Children, Young Persons and Their Families
(Youth Courts Jurisdiction and Orders) Amendment Bill
Hon Dr Pita Sharples
Wednesday 24 February 2010

Last night I received an email about young people. Not an unusual occurrence by any means, as we frequently receive comment about young people and in particular an association with criminal activity, or youth unemployment.

Except this email was different. The writer felt sufficiently enthusiastic about our young people to take to her computer at 11pm to tell us about the excitement she was witnessing at home amongst the iwi of Whakatohea.

She described the ten projects that Whakatohea have going under Community Max which have employed some forty young people in their rohe. The rangatahi are involved in upgrading marae, developing community gardens maara kai; clearing tracks on maunga; restoring old pa sites, restoring whenua and planting native trees and plants.

I want to quote from that email, to share the optimism that she feels for our youth:

“To see the mana and confidence these young people show, they feel wanted and appreciated, they are contributing to our communities, they take on any training they need to help them to better their future. These are young people who believe they are useless, no-one cares.

I am so proud of them all more so that our whanau were able to employ them to make our marae and whenua a place to be proud of. This is the beginning of whanau ora”.

Mr Speaker, I chose to bring these comments to the debate as it is rare for our discussions in this House to make such an explicit link between young people and pride, confidence and mana. All too often, as indeed in this Bill, we focus on the problems of youth.

In this Bill, the intention is unambiguous - it proposes tools to deal with the 1000 or so serious offenders aged between 12 and 16 years. The young people at the focus of this Bill are mainly repeat offenders, 80% of them are male; just over half of them are Maori (and the majority have left school or are near to leaving school.

And so around these chambers we debate with range a menu of initiatives, including ‘supervision with residence’ orders; treatment foster homes; lowering the jurisdiction of Youth Court to include 12-13 year olds; Military-style activity camp programmes; electronic monitoring and the like

The contribution I would like to make to the debate is to encourage us to take a broader perspective, around these 1000 young people.

We need perspectives which provide us with an optimistic view; that remind us of the potential of all our young people; to plan proactively for our future.

I was pleased that the Select Committee recommended amendments which specified, as for example, in the issue around placing child offenders in residences, that the Chief Executive must consider “all reasonably practicable, less restrictive alternatives”.

But the general thrust of the Bill remains to focus on a wide range of sentencing orders to be made for dealing with offenders.

And in doing so it appears to ignore some of the strongest opposition from key submitters to the Bill.

Judge Andrew Becroft, the Principal Youth Court Judge, described the proposal to include 12-13 year olds within the youth justice system as constituting the most fundamental change to the system since its inception in 1989.

Kim Workman, from the Rethinking Crime and Punishment Project, encouraged Parliament to remember that the 1989 Child, Young Persons and their Families Act has worked well and that any amendments should not detract from its focus on treatment, rehabilitation and restoration.

Dr Cindy Kiro, the former Children’s Commission promoted the need to heed the research conclusions that the most effective responses are those that include a child or young person’s family and wider community.

A view that was strongly supported by Jono Campbell, the Manager of Te Ora Hou in Otautahi. Jono, as the Manager of an Urban Maori Youth organisation, described this bill as being counter-productive to building strong communities, noting that it alienates whanau and community and collective responsibility and will be particularly harmful for Maori.

Mr Speaker, the youth justice area, as the House will be aware, is one of the most well researched policy areas of debate.

Dr Gabrielle Maxwell, from the Institute of Policy Studies here in Wellington, concludes from her analysis of the research that if you are going to make a difference in the lives of young people who have been abused or traumatised it is necessary to provide them with close and sustained supportive, pro-social relationships.

She also suggests that they will need education and skills to enable them to find a meaningful role in the community and they will require help in dealing with any addiction problems.

What we know is that prison, youth institutions or boot camps are not a conducive environment for habilitation/rehabilitation and restoration. It all depends on the quality of leadership that embraces our young people, the connection that offenders can make to positively engage in change.

Getting tough approaches don’t work. Our young people need to be exposed to opportunities to learn new behaviour and values, to teach new skills in active ways.

And although it may be heresy to some, the leadership to inspire change can in itself come from ex-offenders who are committed to working with young people to reduce offending and reoffending. Examples of this include the Delancy Street Foundation in America, the Salisbury Street Habilitation Centre in Christchurch and Moana House in Dunedin, all founded by ex-criminals.

And yet Government and officials all too often cannot accept that offenders have anything constructive to contribute to preventing offending behaviour, preferring to see them as recipients of services and not people who have something to offer.

I want to go back to the recommendation from Dr Maxwell to focus on close and sustained supportive, pro-social relationships as the key element of change.

And I want to refer to that broader context of the situation for youth in Aotearoa. One of my key concerns for our young people is lingering effects of the recession in relation to employment.

In particular, for the 15-19 year old age group, Māori unemployment is approximately 1.5 times the non-Māori rate. For Māori youth, there is a twofold effect: the effect of being young coupled with the fact that Māori unemployment is consistently higher than non-Māori.

How do we support these young people, to continue to promote a situation of hopefulness; to focus on their future? We do that by reminding them of their connection to us; that our collective aspirations include them; that they are worthy of work; that they are people we care about.

During the Select Committee process Manu Caddie from Te Ora Hou Aotearoa told the Committee that the Bill is focused on the individual, and not enough on whanau/community. It was the advice of Manu, that funding the very worst offenders might be better spent on strengthening communities to support young people rather than ordering individuals to be mentored or counselled.

Our focus should be on further investigating those interventions and programmes that are whanau and family-based, that are effective based on evidence, and represent value for money.

The 1989 Act stimulated the social sector to consider the centrality and importance of the whanau to the care and protection of tamariki/rangatahi, and to youth justice.

This Bill, in focusing on individual strategies for individual youth, undermines the very intent of the over-riding legislation such as greater whanau involvement in decision-making, and including hapu/iwi in the plans and policies.

The Maori Party is very clear in our commitment to whanau ora.

We want to support communities to develop and implement their own solutions. As part of this, we require government agencies to work with whanau on issues affecting them.

We are tired of servicing the symptoms. We want whanau to be part of the direction forward, and it is because of this, that we are unable to support this Bill at its third reading.

© Scoop Media