now with the bill in the Committee stage. So I have had to apply myself to it and find out exactly what it was about. I would like to take a moment Mr Chair with your indulgence just to recap on that because this bill was introduced on 18 August 2011—18 August 2011. It went to the Justice and Electoral Committee and it was reported back in a not extensive time frame on 27 June 2012 taking into account of course that there was an election between those two dates. With that obvious disruption the Justice and Electoral Committee seemed to have dispensed with this bill in very efficient order.It has come back to the House on 8 April 2014. So I think members of the public could be forgiven for feeling somewhat confused as I am about whether or not this bill is of importance to the Government because of that time frame. We are now looking at nearly 2 years since the report was presented to the House. Although I applaud transparency and I would encourage the Government to be transparent on all occasions in this case I suspect that it is transparent to everybody that it has brought this piece of legislation back to the House only because we are now approaching the next election and because it would like to have this particular notch on its belt in respect of justice issues law and order issues which people will be paying special attention to during the election campaign.So having dispensed with that little bit of cynicism and the fact that the Government has been and is in fact being transparent on this occasion I would like to recap on what the bill is about. People may remember it best I think if I refer in passing to one of the most difficult trials which received a great deal of media coverage—it was the trial of the killer of Sophie Elliott. In the course of that trial the defence of Clayton Weatherston relied on a character assassination of Sophie Elliott in a way that caused her family enormous distress as victims of that crime. I cannot think of anything worse than to be a family member particularly a parent of a child who was murdered in such violent circumstances. Therefore the rights of victims of crime came to the fore again in the public consciousness.This was something that the Labour Government as my colleague Andrew Little has just alluded to did address. I want to draw attention to the Labour Party minority report in the select committee’s return report on this bill. The Labour Party minority view said that the New Zealand Parliament has dealt a number of times with the rights and interests of those who suffer as a result of criminal offending. The Victims of Offences Act 1987 and the Victims’ Rights Act of 2002 were Labour Government initiatives and both adopted a broadly similar approach to this one: incremental changes. Again I refer to the comments that Andrew Little made in respect of the fact that it may be time for more than incremental change. But I was mindful when I was reading the bill and reading the select committee’s report on it that there is a balance that needs to be—