Source: New Zealand Parliament – Hansard
ARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Thank you for the opportunity to take a call on the Parole Amendment Bill, which is a simple bill: it is to amend the Parole Act to clarify that offenders subject to an extended supervision order can reside with their programme provider in a residential setting.
It’s important for parliamentarians in this debate—and in all debates where considerations about the rights of detained people are considered—that we are really clear with what our intention is and the sort of rights balancing exercise that this Parliament is taking into account. The question here—and why we’re debating it—is what Parliament’s original policy intent was with the section 107K(3)(bb)(ii) of the Parole Act. Because New Zealand Bill of Rights Act rights are engaged here, this bill would add a balancing protection by requiring the Parole Act to constantly review the way that those rights are being weighed up by the Parole Board, but it would also remove that section which is the subject of this declaratory judgment.
The point I’m making here is that when we consider those rights—and perhaps the Minister will elaborate on this in committee stage, because it’s useful for us to do that—the two fundamental questions are not the ones that the Hon Paul Goldsmith asked about: when the Government knew and why the plan was not necessarily in place, they’re questions about how specific this Parliament needs to be when we’re making decisions like this. And the first question that we should ask ourselves as parliamentarians is: is this a punishment? Is a rehabilitative programme which is conducted in a residential setting a punishment at all? And that is an important consideration when Parliament designs this kind of legislation which gives people an ability to rehabilitate from what they have done or to continue to be treated because that is one of the goals of our justice system and it was a subject in the declaratory judgment itself.
The second question is whether this is also detention at all, because the degree of freedoms that people have in these settings is different from what the Hon Judith Collins described as putting them in jail. It is intended to be so, and these providers provide a setting where these people can enjoy lots of the freedoms that they wouldn’t be able to enjoy in a prison setting. Those are important questions for us. This Parliament today is coming together to change the way that this operates to be much clearer. This is an improvement in our law and these are the kind of decisions that we should be able to make under urgency.
