Urgent Debates — Police 111 System—Review

I have received a letter from the Hon Tony Ryall seeking to debate under Standing Order 373 the release of the New Zealand Police Communications Centres Service Centre independent external review. This is a particular case of recent occurrence involving ministerial responsibility, and because of the public interest in this matter I consider it does require the immediate attention of the House. I therefore call on the member to move the motion.

I move, That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance.

It was 7 months yesterday that Iraena Asher disappeared. She dialled 111 at a time when she needed the New Zealand Police, and she got a taxi. In the days that followed, New Zealanders became more and more appalled at the sad story of her disappearance. After considerable pressure by this House, New Zealand’s highest-paid public servant, the Commissioner of Police, was forced to launch an external review of the performance of the 111 system.

Today, 7 months and 1 day after the disappearance of Iraena Asher, the bombshell has arrived. The report focuses the blame, like a laser beam, on the Minister of Police, George Hawkins. This Minister has known for months and months how bad those call centres were. He stood in this House and told the Asher family, the Bentley’s, and the young woman who was sexually assaulted and told to walk to a police station, that the New Zealand Police was adequately staffed—that it had all the staff it needed.

This report says completely the opposite. This report says that the public and the police of New Zealand are at risk from a failing 111 system, which that Minister is responsible for. He stood in the House to say, and has said to all the victims of 111 calls, that the police have all the resources they need. This report says exactly the opposite. This report says everything that we on this side of the House have been saying for the last 9 months—that the police are unable to respond to emergency calls, that there is a complete lack of leadership, that there is a complete lack of faith in the system, and that the New Zealand Police and their front-line staff are at risk. This report reflects on the Minister and on the highest level of the New Zealand Police. They have let the public down. There needs to be accountability. Think of the victims of the 111 debacles. They deserve accountability, and they deserve it from George Hawkins. This Minister has known about the failings of the 111 system. He did nothing about getting the additional staff needed. It is on his hands that New Zealanders are suffering from a complete breakdown in the police 111 system.

This report says it all: that there is an inadequate service for New Zealanders, that the system can never provide an adequate service for New Zealanders, and that there is a risk of safety to the public and front-line police. It also says that urgent changes are needed to stop the erosion of public confidence in the 111 system and in the police.

What did this Minister of Police do for 7 months? Absolutely nothing. Day after day we stood in this House and said to the Minister that the victims deserve a response. What did we get? For the first weeks the response was: “Oh, this is just one exception.”; “This is now two exceptions.”; “This is only three exceptions.” Well, this bombshell says that there is no exception. This Minister has let the country down, through the most appalling neglect of his responsibilities. His job as Minister of Police is to get the resources for the police that they need. Here is what he told Parliament and said on television: “I take the rap when things start to break down.” That is what Mr Hawkins said—that he takes the rap when things start to break down. Well, this report states that things have broken down, irretrievably.

I say to the Minister of Police that he has never taken any responsibility. He has never taken any responsibility for the fact that Iraena Asher disappeared. When she needed the New Zealand Police, she dialled 111 and his service sent a taxi. When the Bentley’s were being bashed and dialled 111, and wanted their neighbours, his service let them down. When the young woman was sexually attacked in Hamilton, his service said: “Walk to the police station.” Is he going to take responsibility for any of that, or will he be like the rest of this Government and wash his hands?

In the last 24 hours this Parliament and this country have learnt that we cannot trust the Government on biosecurity, that we cannot trust the Government on immigration, and that we cannot trust a word the Prime Minister says—and this report tells New Zealanders that they cannot trust the 111 system when they need it most. This report is a huge bombshell on the Minister. For weeks he has stood in this House defending his position and saying that absolutely nothing was wrong, that the police had all the resources they needed, and that there was nothing to be worried about. But this report, delivered today, 7 months after Iraena Asher disappeared, says it all. It says that the public and front-line police are at risk because of the 111 system. It is not working. This Minister is responsible for that. This Minister has failed to deliver the staff that the police need to do the job New Zealanders expect of them.

The report details, in a very, very precise way, a huge list of failures of leadership, failures of resource, and failures of management, and it focuses responsibility for those failures like a laser beam on George Hawkins and the Labour Government. This is the Government that reappointed the Commissioner of Police for another 2 years. This is the Government that has endorsed the management of the Commissioner of Police. It has to take responsibility for what has happened. This report details accurately everything the Opposition parties have been saying for years—that this Minister has no idea what is going on in his portfolio, and, when he is told, he ignores it. When he was told that the call centres are crying out for staff, what did he do? There was no response. When he was told that New Zealanders are getting a poor service from the 111 system, he said that it was all our fault for ruining confidence in the police; it was all our fault for ruining confidence in the 111 system. Well, this report today makes it absolutely clear that that Minister of Police is absolutely incompetent. He is the worst Minister of Police this country has ever had. He has overseen a complete collapse in the New Zealand Police. Sixty-eight percent of New Zealanders do not have any faith in the New Zealand Police, because of that Minister’s leadership. There is no leadership whatsoever. He had the opportunity, 7 months ago, to do something about this but he did nothing.

It is even worse. Every month, since the month Iraena Asher disappeared, staff numbers in the call centres have dropped. We revealed that last month. Every month since Iraena Asher disappeared, staff numbers in the call centres have dropped. Does that really say to us that the Minister of Police was determined to fix the problem? Does that say to us that he is determined to do something for the Asher family, the Bentley’s, or for the many other victims of the 111 debacle? Absolutely nothing.

I make it clear to this House that the police need a fresh start, new leadership, and a Minister who knows what needs to be done to get them up and running again. The police need a Minister they can have faith and confidence in. They are not getting that with the Hon. George Hawkins, but they will get it when the National Party leads the next Government in this country. I tell members that the Minister of Police in the next National Government will not allow that sort of nonsense to happen, as it has under George Hawkins. Responsibility will fall where it should, and that is on George Hawkins, the Minister of Police under Helen Clark’s Government. Not only do we have a Prime Minister whose word we cannot trust, we now have a Minister of Police who stood up in this House and said that the police had all the staff they needed. This report today makes it absolutely clear that they do not.

The report talks about the management of the 111 centres being defunct. It states that there is evidence that police units are not making themselves available to respond to 111 calls, that basic things like answering the calls are not being dealt with properly, that radio channels are being linked when they should not be, and that there is a lack of morale and confidence within the call centres. Those things have been apparent for months, and that Minister and the Government have denied those problems all the time. We will get some huff and bluff about a few million that the Minister has decided to throw at the police, under pressure of this report. Frankly, 3 months before an election is just not good enough for George Hawkins to wake up to the problem that has been going on in the police.

We have been saying for months that the problems in the 111 system are endemic and that the public and the police of this country are rapidly losing faith in the 111 system, and the report states that is right. Yes, this report states that more staff are needed and that leadership and direction are needed, and what does this Government offer? It offers absolutely none of the essential stuff that is needed to fix the 111 system. A few million dollars is all too late. He should tell the Asher family why it took 7 months to do anything. He should tell the Bentley’s why, if the police were adequately staffed, they could not have their issue dealt with. He should tell the young woman in Hamilton who was told to walk to the police station after she had been attacked. He should tell the police that it is not right that one has to scream to get better service from the 111 system. This is what the people of New Zealand expect from the police and that Minister. It is a fundamental obligation of the Minister of Police to get the resources and to provide the service the people of New Zealand need.

This Minister told the country that he takes the rap when things start to break down. This report today states that things have broken down, and it focuses the blame, like a laser beam, on the Minister of Police, George Hawkins. It is time he went.

Oh, how short memories are! Of course, leadership is something the National Party knew nothing of when it was in power. Tony Ryall sat around the Cabinet table and voted to have 540 fewer police. He voted for the police budget to be cut. He forgets that amnesia is something he has plenty of; he remembers very, very little.

This Government has delivered. We have already provided more than 1,000 extra police. We have provided over $200 million, and today I am able to announce another $45.5 million over 4 years. That has happened as a late Budget bid, and this Government has seen to it that that money will be provided.

The commissioner has never, ever had greater resources at his disposal. He has more than 1,000 staff and, of course, this issue is something that could have been dealt with very quickly. The commissioner has the right to shift his staff, and he could have put more staff in communications centres.

The report talks about getting things right. The New Zealand Police is a great organisation—an organisation that gets most things right. The crime rate has dropped 8.2 percent over the last 12 months. The resolution rate is up. But I have to say that the issues raised by the independent review authority, such as management, training, and leadership, are issues for the Commissioner of Police.

However, it is critically important that the public has confidence in the 111 system. This Government has committed to ensure that the commissioner has additional resources to allow him to respond immediately to the issues raised by the review, in order to restore public confidence. Back in February I answered a question in the House, from Tony Ryall, by saying that if the commissioner needed more resources we would make sure he got them. I said that on 15 February and, of course, it has happened. We made sure that the police got that money.

Additional funding of $45.5 million is being committed over 4 years. That sum, requested by the commissioner, equates to the salaries of approximately 100 staff across the range of communications centre roles. The mix between managers, supervisors, support staff, and call-takers is a matter for the commissioner, and we are giving him the resource he has asked for. This Government’s clear expectation is that the commissioner will fix the problems identified. We have committed the additional resources he has requested so that he can do that urgently.

The commissioner took the appropriate action in commissioning a review. Following the case of Miss Asher, the commissioner called for a review. He said that he wanted to get things right, and I supported him on that. When he came to my office after having the draft report and said that he needed more money, I immediately went to the Minister of Finance and to Cabinet and secured the money. This Government has done what it should do, and that is absolutely true. This Government, as I have said, wants to make sure that everything is improved.

Let us look at the 111 system. It gets most things right. As with all bodies where a human element is involved, there are mistakes. We want to try to eliminate as many of those as we can. Of course, human error is difficult to deal with, but better training will help. We will make sure that people have skills, in what is a difficult job.

I also want to talk about the problems associated with the new technology. The review found that the new technology is world-class, but one immediate area of concern is the need to be able to separate communications through more radio channels. The funding we are giving will allow for four additional radio channels. That is what is recommended; that is what we are paying for; this Government is fronting up.

The report mentions the value of Automatic Vehicle Location, so that the police know where their vehicles are, and it will be very important to have a rural component of that system. We want to make sure that rural areas are identified accurately and rapidly and, of course, we say very clearly that the police in New Zealand must make sure that the service is improved.

💬 John Carter: Has it taken you 5 years to come to that conclusion, George?

Well, it took me very little time to know that the Government of which that member was a part wanted to cut police spending. Don Brash will not get up even now and say how he will fund the police. He does not know how many more police he wants. It is a matter of the National Party jumping on the police all the time. The Nats made the cuts, and the National leader makes a fool of himself when he goes to Palmerston North—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: Clem Simich was a good Minister, though.

Yes, Clem Simich was a good Minister, but I have to say that he did not get support from his mates.

If we look at the overall situation, we can see that the commissioner has already announced the establishment of a National Communications Centre Advisory Board to oversee the performance and strategic direction of the police communications centre, making it even more transparent and giving the public an overseeing role as well. I heartily agree with the commissioner’s statement that the work of the communications centre must be more closely integrated with the whole organisation, and that external stakeholders need to have a greater role in determining service delivery expectations and standards. All stakeholders have a role in educating the public on those matters.

We are going to look at the number of 111 calls that are not actual emergencies and which could more appropriately be made to a different number. When a person rings 111 to find out how to fix a television aerial, we know there is a need for far better education. Each year the police communications centre receives about 1.6 million calls. Some 466,000 are 111 calls, and more than 50 of those are assessed as priority one calls, which require—and, in the vast majority of cases, receive—an immediate police response.

Overall, the performance of the New Zealand police over the last few years has been exceptional—absolutely exceptional. There are fewer crimes and more resolutions to crime than at any time in the last 20 years. Overall, the performance of the New Zealand police has continued to improve.

💬 John Carter: Oh, rubbish!

That is absolutely right, but the National Party tries to put down the police at every turn.

💬 John Carter: Oh! No!

There is John Carter wailing and moaning. He does not support the police in the way the Government does.

There is still room for improvement, and the Government is making resources available in order to achieve that—and next Thursday there will be more. The Government has always supported the New Zealand Police, which is a far, far different situation from that of National.

National had the Martin review. What was the Martin review designed to do? It was designed to take police out of police stations and put them in the dole queue. National did not want 540 police; it was going to be absolutely shot of them. National was going to save money. Well, New Zealanders will not forget that.

Let us look at the turn-round in things such as burglary. There used to be 96,000 burglaries in New Zealand each year; now that figure is below 60,000. Police do a great job and we support them.

I think that what members opposite forget is that we are making sure that demand and delivery services are improved. We are making sure that leadership is improved. We are making sure that training and supervision are improved. We are also making sure that there are extra radio channels.

This Government’s record is a good one. There was a very quick response from this Government when the commissioner said he needed money and resources. What did we do? We got them for him, and we are producing better results because we listen to the police. We listen to their needs, and we listen to the public’s needs. We answer to the public by making their communities safer.

For the benefit of anyone who is still taking any interest in this debate, I point out that that was the Labour Government’s Minister of Police. It is hard to believe, but that was the Labour Government’s Minister of Police. He ended his speech by saying that he would listen to this and listen to that. All that the people of New Zealand are saying is: “Would you listen to the 111 calls?”. That is all that the people of New Zealand have been asking for a long time, and that Minister is not prepared to listen to the concerns over the 111 calls, or even to the speeches being made in reply to his. That is a disgraceful act. He is not willing to stay in the House and listen to some responses to what he said.

New Zealand First wholeheartedly supports the New Zealand Police. Without the police force we would not have the type of democracy we have today. Our police force is not corrupt, unlike some of the police forces nearby, as we have seen recently in relation to airport matters and drug smuggling. We have a police force that, until this term of the Labour Government, was held in the highest regard by all New Zealanders. But now, because of the inactions and the type of response we have had from this Minister, unfortunately the New Zealand police force is experiencing problems in its relationship with the public.

Who would have expected that the New Zealand police force would be subjected to a review by someone from New South Wales? When would we have ever expected a New Zealand police force to be reviewed by anybody from Australia, of all places? We know about the problems the Australians have had with their police forces. But we have had a review, conducted by the chief superintendent of the New South Wales police. We have had the Toronto police looking at us. The North Wales police have also come over here and, in this report that was put together and in which PricewaterhouseCoopers was involved as well, have told us how we should be running our police force

This is a disgraceful day for this Labour Government’s Minister of Police. We do not expect him to resign, because he not capable of taking responsibility for anything, at all. That is a measure of the quality of this Labour Government. No one takes responsibility, whether it is the Minister of Education, when education is falling apart, the Minister of Immigration, when immigration is falling apart, or, of course, the Minister of Police. Unfortunately, the police have been falling apart for a long, long time.

This is a damning report on the Minister of Police, and, I think, on the higher echelons of the police force. It is not damning of the men and women on the beat—they are being let down badly by the top echelons of the New Zealand police force.

What is New Zealand First going to do about it? Well, New Zealand First will deal with three fundamental issues in order to restore the safe society we expect in New Zealand. The first issue is the need to restore public confidence, which has been shattered by the Labour Government’s failure to have any policies, at all. The second is the need to dramatically increase police numbers to allow officers to do their duty more effectively—not just to take 111 calls, but also to get out and service them; not to have ghost 111 groups, but to have real, live ones. We have more than a ghost, as far as the Minister of Police is concerned. But he is less than a shadow of a ghost when it comes to doing anything in this House. He would feature well as a ghost in Macbeth—that is about how adequate he is for the people of New Zealand.

The third thing New Zealand First will do in relation to the prioritisation of the police force is to demerge traffic officers from the police force. These are the three things we intend to do: restore public confidence, increase police numbers, and demerge traffic officers from the police force.

It is New Zealand First’s intention to double the size of the police force over the next 5 years. I am sure that as we look at having more police in the police force, we will make extra savings by not needing the number of prisons we seem to have these days. The problem of the increase in prisons is because people are not being caught when they are young, because they are allowed to become more and more hardened criminals, and because when they finally get to court and are facing 175 charges of burglary—and that is the only time they get sent to jail—they are hardened by the time they get there. They stay in prison longer, so we need more prisons. We have to catch those people early and deal with them early. If necessary, we need to lock them up for a short time early on. The only way we can do that is by having enough police to do it with.

The only people we catch today are those who finally make a mistake after they have committed many hundreds of offences. That is the failure of the present system, and it is one that New Zealand First will resolve. I believe that as we increase the number of police we will see a reduction in the number of prisoners, and we will get to the stage where we probably will not even have to double the police force—it will be unnecessary to do that because we will have caught everybody. We will make savings in the prison service.

I have seen, in over 30 years as a lawyer, that if offenders are not caught early, they are history. They come back into the system and are locked up for 7 or 10 years. Do members know how much it costs to keep a prisoner in jail? It costs about $100,000 a year. [Interruption] Yes, that member is embarrassing. It costs about $100,000, depending upon who is being dealt with. That is an utter waste of money. It is the equivalent of a good police officer of high rank. How many prisoners do we have today? About 6,000 or 7,000 prisoners, all costing $100,000 each per year. My God! How many police could we have if we could catch those people early and make sure that we did not have to lock them up? That is the way things need to be done.

We need to better resource the police and to make sure that the 111 system works, because it is clear from this report, which is a disgraceful comment on the Minister of Police, on Mr Goff, and on the other members of the Labour Government, that our police force is falling apart. But New Zealand First is here. We will make sure that that does not happen under a New Zealand First Government.

We in this Parliament should never have come to the stage where we have to debate the police in this way. We are debating this only because of a failure of the Labour Government. That is what it boils down to. It is a failure of the higher echelons of the police. An active, appropriate, and hard-working Minister of Police would enforce his or her personality on the commissioner and make sure that the public’s requests and demands were being met.

It is an utter disgrace that the Minister of Police has said that he is not increasing the number of police in Wellington because the Commissioner of Police has not asked him to, when everyone in Wellington knows that there should be more police in the city. Both men are just not doing their jobs. If the people of Wellington and the police officers of Wellington know that there should be more police in Wellington, and if the Minister and commissioner take no notice of that, then we will have a problem in Wellington. One wonders what the Labour and United Future members for Wellington are doing about this. What pressure are they putting on the Minister to get something done? They are obviously doing nothing whatsoever, because the situation in Wellington, Auckland, and elsewhere remains unresolved. We have ended up with the New Zealand police force being subjected to review by an Australian police officer. I cannot believe that such a day has ever come.

Of course, it is not as though this report has just a couple of recommendations. It has 61 recommendations arising out of the 111 service only—based only on the 111 service. Can members imagine, if the report had looked at the entire New Zealand police force, how many recommendations there would be? Any self-respecting Minister of Police would never have let this happen. But at the same time, any self-respecting Minister of Police who allowed it to happen would go—absolutely go. But not in the Labour administration, where nobody takes any responsibility, whatsoever.

There were 61 recommendations—we needed only three. Those are the recommendations that are contained in the New Zealand First policy: bring back confidence in the police—that is what has to be done—dramatically increase police numbers, and demerge traffic officers from the police. We want the police to be catching criminals; we do not want them to be handing out traffic tickets. That is the biggest thing this Labour Government has achieved with regard to the police force—police officers are now out issuing more traffic tickets. I could be getting burgled around the corner, but the priority of the commissioner and the Minister is to issue traffic tickets. That is an absolute scandal. We want police officers to be doing the job of police officers, with everyone knowing that they are police officers. Traffic officers are a separate matter, as far as New Zealand First is concerned. They can have a different uniform and can do a traffic officer’s job.

The way that the safety service for the public is run is an absolute scandal. Police officers are being made to issue hundreds of millions of dollars worth of traffic tickets in order to earn money. The priority of police officers during a bus strike in Auckland is to catch people driving in bus lanes. I know of any number of cases in which tickets were issued during a bus strike to people driving in bus lanes. What a disgrace. What a scandal that is.

Usually when an official report is released Opposition members can be expected to get into it and to find tiny fragments, scraps, or very carefully worded criticisms that are as neutered as the authors can tolerate without losing their integrity. When I took this report from the website at 2 o’clock this afternoon, I expected it to be of mild interest; not a cover-up, but a technical document full of recommendations for management tinkering. Without any fear of hyperbole, this is an utterly devastating document. This would be the worst review of an organisation that I have seen, and I went through the 1980s when organisations were collapsing and losing billions of New Zealanders’ dollars. I saw some of those investigatory reports.

This report is a picture, not just of a communications centre in chaos, but of an organisation that has lost any sense of its purpose—where people mistrust each other, do not know what their roles are, and do not know what their leaders value. I imagine that this report has washed the dirty linen of the New Zealand Police internationally in a way that can hardly have been matched. The Toronto Police Service, the North Wales Police, and the New South Wales Police have been involved in the review and, no doubt, this would have been workshopped. There is no doubt that this version of the report is mild compared with what it started off as, because documents like this are shown in draft to the Minister.

Perhaps the most telling line of all was “historically high rates of absenteeism for sick leave”. That seems trifling, but anyone who knows anything at all about management knows that it is one of the first symptoms of an organisation that has lost its morale and its purpose. People do not feel that they need to turn up. I found it surprising that Dail Jones from New Zealand First did not cite that the panel found clear evidence that available units within districts are either not logging on or are not making themselves available for jobs. Ron Mark tried for months to raise that matter with the Minister of Police. The Minister sat smugly and said that we have the best police force in the world.

We see “a structure that needs to clarify the different responsibilities for command and control of critical incidents”. What else would the police management have seen as its highest priority? It would be to have a clear line of authority and control. A “lack of buy-in by districts can be detrimental to the progress of the Communications Centres Service Centre”—that is, the police do not rely on, understand, or want to work with the call centre. “There is a lack of understanding throughout the New Zealand Police and, disturbingly, within call centres on what the purpose and business of the Communications Centres Service Centre is. … The governance is deficient, and needs urgent attention from strategic and operational perspectives.”

Nothing good has been said in this review, except that the call centres have the very latest information technology equipment. In this report the reviewers have not managed to find a thing to balance the bad, except that the call centres have good information technology—which was probably ordered under the previous Government, anyway. [Interruption] The Minister of Justice, Phil Goff, is howling, as he usually does. He is winding himself up for his own speech, I imagine.

The report states: “The Panel is very concerned about the potential risks to the safety of the public, front-line police and CCSC staff … The Panel believes that unless New Zealand Police makes urgent changes to how the CCSC operates, further incidents will occur with the attendant risk of further erosion of public confidence …”. It is easy to wind up on things like this and to lose a sense of perspective. Sometimes in Opposition one feels like crying in frustration at the loss of the integrity and some of the values that New Zealanders once held—the simple belief in ministerial responsibility, or in responsibility of any kind.

I ask members to think how Denis Marshall, who resigned because some clod at the lowest level of the Department of Conservation failed to use bolts in the Cave Creek structure, must have felt. He resigned. He took responsibility for that matter. What do we see here? We see deaths on a routine scale.

I refer back to the Maggie Bentley story. I asked the Minister of Police repeatedly over a number of days how he justified his statement that the 111 centre’s response to Maggie Bentley’s panicked call at 6 o’clock in the morning was what the Minister called a “textbook response”. I asked him from which textbook did it come that she should be held on the phone and told—falsely—that the police were there and that they had called her neighbours. Every time after she hung up and tried to call out and talk to her neighbour, as soon as she called again, she was back on to the same call-centre operator. I asked what kind of textbook led to that kind of account, and the Minister simply abused me for casting doubt on the quality of the police.

This Minister can make a speech and then vanish. He does not even bother to stay and listen to the people who have been warning him and this Government for years—not just months—about the life and death issue that this country has been facing as the police have been corroded. It is all there in bureaucratese. Every warning that has been given and every statement that the responsibility goes right to the top is justified.

I can pick them on every page: a reluctance of sworn staff to work in the centre, the lack of selection criteria and training for staff, the short time many sworn staff spend in the Communications Centres Service Centre, the lack of a career structure for both sworn and non-sworn staff within the service centre, evidence of a blame culture, absence of positive reinforcement or a recognition programme, frustration and low morale of many senior sworn staff, and a general lack of morale. Those issues relate to the service centre. They could operate in a system at the very heart of the police only if the entire police force is infected with them.

This Minister of Police should have stood up in the House and apologised for the bluster he has thrown across the Chamber. He should have apologised to Iraena Asher’s parents, and apologised to Pete and Maggie Bentley for telling them that the police had a “textbook response” to their home invasion. He should have said that the only thing he could say in mitigation is that the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice were all in this with him, and that if he has to go, they should go, too. The police have been gutted by a culture of lying to themselves and of frustration—the revolving door justice system.

I stand here and I look at a Minister of Justice who passed a Sentencing Act that states that when a judge passes a sentence of 2 years, that means 1 year. There is only one reason for a provision like that in the Sentencing Act. It is so that the judges are obliged to be complicit in the lies of the Minister of Justice. When the Minister of Justice has the courts lying to people to cover up for this Government, where will the police be? Where will be the police’s integrity, morale, or pride in what they are doing if the Minister of Justice passes a law that obliges judges to lie every time they give a sentence of under 2 years?

The culture of this Government has created what every uniformed force fears most of all. A uniformed force, in life-threatening situations, has an esprit de corps and a morale that depends on what its members see happening at the top. It depends on confidence that they are supported, instead of having a Prime Minister whose first action in relation to the police was to accuse them of racism, at Waitara, with no evidence.

We have a police force who cannot be loyal. They were once apolitical. Any member of Parliament could walk into a police station and ask how things were going, but this Minister of Police issued an edict 2 years ago that the police were not to talk to MPs.

💬 John Carter: They still do.

Of course they do, but now they do it covertly—and what is that doing to the culture of the police? This Government has been a disaster for law and order.

The Green Party is pleased to speak in this debate, because this is a very bad situation. The report on the operation of the Communications Centres Service Centre is very damning. It is good that the Government commissioned an independent review. I congratulate it on that, and I hope it will fully implement the findings of the review, which does not pull any punches.

One of the problems—which the review panel perhaps does not deal with as much as it should—is the implication that the people in the call centres are seen as people who are at the bottom of the heap. Unfortunately, that runs throughout our society. If one looks at the treatment of call-centre staff, one sees a lot of rebellion going on in call centres in different big agencies across the country because the pay is very poor. The pay rate is basically the minimum wage—up to $14 per hour. I am not talking about the police call centres, because the report does not specify the wages rates, but it does state that at the junior level—the new entrants into the police call centres—staff are paid at comparable rates to those of staff in other call centres, so there must be very low wage rates.

The dissatisfaction, the lack of morale, the absenteeism, and the high turnover rate mentioned in the report indicate that wages are low, and that a whole lot of other things are wrong with the way the police call centres operate. There would not be a 17 percent turnover rate, as referred to in the report, if there was not dissatisfaction about that among call-centre staff. The issue is not that they are bad people; the report actually states that the staff are dedicated people. The call centres have access to good information technology. There are various suggestions for improvements to that technology, but the problems are more in the basic conditions such as, I suggest, the wages, the training, and the whole organisation of the places. The picture painted in the report is of an agency moving from crisis to crisis, with very little managerial direction or proper training, and with no real systems for looking at the errors in the system and ironing them out.

The performance of the police call centres is clearly not adequate. The target of having 90 percent of calls answered within 10 seconds is not being met, according to the review body. There did not seem to be any clear direction as to how to meet that target, and quite a lot of calls actually take ages to be answered. The report states that between 3 and 6 percent of calls are not answered within 75 seconds of being made, which is pretty disastrous for an emergency system. If someone is lying on the floor and bleeding to death or is being beaten up by somebody, or if someone’s place is being invaded, 75 seconds is a long time. If that time goes by and still nothing has happened, it causes massive upset and trauma, all around.

What happens to the calls that are not answered within 75 seconds? The Telecom system bounces them to another call centre, and that system itself is not working very well, according to the report. One of the problems that has come through, and it is not necessarily addressed in detail in this report, is that if calls are bounced all over the country and are answered by people in another location—let us say a call comes from Nelson and, after being bounced around, ends up being answered by someone from Whangarei who does not know the streets in Nelson—there is all sorts of confusion. I think that over the months there have been reports of that happening. Sure, information technology systems can improve that, and the report talks about new global positioning system mapping systems, and all the rest of those systems, which are good. We have a company, Navman New Zealand, that has a whole new system to bring details of streets all around the country up on screens at the touch of the right buttons. No doubt technology like that has the potential to improve the call centres significantly, but it is very distressing that no real performance standards are being operated in the present system.

In terms of the problem of overload of the system, I tell members that in the past there have been suggestions, which are being partially implemented bit by bit, to have an alternative line for non-urgent calls. One of the problems is that around the country the only number in people’s minds is 111 when they are in some sort of crisis. It may not be a high-grade crisis—it may not be life-threatening or really frightening—but instead a crisis able to be resolved in a few hours rather than immediately. So is quite important to have a back-up emergency system number in people’s minds. The report states that an alternative number—0800 311 311—is reserved for non-urgent reporting, and that it will come into use at some point in the future. But, clearly, there should be a whole campaign either to use that number or to fix a simpler number in people’s minds, so that when a situation is not really life-threatening but they want a response, and when they are not near a phone book or anything else, they can call the non-urgent number. That may take a bit of pressure off the 111 system. We already know that the ٭555 system for people on the roads is working quite well, so we perhaps need another system to be brought in, as well as that.

I have talked about the problem of the lack of training that comes through in the report, and about the probable underpayment of call-centre staff. I think the whole point with service centres, particularly with the police ones as they are emergency centres, is that they actually have to have surplus staff, rather than a shortage of staff. Today, that rubs a lot of management people up the wrong way. They get their bonuses and rewards by cutting staff and by cutting corners, whereas something like these centres actually has to have surplus staff. For a lot of the time there have to be people sitting around and doing nothing—which is anathema to management—so that when the peak really hits, the staff are available. Sure, that can be fine-tuned so that there is not too much of a surplus in staffing, by reassigning stuff and bouncing it to other centres, provided that is done properly. But we do need to move towards a system that has a few surplus staff.

The report states that the extra staff requirement suggested by the review panel, and in a survey done by a subsidiary body to the people making the report, is for 21 extra staff. That is not a lot of extra staff to serve the needs of the nation, in dealing with people in crisis. Mistakes cause loss of life, as we have seen in the recent Pīhā case, and such cases are only the ones that reach the top in the media. For every case that reaches the media in that way, there are generally hundreds of other cases of people who have felt real problems in terms of failing to get to a hospital in time—of their injuries getting worse, etc., because of the lack of proper standards in the emergency phone agency.

So the Green Party supports the Government in looking at the recommendations—and there are a huge number of them—in this report to improve the staff, improve the management, and improve the levels of payment for call-centre staff. Those people should be treated seriously in order to convey the attitude, which I think the public has, that they are valued. I support the idea in the report of having a public reference point, and engaging the public in the process of improving the service is important. It is quite important to have that channel there.

One of the sections in the report is quite devastating. It describes how the panel observed behaviours such as poor questioning techniques, little rapport being established with callers, little clarification to callers of why questions were being asked, long silences from call-takers during data entry, which led to callers querying whether anyone was still on the line with them, lack of consistency in what was being asked, and expressed anger and frustration, etc.

Debate interrupted.