Hon SIMON POWER (Minister of Justice) Link to this
I move, That the Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill be now read a second time. This bill is another step towards the fulfilment of another election commitment from the National-led Government. I thank the Justice and Electoral Committee for its consideration of the bill and note the continued fine chairmanship of the member Chester Borrows, who has worked under considerable pressure for a lengthy period of time on matters arising from the National-led Government’s first 100 days in office. My thanks also go to the other members of that committee, from all parties, as I am conscious that a fair amount of work was referred to the committee during 2008-09.
After receiving 13 submissions and hearing seven submissions in person, I am advised, the committee has recommended that the bill be passed with amendments to clarify its intent and improve its consistency with the broader legislative framework for reparation and fines. As we know, the bill provides for a $50 levy to be imposed on all convicted offenders who are sentenced in a District Court or High Court for one or more criminal convictions. The purpose of the bill is to ensure that offenders, in a general sense, contribute towards addressing the harm that criminal behaviour causes victims. Revenue generated from the offender levy—an estimated $13.6 million over the first 4 years—will be used to fund additional entitlements and services for victims of serious crime.
The offender levy establishment costs of approximately $2.3 million in 2009-10 have been appropriated as part of Budget 2009-10. Collection costs from 2010-11 onwards will, I am pleased to advise the House, be largely covered by funding that was previously allocated to the disestablished Sentencing Council. This additional funding will also allow for new entitlements and services for victims of serious crime to begin in 2009, before collection of the levy commences. In the very near future I will be announcing more detail regarding those new entitlements and services for victims of serious crime.
One issue raised by submitters to the select committee was that of fairness. They pointed out that those who committed serious crimes would incur the same $50 levy as those who committed minor offences. I reiterate that the offender levy is not a sentence. The seriousness of an offence is reflected in the actual sentence imposed on the offender. The committee recommended a sensible amendment to the bill regarding the provision of services to victims. New section 105J, inserted by clause 7, is amended to require organisations approved under the bill to provide “services” to victims rather than “support”. The word “services” more accurately reflects the intention that approved agencies provide specific entitlements and services for victims of crime, rather than the more nebulous concept of support. I have read the concerns of Labour members that “the levy could detrimentally affect reparation payments”. They do not understand the bill. I reassure victims of crime that the offender levy will not affect the payment of reparation to victims because the levy is to be paid after any order of reparation is collected.
In addition, the bill amends the Sentencing Act 2002 so that the court, when it considers the final circumstances of an offender when awarding reparation to victims or imposing fines, must not take into account the payment of the levy. Therefore, the legislation is clear that the payment of reparation and fines is not to be affected by the levy.
The bill specifies that existing enforcement processes under the Summary Proceedings Act 1957 be utilised to collect the levy when the offender also owes fines or reparations. Where only the levy is outstanding, the bill provides for a modified enforcement process to be used to ensure cost-effectiveness. The committee has recommended amending the bill to allow for the sale proceeds of offenders’ confiscated vehicles to be used to pay outstanding levies in addition to fines and reparations. The bill also amends the definition of a fine in the Social Security Act 1964 to include the offender levy. This will allow Work and Income to disclose information—for example, addresses and telephone numbers—to the courts to enable the location of any beneficiary who is in default of the payment of the offender levy.
The Justice and Electoral Committee has also recommended amending the definition of a fine in the Tax Administration Act 1994, the Customs and Excise Act 1996, and the Immigration Act 1997. These amendments will allow those people who owe levies to be matched as part of the authorised information-matching programmes run by the Ministry of Justice, and is a welcome addition to the bill. It will be a cost-effective way of finding a person who owes a levy and who is otherwise not in contact with the court. We support the amendments.
Labour members have also expressed concern at the high administration costs of the offender levy. I consider that the cost of collecting the levy—approximately $1.3 million per annum—is a small figure compared with the estimated $13.6 million that the levy will generate after only 4 years. We must remember that this is money that victims of crime would never have otherwise received. As I said earlier, the cost will also be offset by funding that had been set aside for the Sentencing Council.
This Government has made the commitment to rebalance the criminal justice system—to shift the focus away from offenders and towards victims of crime. The offender levy, which will provide ongoing funding to improve the welfare and well-being of victims of serious crime, is an important first step in this process, but I want to make it absolutely clear that it is by no means the end of our work in this area. I commend the bill to the House.
LYNNE PILLAY (Labour) Link to this
I am very pleased to talk about Labour’s support for the bill. Labour is supporting the bill but doing so with some reservations. I know that Chester Borrows will be thinking that Lynne Pillay is going to bring up the Sentencing Council again—and, yes, I will. My colleague Charles Chauvel will also probably take a call and mention that.
But I start by acknowledging the Law Commission. A year ago, to the day, it released a very comprehensive report on compensation for crime victims. The commission, while acknowledging the role of the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC), considered a variety of ways to make compensation and made some comments on the remedy we are talking about today. Labour is not opposing this bill but we do believe that it does very little—
That is pretty rich coming from that side of the House, but we will not go there. Labour is supporting this bill, and I will tell members why. We had an open mind and supported the bill going to the Justice and Electoral Committee. Submitters to that committee were in support of the bill, and indeed many shared our view about it. I think it was the National Council of Women that agreed with the bill in principle—and I do not think that anyone in this House would oppose any form of compensation for victims—but the council raised a concern, very similar to ours, about the cost of administering the levy and the bureaucracy associated with its collection. That issue was very much a concern of the National Council of Women, and a number of other submitters also raised that, but we could not oppose the principle about enhanced support for victims of crime. We intend to monitor very closely how this legislation will work in effect. We are confident that the bill will be passed, not because it is the best remedy—we know that that is not the case—but because it provides support for victims of crime.
I acknowledge that Simon Power talked about the advantages of this bill, but what I and Labour do not want to happen is to have unrealistic expectations raised. We note that the levy will be further down the pecking order, if I can use that term, after reparation. But the concern we raised—and we talked quite a bit about it in the select committee with submitters—is whether the levy will still have some effect if we are dealing with an offender and there is limited resource, and even whilst reparation will be taken into account first. The levy will be non-negotiable and will be applied to all offenders. If we look at it quite realistically, and considering that the more serious the crime, the longer the sentence, we know therefore that it will be longer before the levy is required to be paid. Ironically, the worse the criminals’ records are for making payments, the less likely it is that they will have to pay them. I think those concerns were raised by the Law Commission in its review. I note that the commission did not see that this levy was the best way forward, mainly because of the cost.
I will just talk a little bit about the cost. The claim was that the scheme would raise about $5 million a year for victims, and then the Government was forced to scale back that prediction to $13.6 million over the first 4 years. That is a substantial scale back. Then other things are subtracted, and that is the area of concern that we had. It is to do with subtracting the costs to set up the levy and to run the scheme, which almost halves that amount for victims. We believe that probably if we were more realistic then it would have been more effective, rather than having all this bureaucracy, to give the money directly to that wonderful organisation Victim Support, which has led the way in terms of support for victims of crime. But that was not to be. The purpose of the levy is enveloped in bureaucracy.
We will see. We will be looking at how much of the $50 levy actually goes towards support for victims of crime.
It would be remiss of me if I did not talk about ACC. In this House during question time earlier this afternoon we voiced our considerable concerns about ACC. One would have to say that it seems completely—
I tell that member to stop that; this is quite relevant to this bill, thank you very much. It seems completely contradictory for the Government to pretend that this levy is about victims of crime, whereas on the other side we have victims of very serious crime being dealt with under ACC. We have seen that, through the sensitive claims unit of ACC. Probably the most compelling and heart-wrenching stories we could ever hear, whether in this House or in our communities, are about victims of crime and of sexual assault from their childhood, yet we see those people being forced to jump through more hoops. There are much higher criteria and the goalposts are being raised for them to receive the support they so much deserve. It seems very, very sad that this levy is being imposed with a very high cost of administration, yet effective counselling through ACC really does help people and it is something they can contribute to themselves when they are going through counselling. They receive a part payment from ACC, but that payment is at risk. People’s rights to that are being cut, and I see that as being very much at odds with what this bill is about. As I said, we will be watching this scheme very carefully as it goes through.
As I said before, this scheme was at the cost of the Sentencing Council. That council would have done a lot to give some real—
David GarrettYes, certainly from the peanut gallery we always have that chant about shorter sentences, do we not? Those people think we will solve all the problems in our country if we put people away longer, but we know that is not the case. The Sentencing Council would have brought about consistency of sentencing, and a common sense approach to consistency. The council was something that the Law Commission had put a lot of time, energy, and sensible advice into, and it is very sad that it did not go ahead. I think that that consistency of sentencing would have delivered a lot to victims. Indeed, when we had our inquiry into victims’ rights, many submitters—and I can see Chester Borrows nodding his head in agreement—came and spoke to us about fairness and consistency in, and understanding of, the system. So that is a loss.
In terms of this levy, I hope that it will build on a number of progressions that happened under the Labour Government, such as the Victims’ Rights Act 2002, the Sentencing Act 2002, and the campaign we launched in 2003 to trace those who owed money and to deal with the money raised by that—a considerable amount of money.
I can see that the Assistant Speaker is saying it is time to let others have a say. We are very inclusive in this Chamber, so I am happy to finish my speech now. Thank you.
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) Link to this
I am pleased to stand here as chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee and acknowledge the work of the other committee members and their good faith, especially Lynne Pillay with her frequent use of terms such as Sentencing Council during the course of the debate around the Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill. I acknowledge the goodwill with which members from across the House debated this bill, and it is also good to be part of a Government that is delivering on the promises we all made on that campaign trail. Of course, law and order was a very big factor in the last campaign. There was an expectation on behalf of the public that the new Government would deliver, and, what do you know, we have.
The thrust of this bill is assisting victims and it is certainly moving towards that at a great rate of knots. People before the select committee roundly endorsed the purpose of the bill. They had some reservations and those reservations have been articulated by previous speakers. But it is also interesting to note two different approaches in relation to this bill between National and Labour. There has been a lot of mention of the Sentencing Council, but we have to remember that that council was, in effect, a district health board introduced by the Labour Government to be put into the criminal justice system to put the responsibility of court outcomes at arm’s length from the Government. The fact is that when we get elected to this House we are charged with the job, in respect of law and order and in respect of justice, to set penalties and to give the courts a clear indication of where we want them to go. If they do not do that, then there are mechanisms to be able to do that, and there was no need for a Sentencing Council, which was going to take $5 million of hard-earned taxpayers’ money, just as some sort of posterior-covering manoeuvre on behalf of a Government that was not prepared to take responsibility for court outcomes.
Another sad fact to note, from listening to one speaker who spoke before me and to others who will follow, is that it must be a long time since they have sat in a District Court and listened to the process of sentencing and imposing fines and court costs on people who appear before the court for fairly low-level offending—those who will be paying the vast majority of offender levies under this scheme. The fact is that most people who appear before the District Court receive a fine or an order for reparation of some kind, and the vast majority of them pay it. There is an administration cost in recovering that. There is an administration cost in recovering just about anything that we impose on society at large, and we have to expect that. The fact is that this legislation will generate a vast amount of money that was not in the system and was not available to victims currently, and it will be as a result only of this piece of legislation.
I will finish off by remarking on the cost of being a victim in this country. In relation to crimes against property, for instance theft and damage, people can get their heads around it very quickly; it is the cost of recovery or reinstating that property that was damaged or stolen. But when it is a crime against a person, it is a totally different kettle of fish. There are so many costs that go hand in hand with being a victim of a crime against a person that are not currently covered within our accident compensation system, our victim support system, or our justice system. This legislation will allow those costs to be met.
I ask members to consider, for instance, the example of the mother of Michael Choy, the man killed by six young people about 8 years ago. From about 2005 those six young people were coming up for parole every year, and the family of that victim had to keep going, out of a sense of duty, a sense of need, and a sense of worth, back and back and back, to six parole hearings a year. The cost of attending was not necessarily covered by the taxpayer, but the vast majority of taxpayers believe that it should be. Under this legislation there is the ability to cover some of those costs. It could maybe cover increased counselling or supervision costs, the costs of travel, and the cost of assistance. I believe wholeheartedly that the vast majority of the New Zealand population, and thankfully the vast majority of this House, agree with National on this point, no matter what little quibbling points they may have.
JACINDA ARDERN (Labour) Link to this
I am pleased to take a call on the Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill, and to follow on from my colleague Chester Borrows. He was a very good chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee through the process of considering this bill, although I would counter the assertion that what we on this side of the House are raising today is mere quibbling. I disagree with that point, and hope to do so by expanding on a few points in my speech.
But first I go back to the Sentencing Council, but only very briefly because there are more substantive matters that this bill raises. It was the funding from the Sentencing Council that was used to set up the administrative arm of this bill, because it will have a hefty cost to administer. I disagree with the select committee chair’s view that the Sentencing Council was in any way trying to circumvent or take away what is ultimately a power of Parliament in guiding, or at least in setting the bounds of, sentencing. We have already seen some of the areas in which the Sentencing Council could have had a useful role. More recently that was through the Crimes (Provocation Repeal) Amendment Bill, which was considered by the same select committee.
All of the committee members heard from organisations, in particular from organisations like Women’s Refuge, and their concerns that the removal of provocation would impact on some of the people they deal with on a day-to-day basis. There was a view expressed that relying on self-defence did not take into account some of the intricacies or some of the details around battered woman’s syndrome, and that self-defence sometimes implies an immediacy that is not often the case when a battered wife is responding to a violent situation in her own home. They themselves acknowledged that it was something that needed greater thought. It was an area that perhaps even a Sentencing Council could have assisted with, in giving guidance around those mitigating factors when laying charges and when responding with sentences.
I think that is a worthy point to raise in the context of this bill. I would be happy to pull out the transcripts for my colleague Mr Quinn, who seems unable to recall that. It was the National Collective of Independent Women’s Refuges, I believe, that raised that particular point.
But in going back to the bill itself, I wish to restate for the benefit of members on the other side of the House, as I did in the first reading, that no one disagrees that it would be hugely beneficial to give greater support to victims in our justice system. That is not a premise with which we would disagree. The question then comes down to the policy mechanisms we use to do that. Although we are supporting this bill because we support the principle, we have grave reservations over whether it is the most effective way to achieve that goal. The Justice and Electoral Committee did its best to deal with what it was given, but at the very core of this bill there are some large flaws that were just not within the scope of the select committee to change. I will cover some of those.
Under the current sentencing regime, the Sentencing Act 2002, there is a requirement already under the court to impose a sentence of reparation unless the court is satisfied that such a sentence would result in undue hardship. There is a really important reason why that has been made explicit within the legislation. There are two factors. The first is that it does not unnecessarily raise expectations for a victim, as would a judge awarding large reparations that would obviously be unable to be paid by that particular person. The other important point about reparation is that it is direct. It is a direct payment to the victim involved in that crime from the perpetrator of that crime. But that is something this offender levy does not achieve; it is in no way direct. So I dispute with anyone who tries to claim that this is somehow creating greater accountability from an offender to a victim.
One point I would like to raise is that I see reparation as what our primary focus should be, yet the offender levy in many ways could overtake reparation. I will refer to the Law Commission’s point on this, because I think the commission articulates it best when it states: “Whatever the range of offences to which it is applied, the financial circumstances of many offenders already impact on the making, amount and payment of sentences of reparation as well as fine collection, and introducing a levy would exacerbate this. It would be possible to set the amount of the levy at such a low rate that it would not make any, or would only make a small discernible, difference to the offender’s financial situation. However, that could clearly reduce the amount of revenue that could be raised.”
The report goes on to state: “There would also be issues about whether the levy should have priority over reparation and fines or vice versa.” The Government has made the decision that reparation will come first. But judges are taking into account the ability to pay reparation; on the levy they are not. On the levy there is no discretion for a judge to make a decision as to whether someone is able to pay. So where does that leave us? In a sense, if the judge did want to take into account the ability to pay, has already told offenders they must pay $50, he or she could feasibly start discounting that from the amount he or she will award in reparation; or there might not be any reparation at all awarded, because in some offenders’ circumstances the judge will think it unlikely they would pay, in any case. So I think we have not prioritised accurately between reparation and levies, particularly given that reparation is much more direct for the victim and is much more accountable. I think that it should take priority over any of those other payments. The evidence bears this out, and the direction of the select committee discussion bears all of these points out, as well.
The select committee spent a lot of time talking about the administration cost of this scheme, and for good reason. If the ultimate aim is to put more money into the coffers of victim support, I think it is important that we try to reduce the amount of money we spend chasing the $50 from individual offenders. I have read reports that state it would take 30,000 offenders to pay the levy in order to break even in this scheme, which to me is quite significant. We have also seen calculations that say that half of the amount collected will go to administration costs. Going back to the Sentencing Act, one of the reasons a judge currently takes into account an offender’s ability to pay is to try to mitigate against that fact—to try to reduce the number of times someone is being chased who absolutely does not demonstrate the ability to pay that particular fee.
Let us reflect back. I am sure my colleagues will spend a lot more time talking about the administration cost side of things. I want to spend a little bit of time reflecting on the changes that the select committee made, because I have not heard them discussed in any great length. One of the issues the select committee discussed was whether the levy should be imposed for each offence—because some offenders will be coming forward with a whole range of offences—or whether it should be just for a single sentencing event. The select committee’s decision was that in order to reduce the chances of non-payment, which would then undermine the scheme, it would be best to award the levy only per sentencing event. Again, there is an acknowledgment here in that decision that chasing around fees that will not be paid would undermine the scheme. That is one of the points we have made clearly the whole way through.
The second issue we looked at was whether young offenders should be picked up by the scheme. The young offenders are those who originally would go through the Youth Court, but who may, due to the nature of their crime or their offending, be referred to the District Court. That amounts to about 270 young people per annum. Again, the decision was made that that would only increase an already exceptionally high administration cost for the scheme, and, therefore, the decision was made not to exclude those young people. I would be very interested to see whether we can get a breakdown of the success of payment across that group of people, as well.
The third issue we discussed in select committee was the size of the levy. As the Law Commission has already pointed out, shifting the size of the levy again might have impacted on whether it was paid at all, so we left it at the charge of $50. Finally, we looked at the sale of confiscated vehicles and made the decision that if a confiscated vehicle was sold, then the proceeds could go to pay off fines reparation and the levy. All of that discussion at select committee, from both sides of the House, demonstrates where all the concern in this debate lies: the heavy amount of emphasis on the cost of administration and the fact that accountability is removed from, what I think is, a well-functioning reparation scheme for victims. We need to do more, but I seriously question whether this bill is the answer.
SIMON BRIDGES (National—Tauranga) Link to this
It is good to take a call on the worthy Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill, which is a plank in the Government’s justice programme. I start by agreeing with something that one of the Labour members said: we have to be careful not to raise unrealistic expectations around this bill. I quite agree; we should not say, and I do not think anyone would say, that this bill is going to save the world. But, in my view, it is certainly a good practical step towards rebalancing the justice system, putting victims back closer to the centre of that system, and helping in real and practical ways with the financial and emotional costs of crime.
Crime is very expensive for victims; I will me give members a real example. The Tauranga District Court is the jury court for the Western and much of the Eastern Bay of Plenty. People have to come from as far afield as Whakatāne, Ōpōtiki, and Te Kaha for sentencing and the like following a conviction at a jury trial. They are coming a long way. People from Te Kaha are coming a good 2½ hours, maybe slightly more, so that is a 5 to 6-hour round trip. And they are not coming in a Lexus or a European car, as some might who travel that distance; as victims of crime, they are, unfortunately, more often than not from the bottom rather than the top of society. On top of having to worry about the effects of the crime, the sentencing coming up, perhaps a disputed facts hearing, and the issues that they will have to confront at that hearing, they are also worrying about the petrol costs and how they will pay to get there. This bill, as I say, is a practical step that gets around that. It will make sure that although victims will still have to worry about some things—human things that we will never be able to do away with—they will have help with their petrol costs and perhaps, after sentencing, with their counselling costs and so on. That is a very good thing, indeed.
Finally, to put a human face on this, I refer to one submission. I will not name the submitter, but it was someone who came to the Justice and Electoral Committee and gave a heartfelt submission in relation to a family member who had been killed by the act of a career criminal, a P addict on parole and on the witness protection programme. As I say, her submission was heartfelt. She had experienced a system, she said, that favoured the offender, and one that, in her view, had little regard for victims’ rights. Nothing could compensate for the death of her family member. Her loss was indescribable, and although the wounds might heal eventually, she said that the scars would run deep and would always be felt. She was in favour of this bill. In her conclusion she said she had a vision that one day victims of crime would be truly recognised and that, regardless of their assets or income, they would not be left financially disadvantaged by a crime that was forced upon them. She saw the $50 offender levy as a positive first step in achieving that vision. I respectfully agree entirely with her; I think this bill is a practical step to rebalancing the justice system and giving victims a better place in our society.
SUE MORONEY (Labour) Link to this
It is my pleasure to rise to speak to the second reading of the Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill. Labour is supporting this bill, but it is not wholehearted support because we think the bill will make a real difference. We support it because it is not really worth our while opposing. Members have already heard from my colleagues that if we felt this bill would make a real difference, there would be full, wholehearted support from members on this side of the House. But clearly there is not a lot in this bill that will support victims, unlike what Labour did when it was in Government, and I will come back to that point. In fact, I will spend much of my 10 minutes talking about the number and range of very real things that Labour did when in Government to support in a very practical sense victims and their rights.
Before I spend most of my speech reminding people about Labour’s very fine record, I say again that this bill is all for show but has no useful effect. It is like the car-crusher legislation that Parliament is also considering at the moment. That legislation will affect 10 cars a year. The offender levy of $50 will, in many instances, cost more than $50 to gather. I think that Simon Bridges is right, unfortunately, that we should not raise unrealistic expectations about the impact of this bill. He is quite right: his Government has put a bill before this House that will not have a huge impact on victims and their involvement with the justice system, but it does have a feel-good factor about it. That is what the National Government is all about, after all.
The Government will be judged on this issue. In about 2 years’ time, National will be judged on whether it has fulfilled its commitment and the impression that it gave the electorate before the last election that it would fix crime. I sincerely hope that this makes a difference to the victims of crime, because National certainly gave the impression that it would do that while in Government. National will be judged in 2 years’ time on whether it has made things better for the victims of crime, and the electorate will be quite right to judge it on that factor.
The bill is all for show and will have no useful effect, but it is not worth opposing, so we will support it. I am sure that victims of crime would rather—
Well, there is nothing in the bill. Nothing will happen as a result of it, but it is really not worth our while opposing it.
I am sure that the victims of crime would prefer to have a better response time to the crimes that they are facing while the crimes are occurring. We have heard just this week that those statistics are getting worse under this Government. Victims of crime are not having their serious crimes responded to on the same priority basis as they were responded to when Labour was in Government. Those are the factors that victims of crime will judge this Government on, and so they should. Crimes are being carried out, but the response time has gone down already under this Government. [Interruption] Phil Heatley may think that is something to be excited about, but if one is a victim of a crime and the offender is still on the premises, the victim wants a very urgent response from the police. In fact, what has been happening, I say to Mr Heatley, is that that response time has been increasing under the National Government. Mr Heatley will be judged in Whangarei on those sorts of statistics, come the next election, and so he should be.
Mr Heatley and his colleagues made a promise to the electorate at the last election that they would fix this. They promised to get better at this, but they are getting worse. Those are the sorts of things that victims of crime want fixed up. They do not want this charade of a $50 levy that is to be collected, or not, and will cost perhaps more to be collected from people who have been successfully prosecuted, and then may or may not end up alleviating the situation for victims of crime. Those are not the charades that people were asking for. What they wanted was better response times.
People wanted the police to be well resourced. At the moment the police are being completely distracted by having to find cost-cutting measures that they can offer to the Minister of Police, just so that the National Government can pay for the tax cuts that it gave to the top 3 percent of wage earners in this country. That is what our police are distracted by. I am sure that is one of the reasons why the response times to serious crimes are increasing. The police are completely distracted by looking for these cost savings.
Before I go too much further on, as I promised at the beginning of my speech, I will remind the people who are listening of what it looks like when very serious attempts are being made to address victims’ rights. These are some of the things Labour did when in Government. Labour introduced and passed the Sentencing Act in 2002, which introduced a presumption in favour of reparation and resulted in that sentence being used more frequently. I say to Mr Bridges that that is a practical result for victims. It is not the idea that victims might somehow get the results of a $50 levy, which may or may not be collected and may or may not end up being something that is a useful resource for victims, but sentencing in favour of reparations being made. That Act was passed in 2002, under Labour.
In 2002 that same Sentencing Act also recognised the potential of restorative justice processes, to make offenders more accountable to victims. Very real progress has been made. This is good, practical stuff. It has enabled the courts to take into account both financial and non-financial offers of amends made by an offender.
Labour also introduced and passed the Victims’ Rights Act in 2002—in that very same year—which extended a number of rights to victims, such as the right to information and the ability to have input into sentencing decisions through victim impact statements. We have seen the impact that has had in some very recent high-profile court cases in this country. A law that was passed in 2002 continues to be put to good use, and so it should be. These are some of the actual, real, practical impacts on victims.
The problem with the bill we are presently addressing is that this $50 levy is a feel-good factor that may never ever get near the victims who really need that support. I agree with Simon Bridges on one fact, though. Well-researched evidence suggests that low-income people suffer more frequently as victims of crime than people at the higher end of our social spectrum. There is also plenty of evidence to suggest that women are more frequently victims of crime, as well. Of course we take these issues very seriously.
Again under Labour, in 2003, the Ministry of Justice launched a campaign to trace those who owed money. It spent $385,000 on advertising an 0800 number for people to call, and the establishment of new collection centres further bolstered the collection and disbursement of reparations, which had been put in place by the Sentencing Act 2002. An amount of $9 million was allocated in the 2003 Budget for this purpose. Labour also passed the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Act in 2005, which ensured that the victims of inmates who had been awarded compensation could claim against that compensation.
These are very real examples of things that made a difference. The list goes on and on, and I am about only one-third of the way through it, but members can get the sense of the very real and practical things that Labour did when in Government that made a difference. Those things continue to make a very real difference.
I will be interested to see, in 2 years’ time, when the electorate gets to make its decision and cast its judgment on whether National has reduced crime, whether National has made life better for victims and whether these $50 levies come anywhere near any of the victims of crime who need this so much. It is a very important issue. I do not think that this bill goes anywhere near addressing the seriousness of it. It is an interesting attempt at window dressing, but it will not resolve the issue.
PAUL QUINN (National) Link to this
I was somewhat underwhelmed by the previous speaker, and sort of flabbergasted at the words that came out of her mouth. Clearly, during the deliberations on the Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill in the Justice and Electoral Committee, she was obviously completely asleep. I will read to members—
I cannot refer to the fact that the member was not on the select committee, but now that she has raised that, I will do so. So how does the member know what she was talking about? That is the very point I was trying to make, and you have just made it for me.
Carmel Sepuloni
The ASSISTANT SPEAKERI offer my deepest apologies. Let me read something for the benefit of the member, because she said this whole bill is derisory. I challenge her to come with me to visit Judy Ashton in Richmond. Judy Ashton fronted up to the select committee, and in a heartfelt, gut-wrenching submission she gave her full support to the bill. Here is a woman who, on 6 December 2006, lost her only daughter in a car accident, and the member is making a joke of it. I do not know where the previous speaker was coming from.
I will now comment briefly on Jacinda Ardern’s contribution to the debate. Although she did share with us some of the issues that were canvassed, typically she put her own colourful twist on things. I look forward to debating those and other issues during the Committee stage. Of course, one of the other things I look forward to debating is the Sentencing Council.
With those few words, to which I just add that the present net value of the levy means the funding for victims will be self-sustaining, I have much pleasure in supporting the second reading of this bill. Thank you.
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) Link to this
My colleagues on this side of the House have already set out Labour’s position on the Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill. I think each one of them has also noted that the establishment of the apparatus to create the sentencing offender levy will come at the expense of the proposal to establish the Sentencing Council. I will devote some time to that issue.
I think it is a tragedy that we are losing the Sentencing Council. If lawyers in the House thought seriously about this issue, they would admit to themselves that one of the things that the common law cannot deliver is certainty of outcome. The reason is that the common law is a judge-made system. It is a system where judges decide cases before them on the basis of the facts, and the facts are never the same, so perfect consistency cannot be achieved across the system in the way that, for example, the European magistracy strives to achieve. In that system judges essentially follow a set of rules. In our system we preserve a judicial discretion. I am all for the judicial discretion. It is the way in which judges manage to differentiate between different cases and, hopefully, try to deliver justice on each individual occasion.
But it is worth remembering that most jurisdictions that we like to stack ourselves up against—the United Kingdom, Victoria, and New South Wales spring to mind—have brought into being councils to help standardise the practice of sentencing across their jurisdictions. I could never understand the opposition to the idea of a body that issued guidelines to judges to allow them to do just that in New Zealand. There is no danger to judicial independence in the proposal that was passed into law in the last Parliament. There would be a majority of judges on our Sentencing Council, and they would not be appointed by the executive. They would be appointed, effectively, on the nomination of the heads of bench, so we were preserving the principle of judicial independence.
We were trying to create the opportunity for some sort of central research body that the judges do not have at the moment, and that they could draw on, so that they could deliver a bit of consistency in the important work that they do, rather than relying on the ad hoc guidance that they have to rely on at the moment—some sort of arcane sentencing guideline handed down by the Court of Criminal Appeal in a case that might or might not be relevant to all the facts before them, and that might not be readily accessible to the District Court judge or the JP sitting in the court at Invercargill, Waitakere, or elsewhere. That was the aim of the Sentencing Council. It was a really good idea.
I listened to Chester Borrows, and it was obvious that he had never read the Law Commission’s report on the Sentencing Council. If someone steals a car in Hamilton, that person is more likely to go to jail than someone who steals a car in any other part of New Zealand. Members opposite, in particular, need to ask themselves how as parliamentarians we can expect our fellow citizens to have respect for the rule of law if we do not take steps to deliver equality before the law and uniform justice in this country. Why on earth should it depend on where citizens live in New Zealand as to what their fate should be when they suffer a penalty from our criminal justice system? That is what we abandon by walking away from the Sentencing Council, and that is one of the major reasons why a future Labour Government will bring it right back.
My colleague Jacinda Ardern pointed out another practical deficiency with the abolition of the Sentencing Council, and it is one demonstrated by a proposal from the Minister of Justice, who is currently in the House—that is, his very wise proposal to abolish the partial defence of provocation, prompted by the first reading of a member’s bill to that effect from my friend and colleague Lianne Dalziel. The Law Commission recommended doing exactly that—abolishing the partial defence—but it also said that it is undeniable that in many people’s minds there is a difference between a cold-blooded, calculated act of mass murder on the one hand, and a crime of passion in the moment on the other hand. The fact is that without a Sentencing Council, as many of the submissions to the Justice and Electoral Committee pointed out, there is no easy way to differentiate between those two scenarios. A sentencing guideline issued by the Sentencing Council for clarity in such cases would have done the trick. That is now not a facility that we can offer to the judiciary or, more important, to citizens who find themselves before our criminal justice system. Short of some sort of clumsy amendment to sentencing law that would in itself create all sorts of uncertainties, that is now beyond this Parliament, and that cannot be a good thing.
The final point I will make on the issue of the Sentencing Council is that I heard an unfortunate interjection from a member opposite to the effect that the Sentencing Council was simply a proposal by the previous Labour Government to give some sort of superannuation scheme to the president of the Law Commission. I do not think anyone ever hears that sort of invective from members on this side of the House about figures such as Jim Bolger or Jenny Shipley. The fact is that the Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey Palmer did more to restore respect for the rule of law in this country than any other Attorney-General, or any other person holding comparable office. More than that, after he left this place he pursued a very lucrative career in the private sector, and he could have kept doing that quite happily, but, instead, he agreed to a much less lucrative offer from the Government, to return to public service. He deserves better than the sort of heckling that we heard during one of the speeches from a member opposite who, clearly, has never been appointed to any position on merit in his life.
In summary, as Sue Moroney said, this bill is not in the league of the Sentencing Act 2002, the Victims’ Rights Act 2002, the Victims Charter, or the Pay or Stay initiative, all of which were initiatives of the previous Labour-led Government that were designed to make a difference to victims of crime. This bill is window dressing, and that is proved by the fact that the Minister of Justice has made conflicting claims about the amount of money it will gather in. There was one claim that it would bring in $5 million in the first year, and there was another claim that it would bring in something like $12 million over 4 years.
It would be much better to see the Government making reparation automatic, so that when an order was made by the court a victim did not have to go through the process of suing, of taking his or her own legal action to try to get the sort of compensation that the court ordered for the victim. It would be much better to see members opposite not running down the accident compensation system, so that the vital services provided to victims by that programme were not at risk. If this Government were serious about victims’ rights, we would see more of those sorts of measures, rather than this sort of pathetic gesture politics.
KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National) Link to this
I stand to support the Sentencing (Offender Levy) Amendment Bill. This Government has been in power for the past 11 months, and law and order has been one of its top priorities. This bill is part of the response to the law and order priority of this Government. Victims have been suffering from the anguish of crime. Those sufferings include emotional and financial torment. Victims, and also families, suffer from the trauma of serious crimes such as murder, sexual violence, and grievous assault.
This bill will amend the Sentencing Act 2002. It provides that all offenders who have been convicted of an offence must pay an offender levy of $50, which will be imposed at the point of sentencing. It is intended to help victims with expenses such as travel to and from the court, which are not covered by the accident compensation scheme or by any alternative State assistance. This levy will be in addition to any other penalty imposed by the court.
I remember that during the submission period a submitter, Judy Ashton from Nelson, was very emotional because she had lost her daughter. The offender, a drug addict, was on parole and did not have a driver’s licence, but he was still driving. In her words that mother said: “I can see there is something being done for the victims.” People understand that this bill may be a small step, but it is a step in the right direction.
It should be noted that the Government will also introduce measures to improve the services that victims receive and that enhance victims’ rights. In other words, this bill is part of a bigger package. Thank you.