Estimates Debate — Vote Corrections

What we have in the chair is a Minister of Corrections who is engaged in a cover-up and a whitewash. The Minister spent $1.5 million of taxpayers’ money on fake and phoney iwi consultation, and when confronted with that said yes, the money seemed to be excessive, and he would demand a report. He then had an internal report written by the Chief Executive of the Department of Corrections, and it covered nothing. It is a disgrace that Minister Paul Swain, when confronted with the allegations of misspending, went to his own department for a report. I tell members that Minister Paul Swain will be found wanting.

The great Tainui people did not accept what Minister Paul Swain found out. They did not rely on the Department of Corrections; they employed a forensic accountant. Rather than looking at the $1.5 million, they looked at just one contract, for $305,000. I have here a copy of the report on that. It shows that the Department of Corrections has been spending taxpayers’ money out of control, not on iwi consultation but to get a result. And what do we find? We find soft contracts without specified deliverables, fake time sheets, duplicate payments, and the Department of Corrections spending taxpayers’ money on iwi consultation in a corporate box. And who happened to be there? Staff of the Department of Corrections were there, on that iwi consultation.

💬 Hon Paul Swain: How many corporate boxes have you been in?

Now the Minister wants to know how many corporate boxes I have been in. Well, I can say that I have not been in any that were paid for by the Department of Corrections.

💬 John Carter: He wouldn’t know.

He would not know. Then what happened in the Chamber when the Minister was asked about that report, which has seen the co-chairman of Tainui fired because the Tainui people have standards and expect accountability? I do not know why Labour has an MP from Tainui, because she has not alerted Labour’s own Minister to this problem. The report found there had been $42,000 of duplicate payments. The trust was being paid to employ four full-time people, and the department was then paying those employees, as well. Those were the duplicate payments. The Department of Corrections said it would hold back the money because there had been duplicate payments. When the four people complained, the department paid it. The report by the forensic accountant, Dennis Parsons, states that that money should never have been paid, because it was an incorrect payment. That is what Tainui found.

I ask the Minister whether his own department alerted him to that. Either it did or it did not. Did it alert him to the double payments, to the fake time sheets, or to the corporate box? Did it alert him to the fact that his department was paying for consultants, who were on contract to do a job, to fly to Australia? Did it alert him to that? And what did the Minister say in the Chamber today? He got up and said he did not believe any of that. He said he had not read the report, but he did not believe that could be true. If I were the Minister, I would be asking for an independent report into where that money went. I would be going to the Tainui people, and saying I had heard that Rodney Hide had a report, and asking if they could maybe share a copy of it with me, so I could have my people look at it. The Minister’s chief executive has sold him a pup, and he has bought it. The chief executive has written a cover-up and engaged in a whitewash, and the Minister has done nothing about it.

There are three areas in the estimates for corrections that I would like to concentrate on: prison construction, home detention, and the integrated offender management system, and I will try to get through the lot if time allows. We are to have four new prisons: Ngāwhā, opening in 2005, Auckland Region Women’s Corrections Facility, opening in 2006, South Auckland Men’s Corrections Facility at Spring Hill, opening in 2007, and Otago Region Corrections Facility, opening in 2007. We are talking here about over half a billion dollars a year being spent on running the Department of Corrections. The total cost of the projects I have just mentioned has ballooned to $624 million. That is an abject lesson that no Government project should ever be pursued without adequate tendering—and I do not believe that has been done—without front-end cost appraisals, without true accountability, and without due respect being given to the taxpayers who are forced to pay for it. When we look at how prisons are being built and run, we see that it is nothing more than a sop to the unions and a sop to Labour Party ideology—and I will get on to that a little later.

The facts are, firstly, that the estimated costs were not set for the projects. Secondly, they were inadequately tendered, having incremental decisions made all the way through the different stages of each project. If that were done in private enterprise, the plug would have been pulled a long time ago. The shareholders in private enterprise would have complained. In this case the shareholders are the public of New Zealand, and they should complain. Thirdly, no consideration was given to viable alternatives in providing the safety and security that is rightly demanded and expected by innocent and law-abiding taxpayers. For example, why should there not be double-bunking? Why should prisoners be kept in conditions that are better than those of many of our aged citizens and some of our more at-risk families? Also, we could increase the muster capacity of our current prisons by adding extra wings, rather than necessarily having to build new, expensive facilities to house criminals. Again, why on earth did we not have private management, such as has been done in the case of Auckland Central Remand Prison, tendered out?

💬 Brian Connell: Union payback time.

That is exactly right; it is a sop to the union. When privately managed prisons run effectively, they can do so with the public interest and the public purse at heart. The Auckland Central Remand Prison saves taxpayers $27,000 per inmate per year, yet this Minister and this Government have decided to get rid of the one bright spark in our Department of Corrections. Why? Because it embarrasses the hell out of the Minister’s department, and because it upsets and embarrasses the union responsible for the State-managed prisons.

If we look at the situation regarding home detention, we find the hopeless, cost-reducing, ideological mess that is this Government’s home-detention policy, and it can be nothing else. It has not reduced reoffending, it puts the public at risk, it is difficult to monitor, it is not cost effective, and it is administered contrary to the expectations of the public and their interests in the justice system of this country. United Future does, however, congratulate the Minister on his signal that he will have a review. We look forward to its conclusions, and trust that it will not be another socialist whitewash of the existing failed policy.

💬 Brian Connell: What about the “goon squad”?

I am waiting for that with bated breath, along with everyone else.

I question the validity of the integrated offender management system, which is the greatest con job perpetrated by the Department of Corrections. We asked for the empirical basis upon which that system was being pursued as our prisoner management model. We received nothing. We asked for the benchmarks upon which its success or failure would be determined. We received nothing. We asked for information about when and how its efficacy would to be determined, rather than having a swarm of partial reviews, committee assessments, and apologetic kowtowing to technical issues about the questionable reliability of the rehabilitation quotient. We received nothing. That system is nothing more than ideology masked as common sense, and it does not do that very well, at all. In fact, it does the reverse of that. We were told that there were factors that would affect the success of the integrated offender management system, such as the personal decisions made by the offender, the ability to lead a non-offending lifestyle, and so on.

There were a couple of contributions: one that was worthy of reply, and one that was not. I want to begin with Rodney Hide’s contribution. I felt that it was a typical leadership bid, and I say to Rodney Hide that he should stop undermining Richard Prebble, and should come out and be honest and open about his leadership ambitions.

💬 Darren Hughes: Hang on! He is the leader.

I am sorry; yes, he is the leader of the ACT party. I forgot that. Members will remember that Rodney Hide was going to be a statesman. He said that he would stop doing all the muckraking, and would be a leader. He said he would talk about the vision thing, and particularly things in the future, and he would get away from corrections. He said he did not want to talk about corrections any more. That lasted about 2 months, because ACT went from 2 percent in the polls down to 1 percent. So now Rodney Hide is back to undermining the ACT spokesperson on corrections, and no one really knows whom that is at this stage. The point is that it is hardly worth even talking about the ACT contribution.

I will spend some time making a quick contribution on Marc Alexander’s points. Marc Alexander gets a bit obsessive about a couple of things, but by and large he makes a reasonable contribution in this Chamber. He said a number of things, and I just wanted to cover a couple of them. He said that there was no tendering for prison construction, and that it was all done on an incremental basis. That is true, and that started under National in 1997. That was the basis of the policy.

💬 Dr Paul Hutchison: Good government.

It is funny to hear that it is good government, because now we have Paul Hutchison, whose leader wants to build more prisons. But Paul Swain opposed a prison! National members of Parliament oppose prisons being built in their electorates but support Don Brash for wanting to build the 10 new prisons that would be needed under the new parole provisions of the National Party policy. I come back to Marc Alexander’s point, and say the incremental policy was started under National, on the basis that the then National Government decided it would not be able to give a whole pile of money to the Department of Corrections. It said the department should go away and do the site selection first, and then come back and ask for more funding. National said that after the department had done a bit of building, it could come back and ask for more funds. That is what has happened. That policy started under National, and the funding has been increased as a result of that.

Mr Alexander also talked about double-bunking. The member knows that probably about 1,000 of the 6,000 or so cells are double-bunked. But what the member does not understand is that going to prison is not like picking up a flatmate and deciding to live in Mount Victoria. One has to be very careful about who goes in with whom in a prison, as the fact is that a lot of the people in there are violent. They stand over people, and if the member thinks that simply double-bunking and putting violent people in with other violent people is the way to solve the problem of the prison population, he does not have any understanding of prisons. If he talked to a few of the corrections officers, they would tell him that double-bunking is enormously difficult. It makes prisons hard to manage, and it leads to a higher incidence of potential riots and chaos within the prison system. I invite the member, because I know he does visit prisons, to ask prison officers whether they think double-bunking is a good idea. They will tell him that one needs to be very careful.

💬 Marc Alexander: Rubbish!

It is not rubbish; it is what the corrections officers will tell the member. Of course, one of the problems is that if there is contraband—drugs or something—in a cell, double-bunking makes the problem of isolating who is at fault much more difficult. The member needs to talk to corrections officers. Here is the deal: if he goes and talks to corrections officers and comes back and tells me that they all support double-bunking, I will rethink the policy. That is a fair deal.

Then Marc Alexander asked about expansion—expanding existing sites. The problem is that we need to get consent to do that, and people like him would probably oppose it every time consent is sought. We do try to expand on existing sites where we can, like the Rimutaka Prison, but there is a limit to how much it can expand. Marc Alexander would also be told by staff that the bigger a prison is, the harder it is to manage. The National Party actually started the regional prisons policy, which was not a bad policy. It stated that if an offender went to prison and wanted to be reintegrated back into the community, he or she should go to prison somewhere close to the family and whānau. That is not a bad policy. The problem with the National Party is that every time we try to build a regional prison, it opposes it.

💬 Darren Hughes: What did Tony Ryall say?

There was the possibility of some suggestion a long time ago that there would be a prison in the Bay of Plenty. Who was the first to oppose it? Tony Ryall. Who is the strongest supporter of Don Brash’s policy of building prisons? Tony Ryall. It is a kind of voodoo economics. The National members cannot promise to build prisons on the one hand, as a result of getting rid of parole, and on the other hand oppose every prison that will be built, ever. There will have to be a prison in Nelson, and I call upon Nick Smith to say whether he supports a prison being built in Nelson. I want to know whether Nick Smith supports that. And what about Bill English? Would he support a prison being built in Southland? What about Lockwood Smith, in the case of Kaipara? Or what about building a prison on the North Shore? Paul Hutchison is another example of National’s opposition to regional prisons. There is a big prison to be built at Spring Hill, in Paul Hutchison’s electorate. Instead of that member supporting the prison, he came out and opposed it. So we can see that it is all voodoo economics, and that it will not work.

In terms of private prisons, they were a clear point of distinction between the Labour-Progressive Government and National, ACT, and United Future. We consider that keeping people in custody is a role of the State, and we are very proud of that.

Mr Alexander then asked about the integrated offender management system policy. In fact, that is such a good policy now that a lot of the prison systems in Australia are following it. I think the member should know that. He should get out more. He should get on a plane, go overseas, and look at what is happening, instead of being stuck in a narrow little isolated view in New Zealand. The Australian prison system now is modelling much of how it runs its prisons on the integrated offender management system, because the Australians consider it to be a good system. I tell that member to go out and look around the prisons before coming to the Chamber with those views.

The Government is now really keen to put three things together. Those are early intervention—making sure people do not get to prison in the first place—and, if people do get to prison, building some programmes to make sure that when they come out they do not reoffend. But the most important thing that I am putting my effort into this financial year under these estimates is reintegration—making sure that when prisoners come out of prison, they do not go back. Members may be interested to know that one in four prisoners return to prison within the first 12 months after their release. If we could reduce that to one prisoner in five in the first 12 months, we would not have to build a new prison. It is as simple as that; the maths are pretty compelling. We know it is very, very important to get the resettlement process going better, so that we can have people going back into the community and getting a job and a house, and going back to their whānau—all that sort of thing. It is very important that we do that properly. In these estimates we have been able to get some funding to do that.

We will be piloting reintegration into the community first in the Wellington region, by making sure that no one comes out of prison without a proper programme—potentially a job, somewhere to live, and some support around the person. We know that it works. It is simple; we know it works. In the past we have not done it as well as we should have, and we have acknowledged that. We have acknowledged that we need to do it better, and now the officials are working away with some of the funding that I was able to extract from the very generous Minister of Finance for reintegration. We will be piloting reintegration into the community. In the future I am sure we will see that, as it becomes successful, it will be rolled out in other areas. A number of colleagues have come to me to ask whether they could have a reintegration person who is responsible for taking that up at each prison. I am sure that will come. We need to do it for our youth offenders and our women offenders, because they are in different categories and have different needs.

We need to make sure that people who come out of prison come out with opportunity. We know that building prisons is part of the answer, but a good Labour-led Government worries about the other two things, which are early intervention—stopping people from going to prison in the first place—and then making sure that when people get out of prison, they do not go back. That is what a Labour-Progressive coalition Government does. That is the way to tackle the law and order problem in New Zealand.

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