Labour’s Ginny Andersen is defending her party’s decision to oppose a new provision that would encourage offenders to pay compensation to victims of robberies and ram raids.
New sentencing rules that will come into force by August offer offenders the opportunity to have their prison term reduced if they compensate victims for their financial loss.
The Labour Party was critical of this provision at the time the Bill was being debated in Parliament. It said this will enable offenders with money to buy their way out, while ostensibly putting at a disadvantage those who don’t have money but are genuinely sorry.
In an interview with The Indian Weekender, we asked Andersen why the Labour Party preferred to prioritise an offender’s feelings of remorse over tangible justice for the victims.
“(Previously) National brought in something where money from the offender was paid to the victim. It cost more to administer that project than was ever paid to victims,” she said.
“So what it proved was, it was very difficult to extract that money. And it cost the taxpayer more money to administer than was ever paid to victims,” she said.
But that wasn’t the line the party took in its critique of the sentencing reforms bill the Parliament cleared last month. Among other things, the bill bars repeat offenders from claiming leniency because they are sorry.
However, in cases where an offender is willing to demonstrate remorse by paying compensation, additional leniency could be granted. That didn’t go down well with Labour.
The party said: “The result is that if a person has the financial means to give a show of apparent (but in fact feigned) remorse by offering money compensation for their wrongdoing then this will be taken into account and their sentence reduced.
“However, if a person genuinely regrets their wrongdoing and is prepared to engage with the victim appropriately to express this but cannot pay compensation – that cannot be taken into account in respect of subsequent offending.”
The question then is – why did the Labour Party take a seemingly moral objection to the provision, and not one based on evidence questioning the viability of paying compensation.
“Well, the point I was trying to make before is if you're looking at (it) from the victim's point of view, the victim wants the repayment. So we want a system where the victim gets the repayment, gets the support.
“And when we were in government, we doubled the amount of money for victims assistance. And we doubled, tripled the money for victim support,” she said.
In its written opposition to the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill, the Labour Party mentions the word ‘offenders’ nearly four times more often than ‘victims’. The focus seems to be more on protecting the rights and sensitivities of offenders, and victims seem to barely register in the narrative.
Andersen points to her party’s loss in the 2023 elections to say Labour’s position on policing and justice is often misunderstood.
“Let me be clear. The one thing I think we could have done better [during the elections] is communicating that as Labour, we believe there should be consequences for crime,” she says.
“If someone commits a crime against another New Zealander, they need to be punished. And we need a criminal justice system that enables that to happen. And judges who are independent make those decisions, and we support someone serving a prison sentence if they've broken the law.”