Corrections (Use of Court Cells) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Corrections (Use of Court Cells) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. This bill makes one amendment to the Corrections Act and a consequential amendment to the Resource Management Act. This bill will provide the Government with increased flexibility in its response to the growing prison population. This bill is part of a range of measures, both short term and long term, that the Government is introducing to help manage the growth of the prison population. Passing the bill before the House rises on 22 December will mean that the changes in this bill can be put in place in time to be used in the new year if necessary. I commend the bill to the House.

This started off as a pretty mundane sort of debate, with Labour supporting the Corrections (Use of Court Cells) Amendment Bill because there needs to be some flexibility in the use of court cells. But as the debate moved forward, a number of legitimate questions were raised about how this five-clause bill would be implemented. The Green members raised questions, my colleagues in Labour raised questions, and the Māori Party’s Associate Minister of Corrections himself, the Hon Dr Pita Sharples, raised questions on his own bill. We will get to that in a minute.

The Minister of Corrections did not take a call in the Committee stage, never sat in the chair, never answered any questions, and now has not taken a call in the third reading. The Associate Minister of Corrections was, presumably, not allowed to sit in the chair to have questions put to him. Rather, he bizarrely raised questions on his own bill. Nor was he, presumably, allowed to read at least his third reading speech as Associate Minister of Corrections. One has to ask why.

As I said in the Committee stage, a number of possibilities present themselves. Dr Sharples says that he and the Māori Party support the bill—presumably Mr Harawira does, wherever he is. We think so, but we do not know. But the most bizarre thing to come out of this debate is something I have not seen in my 10 years in this place, and that was an Associate Minister raising questions on, and expressing dissatisfaction or concerns about, a bill before the House. The question is: why? Either he did not raise those concerns with his Minister or his Cabinet colleagues, or he did raise them and they were completely dismissed, or he did not have his eye on the ball, or he was not shown the respect that an Associate Minister should be shown by his Cabinet colleagues and by the Minister herself. One or a multitude of those possibilities have to be true, because otherwise why would an Associate Minister of Corrections come down to the Chamber and lament, and raise concerns and risks about the implementation of a bill that he is partly responsible for? What is the answer to that? I hope we might have a call from him. Sandra Goudie is over there giving him the benefit of her vast experience and knowledge on those matters, feeding him lines. I think Dr Sharples is not a bad bloke, so I advise him not to take any advice from Sandra Goudie, at all.

Legitimate questions have been raised about this bill. There will be extraordinarily large costs dealing with the logistics of transportation, food, security for staff, and security for the community, especially in relation to transportation. As Mita Ririnui, a former Associate Minister of Corrections, pointed out, it is a 3-hour drive from Whakatāne to the nearest prison. None of those issues have been addressed, and I thought they would be addressed. This bill, in its essence, takes away the right of a community to object. We support that because we have to house these prisoners somewhere, but I would have thought that the Government, or the Associate Minister especially, would use its time in the House to at least address the basic logistical issues of implementation that we and others have raised, to give those communities a level of comfort, especially around the issue of security.

So I just express quite a bit of amazement that the Associate Minister of Corrections has presumably been treated so shabbily by his Minister and his Cabinet colleagues. I cannot see how that sort of treatment being meted out could be considered mana-enhancing according to National and the Māori Party’s coalition relationship. Maybe things are starting to fall apart on the back of the emissions trading scheme, Hone’s comments, and other things. I would have thought that the Associate Minister would at least phone Judith Collins—maybe he has. Maybe between the Committee stage and the third reading he has phoned Judith Collins and said that he has some concerns about this; maybe he asked her to at least listen to those concerns before they tick off the bill. Obviously that has not happened. That says a large amount, and it tells us and the community a lot about the management style and culture inside this Government.

This is a five-clause bill on a piece of A3 paper, bolstered hugely on a website by a regulatory impact statement that was not even included with the bill, because the bill was so rushed. As the Green member and others have pointed out—and I am sure communities will be interested in this—the so-called maximum period of time that we can house a prisoner in a court cell, according to a regulatory impact statement that is on a website but not printed with the legislation, is 96 hours. So the question then is: is it by regulation or Government fiat that those hours and those days can be increased? Maybe the Associate Minister of Corrections might be involved in these future discussions, but I would not bank on it.

I am told by reliable sources whom I trust and who work in the Department of Corrections that, as we speak, some 800 beds are available and free to house prisoners in. I believe those sources because they are in the front line. I will not name them, for obvious reasons: Judith Collins may administer the political version of the crusher. But if that is the case, the question is: why is this bill being rushed through? Why has it taken until there are 8 parliamentary days to go in the year for the Minister to ante up, throw a bill on the Table, and say that we need to do this? It could have had correct parliamentary scrutiny through a select committee.

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: They must need it before Christmas.

Well, that is interesting. That is the contradiction. Is it required before Christmas? We do not have the prison forecast on this side of the House. If 800 prison beds are indeed—and I believe my sources—available today, then why is the bill being rushed through? Why could it not have been given the parliamentary scrutiny of a select committee? It is a five-clause bill. Ms Goudie reared up and said we were being repetitive. Well, we are. We are raising legitimate concerns that are not rocket science. How will we feed people? How will we make sure prison officers are secure? How will we make sure the community is secure? How long will these folk be incarcerated in a court cell? Where will the money come from to transport them the 3 hours my colleague Mita Ririnui talked about between the Whakatane District Court and the closest prison? Where will the staff come from to do this? What will be cut out of the baseline?

I must give Georgina te Heuheu credit. Even though corrections is not her portfolio—it is Pita Sharples’ portfolio—she attempted to actually answer some of those questions. Given that it is not her portfolio, I extend some goodwill because she made as decent a fist of it as she could. She was not aided or abetted by the Minister of Corrections, and she was not aided or abetted by the Associate Minister, who sat through the whole debate.

This bill is flying through the House, and it will go through with our support, for practical reasons of security, but none of the issues raised by members across this House have been addressed. They are not political issues; they ask how we will transport people, how they will be secured, how prison officers will be looked after, and what logistical arrangements will be put in place for prison officers. They are not political issues; they are practical issues of implementation. None of those issues has really been addressed.

I will talk for a moment, in conclusion, about the nature of this debate. In the earlier speeches in the first reading debate, members got up and said a couple of things. They said it was a disgrace that we have so many people in prison. They were the same members, from the same political party—the National Party—who trumpeted the fact before the election that the then Labour Government was not locking enough people up, and that the Government had done nothing, when it had built four prisons. They were the same people who went to the country at the last election with a party manifesto that said that if they implemented every law and order policy they had, they anticipated a doubling of the prison population. Then they say that they did not know about this problem. Judith Collins says she did not know about this, even though she was planning, pre-election, for a doubling of the prison population, and even though the day she took up the warrant, the limousine, the salary, and the flat, she got a briefing to incoming Minister giving her the prison forecast, which everybody knew anyway. Most journalists knew—for the last few years, anyway—because the forecasts were made public. But she says she did not know.

Those members try to say, of course, that the Labour Government did nothing to incarcerate prisoners. Well, I invite them to go into the four prisons we built. We did not drop containers from the sky or off the boat; we built four prisons. We selectively double-bunked where we needed to, with the agreement of staff and with resources provided; we did not just cobble together a deal and bully some staff, then end up with staff taking us to court and the department being at war with itself. We did not then rush down to the House with 8 parliamentary days left this year because we did not have a plan, and then try to rush through a five-clause bill. We did have a plan. So I say to the Minister and to the National Party that it would be helpful if they answered some questions.

I rise in support of the Corrections (Use of Court Cells) Amendment Bill and I state that upfront because it would have been fairly difficult for people listening to this debate to know which bill the Opposition is debating. I will run through the list of questions that the Opposition has asked repeatedly over the last few hours: why are we doing it now, where are those prisoners going to be fed, how will they be showered, will they be safe, and is this the most suitable use of legislation to cover that issue? All of those questions have been canvassed in the last few hours.

I say to members on the other side of the House that I have a few questions of my own. Why is this necessary now? After 9 years of the previous Labour Government and all of the forecasts it was presented with, and all the warnings the Opposition gave it as early as 2005, it did not build sufficient accommodation. Those Labour members talk about how they built four prisons. We know about the cost of overruns of those four prisons. We know what a shambles that was. We have not heard why it closed prisons like Ōhura Prison. The Opposition corrections spokesperson—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: We closed it down because there was sewerage going right through the town and it was going to cost $12 million to fix it!

Well, there we go. Finally someone from the Opposition knows why it closed it down. It was going to cost $12 million to fix it. How much did it cost to build the new prisons, which did not meet the standards? That member should take a call.

In his excitement to speak in Opposition for something Labour is voting for—and another question is why it is voting for the bill—Clayton Cosgrove said that he wished there was another election coming. Well, so do we, but I cannot understand it. There is something wrong with the psyche of someone who loves to be thrashed by the amount he would be if there was another election tomorrow.

I say to members over there that there are a few questions they need to answer. Another question—and the Hon Trevor Mallard will no doubt have a crack at answering this—is why are we in this situation where there is a crisis in the accommodation for prisoners after 9 years of the previous Labour Government?

💬 Dr Rajen Prasad: You’re in Government now. What’s your plan?

I tell that member to go and look at what the plans are going forward. Dr Prasad made a very interesting point when he talked about the good work that he has done in terms of trying to put the ambulance at the top of the cliff, of identifying problems with families and looking at doing something about that. I acknowledge him for the work he did. But Dr Prasad did not say how this Government has picked up on that work and is putting more resources into it than the party he now represents did for 9 long years. His party picked up work, looked at it, and said: “It is not broken. We’re not going to fix it—we’ll support it.” I say to Dr Prasad that when he stands in the House and starts accusing us of inaction, he should know that when we were in Opposition and we did not support something, we voted against it.

For this whole debate we have heard that Labour is supporting the bill, but its members speak against it. If that is not speaking with a split tongue, then I do not know what is. I think that is probably enough from me. The points have been made. Our whip is giving me the nod, so it is presumably time for me to sit down. Thank you. We support the bill.

I have been stimulated by the member opposite, Shane Ardern, to make a speech, which I was not going to do. The Corrections (Use of Court Cells) Amendment Bill is about the use of court cells. The vast majority of that speech was about prisons, why they are open and why they are not open. I have never heard of a local member so ignorant about the reason for a prison closure in his own electorate. There were complaints from his electorate. There was complaint after complaint about the Ōhura Prison and the effect it was having on the local sewerage system, which was not working. Stuff flowed down the streets whenever the water levels of the Ōhura River came up. Complaints were made to the local member. The previous Labour Government had the choice of putting in a $12 million sewerage scheme, an extra scheme that was unnecessary, or picking up the prison and taking it to Rangipō.

I think I know why that member is complaining. We know that Ōhura Prison was known as the gentlemen’s prison. It was the prison that was out in the country. There was no perimeter fence. It was a holiday camp. It was not locked at night. I think the reason the member did not want it to shift to Rangipō was that it was just too far for him to visit his mates. It was too far for him to go and visit his gentleman mates who had been held in the gentlemen’s prison at Ōhura. It was a very low security prison. What has happened? The logical thing has happened. The buildings have been picked up and shifted across to Rangipō. That means that fewer court cells have to be used.

I am delighted to speak in the third reading debate on the Corrections (Use of Court Cells) Amendment Bill. It is a very sensible bill, and, of course, one that is supported by Opposition members. One would not think so, though, from all their rhetoric. To give members a little bit of background, 10 blocks of court cells—that is 111 cells—are currently gazetted as being part of Department of Corrections prisons. However, using the cells to house overflow prisoners is subject to section 9 of the Resource Management Act, which includes a requirement to comply with the rules of district plans. How many people would have any idea that the rules of district plans had some jurisdiction in regard to cells? I think this bill is a very sensible move to remedy that anomaly in the legislation. I commend the Minister of Corrections for bringing it before the House. I am delighted that it is done and dusted and will be enacted in due course.

The Greens will continue to oppose the Corrections (Use of Court Cells) Amendment Bill. The principle that underpins it seems to be one of passively accepting that the number of people in our prisons will continue to increase. This is deemed to be inevitable, apparently. The prison forecasts suggest that current capacity will be exhausted from June 2010, presumably even with the imposition of the very dangerous and undesirable practice of double-bunking, which has been flagged for some of our prisons. The corrections officers at the sharp end of this debate are resisting this option, as well they might, given that they will suffer the inevitable negative consequences in terms of the safety and security of both staff and inmates. Given the date of June 2010 as the crisis point, it is surprising and, I have to say, disappointing that our Labour colleagues—who have made some very strong, well-informed, and powerful statements opposing this bill—nevertheless choose to support it. There is still time for a proper process to engage decently and properly with this issue. We have, according to these documents, until June of next year to have a proper process around this matter.

The regulatory impact statement accompanying the bill notes that the option of using court cells to accommodate overflow prisoners has been used during periods of acute accommodation shortage. The word “acute” suggests something unexpected and short term. Here we have, in fact, a long-term and chronic problem that demands a long-term vision, a long-term strategy, and some decent investment in real solutions. The bill is a classic band-aid solution—or an attempt at a solution—and it does not even pretend to address the long-term chronic issues and problems that demand urgent attention.

Court cells are designed to properly house people in custody while they are appearing in court. They are designed for short stays, and as such they have never been designed or constructed to provide the level of basic facility, or to meet the minimum requirements of longer stay prisoners. My colleague Sue Kedgley, who has been supported in a number of the Labour speeches, has identified the very basic issues. How will prisoners’ meals be delivered and prepared? What toilet and bathroom facilities will be available to them? What facilities will there be to provide for family visits or other support? Where will prisoners exercise their right to physical exercise? How will prison staff be provided with adequate facilities as prescribed by their employment conditions? How will rehabilitation programmes—which are invariably highly sensitive to interruption and depend on a carefully staged, managed, and sustained engagement—be sustained or maintained?

We are asked to simply accept that administrative safeguards will be put in place to ensure that this wholly inappropriate treatment of prisoners will occur only if it is strictly necessary, and that prisoners will continue to receive their statutory entitlements. This test of strict necessity is an interesting one, and I wonder what criteria, what indicators, and what standards will be established against which this very vague and amorphous notion of strict necessity will be measured. The statutory entitlements of prisoners that are referred to in section 69 of the Corrections Act include entitlement to physical exercise, to a bed and bedding, to food and drink, to access to private visitors, to access to statutory visitors, to access to legal advisers, to receive medical treatment, to send and receive mail, and to be able to make outgoing phone calls. How will any of these statutory minimums be met in the context of a court cell?

We are assured, but by no means reassured, that the normal functioning of the courts will not be compromised. An interesting experiment could demonstrate the veracity of that assumption. Perhaps we could require the courts and the police at one or two of our larger courts to function for a few days at a time without access to the court cells—let us just assume for the moment that those cells are full of long-term prisoners—and see what effect this has on the proper functioning of the court system, which already works under considerable pressure. That fairly simple experiment would quite readily, at no cost, reveal the shortcomings of the propositions of this bill.

Some reference has been made to the likelihood of transgressing the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. We already have case law. Taunoa v Attorney-General relates to a situation where it was deemed that the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act had been contravened when a person who had been held in custody did not have a cell with sufficient standards of hygiene, where bedding and clothing fell below standards established by prison regulations, where there was inadequate monitoring of inmate mental health, and where exercise conditions were inadequate. All of these conditions are likely to apply in court cells. Clearly we now have legal precedent that there will be responses and implications from those conditions.

A rather sneaky mechanism in this bill that is being used to achieve its outcomes is an amendment to the Resource Management Act that overrides the authority of district plans. The Resource Management Act speaks of enabling people and communities to provide for their social, economic, and cultural well-being, and for their health and safety. The processes of preparing and enacting district plans demand a very high level of public engagement. An absolute requirement is placed on territorial local authorities to hear and respond to the public’s views, and incorporate their preferences into the plans. The plans themselves are very powerful and influential documents. They enable and constrain members of our communities in the use and development of natural and physical resource. It is critical to the ongoing success of the Resource Management Act regime that there is a high level of public confidence in the process of plan preparation and enactment. This very brief but pointed bill, being pushed through under considerable urgency, is a very shabby mechanism indeed that will almost certainly undermine people’s confidence in the integrity of the plan preparation and Resource Management Act processes more generally.

Over many years I have been involved in a number of issues and disputes around provisions and processes related to the Resource Management Act, and I know very well that in recognising its central and even unique ability to influence so much of our daily lives, members of the public become highly engaged—and, indeed, passionate—about the content and the application of the legislation. The initial surprise of any community that has worked long and hard to get provisions that meet their needs and ambitions in the plan will very quickly turn to cynicism with the whole process to the extent that Parliament passes a bill such as this that very neatly circumvents the work done to make district plans operational. The complete absence of any consultation on this bill, the lack of a select committee process—all of this signals to the public that this Government is willing and able to jam through legislation that will have negative social and, indeed, economic impacts, and that the Government will provide absolutely no avenue for members of the public who will be affected to participate in the decision making.

We do not actually need to surmise what the practice of putting prisoners into court cells will lead to. We have the benefit of overseas experience. There is a very interesting report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Court Administration in the UK, dated 20 August 2007, where inspectors from the inspectorate visited court cells that were being used in the context of significant prison overcrowding. The report “raises serious concerns about the use of such cells.”, which is exactly the practice that this bill is intended to facilitate. It highlights that “it is in the early days of custody that prisoners are most vulnerable:”, and that most self-inflicted deaths occur within the first days, yet none of the support systems to prevent these tragedies existed in court cells. There was a lack of any “proactive reception or healthcare screening”, “Prisoners were being held in bare cells over a weekend, with no activity, no natural light … and with no exercise facilities”, “Prisoners spent long periods travelling in cramped vans … often arriving late and having to leave early the next morning”, “Prisoners could not contact their families”—indeed, families of prisoners did not even know where their family member was—and “Shower facilities were inadequate and there was no opportunity for prisoners to change clothes, so they slept in what they were wearing.” The inspectorate highlights that this was no shortcoming of the prisons or the court staff.

This is an abysmal bill. It is a disgrace, and the Green Party opposes it in its entirety.

The basic proposal in the Corrections (Use of Court Cells) Amendment Bill is that the Department of Corrections will have access to court cells in order to house overflow prisoners from the first half of 2010, when the court cells may be needed. Once the bill has passed today, the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Corrections will fast track work specifying the cells that may be used for overflow prisoners, the circumstances in which the cells will be made available for this purpose, and how the cells will be operated. So, in many respects, we are already well down the road towards implementation while this debate proceeds. This is not unusual, of course. The Department of Corrections has been forecast to run out of baseline beds early next year, so there is an immediate issue around prisoner accommodation and public safety. We are in this situation because prisoner numbers swelled under the previous Labour Government, from about 5,000 in 1996 to 8,400 now.

Changes in New Zealand’s criminal justice policy in the past decade have been extraordinarily rapid and this rapid change is set to continue. But another facet of this increase in the prison muster is of note. From 1997 to 2007, although the number of those sentenced to prison increased by 37 percent, those remanded into custody increased by a staggering 214 percent. This bill is an attempt to do something about housing those prisoners and to do it quickly.

We know that this bill fits into the context of a range of other measures that are being taken to address prison population pressures, including approval for extended double-bunking at five prisons. However, there is some uncertainty about the ability to access the additional double-bunked capacity, which may mean there may be insufficient accommodation for prisoners from June 2010. It is estimated that a further 5,000 beds will be needed by 2018. One of the more controversial operations has been the proposal to establish a 60-bed container unit at Rimutaka Prison. This is the first such project of its kind in New Zealand, and the emphasis has been on the fact that it is cheaper and faster to construct than facilities for a new prison. We in the Māori Party are not convinced as to whether the recycled container solution is an effective solution to the overarching issue of prison numbers, but we will leave that and the double-bunking issue for another time.

Today’s debate is basically the option of last resort. The proposal is that once the regional capacity at police jails is exhausted, court cells will be used to accommodate overflow prisoners. Although there are currently 10 blocks of court cells, some 101 cells that have been gazetted as parts of prisons, the Resource Management Act prevents them from being used for the overnight accommodation of prisoners. The approval sought in this bill is to amend the Corrections Act so that the requirements of section 9 of the Resource Management Act do not apply to the detention of prisoners in court cellblocks. In effect, this means that where there is an acute shortage of prison accommodation, court cells can be used to accommodate overflow prisoners without undue delay or cost. The Māori Party is willing to give begrudging support to this bill, to basically ensure that there is short-gap inmate accommodation in place for prisons to access if there is no other facility available. The last thing we want in prisons is overcrowding, triple-bunking, or for our prisons to be under any more stress than is necessary.

But there is an important rider that we place on our support. The Associate Minister of Corrections, Dr Sharples, raised during the Committee stage the issue of safety and spoke of some break-outs from court cells in the past. He spoke from his wide experience of some 35 years of working in the prisons and courts, but he made it clear that the Māori Party is supporting this bill as a response to the crisis over prison cell shortages. We recall that more than half of the most serious prison escapes in the 2006 financial year were made from court cells. In that year, six of the 11 break-outs took place from courts throughout the country. In one of the more embarrassing cases, two remand prisoners escaped by breaking through the ceiling of their cell. In another case, an inmate was just 20 minutes into a 9-month prison sentence for burglary, when he escaped from a holding cell at Waipukurau District Court. Concern has been raised about prisoner deaths while in custody in court cells, given they are multiple occupancy. There are some real issues around public safety that may fall out of this new proposal, which I trust the Minister will give attention to.

Another key issue is the one around the emotional and physical safety of prisoners located in cells. The investigation of the circumstances surrounding the death of Liam John Ashley reported that Liam, a 17-year-old teenager, had been held in a court cell with adult prisoners for the whole of the day on which he received his fatal injuries. Action for Children and Youth Aotearoa, a coalition of non-governmental organisations and individuals interested in children’s rights, drew on this situation to petition the Law and Order Committee about the Department of Corrections. I draw the attention of the House to that recommendation, namely that the department should ensure that when prisoners under 18 years of age are moved to court cells, either the department or the police ensure that they are kept separate from adult prisoners.

There is, however, a much bigger debate that needs to be held in this House, which forms the broader context for this bill on the use of court cells for prisoner accommodation. It is the urgent need to comprehensively review the criminal justice system, and particularly the high levels of incarceration—specifically of Māori.

Many of the speakers before me have referred to the fact that the Vote Corrections budget continues to escalate as a result of prison being the priority response to offending by both the previous and current Governments. The total appropriations for the Department of Corrections have increased by $368.731 million, or 33.54 percent, since last year. The total vote is now over $1.5 billion per year. This is a substantial increase, given the context of the world’s deepest recession in at least 60 years. We are aware that Treasury projections for Vote Corrections 2020 are a massive $2 billion per year.

There are fiscal reasons why we need to review the overpopulation of our prisons. But there is a far greater moral and ethical issue about the rising trends in prison populations. In 2007 the Ombudsman, Mel Smith, carried out an investigation into issues involving the criminal justice sector. His report suggested a royal commission of inquiry should be called to undertake a comprehensive review of the criminal justice system. The overrepresentation of Māori should be an area of significant focus of any commission of inquiry. One of the reasons why the Ombudsman made the suggestion for a commission of inquiry is that it will allow an opportunity to stop and reflect on why the punitive treadmill seems to grow and pick up speed. It is hoped to find constructive ways to slow it down.

The Māori Party believes that crime prevention needs to be looked at in a different way—holistically—to try to change contextual factors as well as the outcomes. A kaupapa Māori justice strategy will be a starting point for doing things differently—doing things from a Māori values base of restoring and transforming. The idea is to have a strategy that will address practical things that whānau, hapū, iwi, marae, communities, organisations, and institutions can do to get going with the doing of creating alternatives to police, courts, and the prison system. The Māori Party supports the good work that the Associate Minister of Corrections has been doing to this end. We will, as we said earlier, give begrudging support to this legislation to use court cells as an emergency stopgap measure until the more enduring solution is available.

I begin by pointing out some of the comments that Mr Ardern made earlier. I think that the noise from his tractor has impaired his hearing in some way, because he has not really been listening during the course of the debate. One thing he continues to say, and a number of National members continue to say, along with a few other members in the House, is with regard to Labour’s track record for law and order over the last 9 years. It is one of their catchcries. They like to say what Labour did in 9 long years. Well, what we did was reduce crime. They point out, however, that there was an increase in violent crime, mostly family crime—domestic violence. I point out that Labour members on this side of the House will not apologise for an increase in reporting family violence during the 9 years that Labour was in Government; we will not apologise for that. The fact that there was an increase in reporting family violence is due, as far as we are concerned, to the fact that we did as much as we could to help women in violent situations. The fact that there was a high level of reporting says a lot about what the previous Labour Government did, and we will not apologise for that.

I point out to Mr Ardern and his colleagues that since the National Government has been in office we have seen a real increase in crime. It has been a real increase, not just a perception that a few members of the House have decided to put out there. This increase has been recorded.

I say to Mr Garrett, who never yells in the House, that for his sake I will look at the New Zealand Herald and also at a press release put out by the university that gives information on the fact there has been an increase in crime since the National Government came into power. We all know there is a correlation between poverty, unemployment, and crime. This Government has done nothing to solve the problems around unemployment and poverty. In fact, all it has done is to implement policies that do nothing to help those who are the most vulnerable, and, therefore, we are seeing an increase in crime. The reason this Government is putting this bill through, as we have pointed out on a number of occasions throughout this debate, is that it is in crisis.

Mr Cosgrove pointed out something earlier that is a little bit concerning and would be concerning to the public. Why does National need to push this bill through before Christmas? We know there is something like 800 beds available in prisons at the moment. So why is there such a push to get this bill through—all of a sudden—before we hit Christmas? What is concerning to us is that the Government has access to forecasted numbers; we do not. So is it anticipating an even steeper increase in crime over the Christmas period? Is that the reason for getting this bill through, to cope with the sheer numbers of prisoners whom it will not have the capacity to hold in the actual prisons, and who will need to be held in court cells? If so, the Government needs to take responsibility for that. Crime rises in line with poverty and unemployment, and unfortunately it looks like we will possibly see an increase in crime during what should be our festive season.

An issue that has come up over and over again in this debate concerns the security guards who are in the court cells. It has been pointed out that they are not trained prison officers; they are security guards in the courts.

Sitting suspended from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.