Financial Review Debate — Department of Corrections

The Law and Order Committee completed its financial review of the Department of Corrections in recent days. Many of the issues that have been raised in recent months were, of course, omitted from that financial review, which covered the period until June 2005. However, two or three very serious issues were canvassed during the financial review of the Department of Corrections, the most significant of which is the considerable overspend on the regional prisons building programme—so much so that the scale of that overspend and of the mismanagement of funds in relation to that overspend is still unclear.

In October 2002 the then chief executive of the department told the then members of the Law and Order Committee that the approximate cost of building those prisons would be $400 million. We discovered, after Budget 2005, and after a further $140 million was requested by the Minister of Corrections in order to deal with the overspend, that in fact the prison building project had had an overrun of $490 million—almost double the original amount budgeted by the department. Only one person in this Chamber can be feeling the pain of that overspend more than the Minister of Corrections. That person is the Minister of Finance, who has to continue to find a way to fund the mismanagement of this department.

I think, though, that the most astonishing fact about the capital overspend is that under questioning in Parliament, the Minister of Corrections, the Hon Damien O’Connor, assured Parliament in the first instance that the collaborative working arrangements had been signed off at $890 million. He then had to return to the House and state that that was not the case—that the arrangements had not been signed off. I would welcome his taking the opportunity tonight to confirm once and for all that they have finally been signed off and that $890 million, most unequivocally, is the final sum that will be spent on those four prisons. The Minister has an opportunity to do that tonight. I hope he takes it, because the public will be waiting for confirmation that this department finally has its act together and can sign those matters off.

I have no doubt that my New Zealand First colleague Ron Mark will talk about rehabilitation programmes this evening, and well he should. The Department of Corrections rehabilitation programmes are failing dismally, not only in terms of those who take some of the courses being more likely to reoffend than those who do not, but also, more particularly, in terms of the uptake of the courses, which is far less than satisfactory. The uptake is well away from the numbers the Ombudsman in his report in December 2005 described in gentle terms as being—to paraphrase—hopeless. I think it would be worthwhile for the Minister to assure the House tonight that for the considerable sums of money being spent on those rehabilitation programmes we are seeing those programmes filled, and more particularly seeing programmes whose outcomes ensure that the rehabilitation needs of our prisoners are met.

This department is in a shambles. That is the only word to describe it. The issues I have mentioned are only two or three of the matters that were dealt with in the financial review. The public will be aware that since June 2005 many more issues have been raised about the incompetent way this department is managed and the difficult situation in which it is continually put by the appallingly inaccurate statistics on prison forecasts provided to it by the Ministry of Justice—numbers that continue to be wrong every time the Ministry of Justice provides them. That is one area in which I have sympathy with the Department of Corrections. I will not sit here tonight and let the Minister say that the prison building overspend is due to materials and labour market shortages, when of the $140 million recently requested, $57 million was for omissions by the department—a fact that had to be dragged out of the chief financial officer in the committee hearings, when the summary of proceedings handed to the committee members made no mention of that fact at all. I did not think that was even close to being straight with the committee about where the shortfall of funds had emerged from. I look forward to the Minister’s responses.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to the financial review of the Department of Corrections. What an interesting time the Law and Order Committee had! This debate, I have to put on the record, does the work of that committee no justice whatsoever. We have 4 hours to debate the financial reviews of every Government department. Days and days, weeks, and months of work by committees all come down to a 5-minute speech. That is pretty pathetic, given that we tout ourselves as an institution that promotes transparency.

In the very little time we have, let us hit on the one issue New Zealand First raised. Why did we raise this issue of the rehabilitation programmes and their effectiveness? My antennae went up in 2003-04 in response to a glaring omission in the department’s annual report. No rehabilitation quotient was mentioned in the report, at all. Come the next year, what did we naturally go looking for? We looked for a rehabilitation quotient. We found what we had known all along, what we have known for about the 10 years during which I have been in Parliament, and what we have heard from countless corrections officers and from people who work in the field trying to turn people round—like Dr Pita Sharples, who has done so for years—that the programmes run by the Department of Corrections do not work. We found that for 13 of the 20 programmes being run, at the end of 12 months participants who took part in and actually completed the programme—and that is another story—were more likely to reoffend and more likely to be re-imprisoned than if they had never ever done the course at all. That was the revelation New Zealand First put on the table. It was astounding, and actually a breath of fresh air, to hear the Chief Executive of the Department of Corrections, Mr Barry Matthews, say that that was true.

It is interesting that since we raised that in the select committee, discussed it, and pointed to the figures, two of those—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich): I am sorry to interrupt the member, but the time for this debate has ended.

Report noted.

Clauses 1 to 8, and schedule agreed to.

Bill reported without amendment.

Report adopted.