Crosslink column
By Richard Davis
Executive Officer
Joint Methodist Presbyterian Public Questions Committee
Responsibility
One of the most significant results in last year's general election was that of the "justice" referendum. As you will recall the overwhelming majority voted "yes" to the following question: "Should there be a reform of our justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offences?"
As has been pointed out many times, this was several questions rolled into one. Such poor drafting made it a difficult question to answer, and should have encouraged caution in interpreting the result. It is certain that some people ticked 'yes' because they agreed with helping victims, while others ticked 'no' because they don't think hard labour is the answer. Some people ticked both 'yes' and 'no' to cover both options.
A job for the churches is how to interpret this result in light of its unqualified commitment to restorative justice. Such a commitment was seen at the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1998. The Church adopted "the concept of restorative justice" and in doing so "adopted restorative justice as a mission initiative of the Church, and supports the development of programmes to educate members of the Church and society to accept and work for restorative justice." Locally, the Auckland presbytery of the Presbyterian Church declared itself a supporter of restorative justice and agreed to make this a focus of its outreach.
Restorative justice now has strong support in the Government, such as Matt Robson, Minister for Corrections. There are also some new supporters on restorative justice in Parliament, most notably in the Greens. Nandor Tanczos, Green Party Justice spokesperson, launched the Greens justice policy outside Mt Eden Prison in Auckland 17 days before the election. According to the Greens restorative justice has three characteristics:
involvement of the complainant as a key participant in the process. The focus then becomes one of healing the harm caused by the crime;
transfer of power from the State to the community, allowing space for more appropriate and creative resolution to conflict and restoring a sense of balance to the community;
offenders being made accountable for what they have done and being encouraged to take responsibility for putting things right.
Despite this support for restorative justice, I fear that the majority of people who voted 'yes' in the referendum are still believers in punitive justice. We in the Church have a huge task to make restorative justice a reality, and we cannot rely solely on some of our MPs' commitment to see this happen.
The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the Public Questions Committee.