Providing a Co-ordinated Response to Justice

United Future will:

• Establish a National Crime Team of government ministers to co-ordinate the government's approach to law and order, headed by the Minister of Justice and including the Ministers of Corrections, Police, and the Associate Ministers of Justice with responsibility for Courts and Victims' Rights.
• Introduce specialist drug courts to allow treatment options to be incorporated into sentencing, combined with the use of further sanctions for continued abuse of drugs and other re-offending.
• Establish a review of the judiciary, to consider the appointment process, accountability, workload and resources.
• Actively promote non-judicial case resolution (mediation or arbitration) for civil cases, making it a compulsory first step prior to court action.
• Develop the concept of community courts for low-level criminal cases, as recently advanced by the Law Commission, to put the victim back in control of the process, and seek to bring about mediated resolutions between offender and victim while ensuring that the need for societal condemnation of actions (the punitive element) is factored in.
• Tender prison management to both state and private providers, and ensure that prison construction costs are minimised.
• Establish an independent authority to monitor prisons and act as the forum for complaints from inmates to ensure that non-legal avenues for their resolution are exhausted before court action.
• Ensure that prison inmates undertake employment while inside at 'normal' pay rates with deductions for tax, cost of board and keep, restitution to victims, fines, and their own family.
• Ensure that prison inmates participate in educational programmes for literacy, numeracy, employment skills and character
• Ensure that prison inmates are provided with co-ordinated re-integration services upon release, including stricter supervision regimes, mandatory drug-testing and drug treatment options, mandatory community work, and access to suitable and stable accommodation, with accountability mechanisms for enforcement failures.
• Increase the resources available to ESR to ensure the speedy analysis of evidence.
• Ensure that offenders are brought before a court within 24 hours of being charged.
• Establish night courts to deal with lesser non-jury offences, to speed up the judicial process.
• Make specialist public defenders available to people of modest means
• Ensure that courts are presented with all information relevant to the case, placing more onus on the police to fully disclose all matters, and requiring the accused to give his or her version of events, neither of which are required at present.
• Introduce stronger penalties for failure to disclose all relevant evidence in civil cases.
• Increase the jurisdiction of the Disputes Tribunal from $7,500 to $15,000 as of right and from $12,000 to $25,000 by agreement of the parties.
• Provide more training for Disputes Tribunal Referees, and increase their salaries and have them placed under the review of the Remuneration Authority.
• Provide for a limited right of rehearing of a District Tribunal case to the Principal District tribunal referee under certain circumstances.
• Monitor the television viewing of prison inmates to ensure that it is non-violent and educational.
• Ensure that prison inmates participate in drug and alcohol programmes where there are identifiable criminogenic needs.
• Enforce stricter disciplinary measures against recalcitrant prison inmates through the withdrawal of privileges, or removal to a harsher unit within the prison system.
• Deny temporary leave for any inmate who is incarcerated for a violent offence unless for serious medical reasons.
• Ensure that there is sufficient capacity in our prisons due to changes in sentencing laws, by improving forecasting models.
• Ensure that the Community Probation Service is sufficiently staffed to enforce release conditions and enhance public safety.
• Ensure that there are sufficient secure places in Youth Justice facilities.
• Establish a taskforce to consider the management/treatment of people with mental illness in the criminal justice system.
• Improve co-operation between New Zealand and Australia to manage citizens that commit crime overseas, including notification at sentencing, legislative co-operation to ensure that parole and post-sentencing regimes may be enforced on repatriated nationals.
• Ensure that all residents without New Zealand citizenship who are found guilty of a violent offence are deported as soon as possible.

		Return to Policies Index

Home | News | Successes | The Team | Policies | Get Involved

United Future Contacts: 0800 UFNZHQ
Parliamentary: Bowen House, Lambton Quay, Wellington E-mail: Ph: 04 471 9410