Annual Review Debate — Justice Sector

Before I call the member, I will just remind members that the Business Committee has given permission for the chairs of select committees to lead each debate on the basis that they are recapping evidence that came before the committees that they have taken over time, as opposed to future projection, in their speeches.

With those words echoing in my ears, thank you, Mr Chairman. There are many divisions across this House over a number of issues. There are some things that we all agree on, however, and one is that we want New Zealanders to feel safe in their communities and to feel safe in their homes together with their families. Sadly, for some people this is not the reality of their lives. Family violence in this country is far too high. The Minister of Justice, the Hon Amy Adams, has made tackling family violence a priority for her in her time as justice Minister. Also, the other issue in the justice sector that has been under review is around reducing reoffending within New Zealand prisons and the number of people who go to prison. I am going to briefly touch on both of those things.

In terms of family violence, early last year the Ministerial Group on Family Violence and Sexual Violence commissioned a stocktake of family and sexual violence services across all Government agencies. We should note that the Government spends around $1.4 billion each year responding to family and sexual violence issues. That is a large amount of money to spend on a number of very important programmes. The stocktake found that although a whole lot of good work was being done there is certainly room for improvement, and the figures, of course, underline that. There is duplication of some services, there is fragmentation of other services, and all these things were noted. So a new family violence work programme has been under development and is developing a whole-of-Government strategy to tackle these issues and provide better services and better results for victims of family violence.

So I will just run through a number of the initiatives that have been undertaken in the past financial year and are ongoing. A Chief Victims Advisor has been appointed to provide independent advice to the Government—that is, an independent voice to Government on family violence. There has been a $3.6 million contract for a National Home Safety Service and that was awarded to the National Collective of Independent Women’s Refuges. That is being rolled out across New Zealand and that will now assist up to a thousand victims a year with better security so that they can remain in their homes and they can feel safe with a much lower risk of serious physical harm or violence.

There is now new regulation to give judges better access to more information about perpetrators’ family violence history so they have the best information possible when they are making decisions. We are trialling ways where we can speed up family violence cases that are progressing through the courts. That is happening in two pilot locations. Why? Because Family Court issues need to be resolved quickly, mostly for the benefit of the children involved. Police will soon start testing improved portable safety alarms and fixed alarms for high-risk victims.

The Ministry of Justice is looking into how to improve the information judges receive about defendants’ health where that is relevant to bail conditions and sentencing decisions and, for example, alcohol and drug dependency issues. That segues quite neatly into the reducing reoffending programme, which is so dear to the Minister’s heart. The Justice and Electoral Committee visited the alcohol and other drug treatment court in Waitakere. There is a trial going on into how the judicial system can better deal with people who have recidivist offences in the realms of drug and alcohol offending.

The pilot that the committee attended in the Waitakere court was under Judge Tremewan, and I want to acknowledge Judge Tremewan’s work in the alcohol and other drug treatment court. I want to commend her for her vision and for her passion and for her commitment to those offenders who have been referred to her court. What happens is that a recidivist drink-driver is facing charges. They apply to appear in the drug treatment court. They will be sentenced but not until they have undergone a programme of treatment. This is a great initiative. Thank you.

I will dedicate my 5 minutes to talking about the Department of Corrections. When we look at the annual review of the department, where do we start? There is just a wealth of material to go on, so let me start where it needs to start, and that is with the Serco debacle. The Department of Corrections had a terrible year last year, and Serco was the poster boy for incompetence and mismanagement.

I remember walking down the main street of Kaikohe in 2009 or 2010—about that time—when the Government first mooted the idea of privatisation of prisons. I walked down the main street of Kaikohe with corrections officers from Ngāwhā prison. They said to me at the time: “This is going to be a disaster. Privatisation of prisons doesn’t work overseas. There are going to be more assaults, prisoner on prisoner assaults. There are going to be more prisoner on staff assaults. There is going to be a whole heap of things covered up.” Let me tell you, every single prediction they made was 100 percent accurate. In fact, we could not have imagined that it would be worse, but it certainly was.

On 24 June last year we had the then Minister of Corrections in front of the Justice and Electoral Committee talking about the Estimates, and even then he had his head in the sand. He was talking about what a great job Serco was doing, saying that everything was fantastic, it had been monitored, and it was just swell. Within 7 months Serco was gone. Its contract was not going to be renewed. OK, so it is still managing the prison for the next 12 months, but, basically, all it is doing is just providing the staff to run Mt Eden Corrections Facility. The Department of Corrections has taken it over, and so it should.

Let me just remind everybody what the Minister who set up Serco said in 2010—and, of course, that Minister was Judith Collins. She stated in 2010: “Serco has a strong track record in managing prisons. I’m confident that the company will bring the high standards of professionalism, safety, rehabilitation and security expected by the Government to Mt Eden/ACRP.” Well, are those not famous last words? Everything she said there has been totally wiped.

Nothing that she said in terms of high standards, of professionalism, of safety, of rehabilitation, or of security measured up to what she said at that time. We have heard the story of contraband being brought in, we have had the fight clubs—and the fight clubs have been videoed and put on Facebook. Everything was a disaster. And now that the “tough on crime” rhetoric is not working, we are heading towards having a muster of 10,000 people in our prisons before the end of next year. We start to wonder why it is that our muster is getting so high.

Let us take a look at the programmes that they have in prisons, but, first of all—and I am reading from the annual report here, at page 134, talking about the programmes—“The rates of some programmes reported are small and below the level of statistical significance;”. Imagine that: programmes in prisons are performing and getting results below the level of statistical significance. In other words, they are not working. Then the report goes on to say: “however, this does not necessarily mean that the particular programme has no impact on re-offending.” Of course, a programme needs to help only one person to not reoffend, out of all the hundreds of thousands who might attend the programme, to say that it is having some positive effect. So that is just nonsense.

The programmes have what they call a rehabilitation quotient, and after a 12-month follow-up only one of the rehabilitation quotients, when it comes to preventing reconvictions, gets to double figures. There is one rehabilitation quotient for the reimprisonment of offenders, and this is the Special Treatment Unit - Child Sex Offender programme. It has a rehabilitation quotient of minus 2.2. I thought, well, what does that actually mean? Because people will read the annual report and ask: “What do these figures actually say?”. I asked written questions of the Minister of Corrections: what does that figure of minus 2.2 mean in terms of offenders? How many offenders has it helped?

It is a great pleasure to come down and take a call in the 2014-15 annual review debate. First of all, I want to begin by just acknowledging the Justice and Electoral Committee, which does a huge amount of work in this space, and, of course, the Law and Order Committee. I see that the chairs of both committees—Jacqui Dean, who chairs the Justice and Electoral Committee, and Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi, who chairs the Law and Order Committee—are present. The members on both of those committees do a huge amount of work in this sector, and I do want to acknowledge all of the members on those committees for their diligent work.

The role of the justice sector, in my view, is really about reducing harm and victimisation wherever we can and, of course, maintaining trust and confidence in our institutions, and recognising that when people are in contact with the justice sector, it is generally not somewhere that they want to be. It is not something that they have chosen for themselves, and it is our job, I think, to make sure that we deal with them as fairly and as efficiently as possible and allow them to get on with their lives as soon after that as we can. I think, in that regard, a huge amount of work has been going on under the radar that I want to take a moment to reflect on. It is obviously not only about the people using the sector but also about the taxpayers who fund it, and my view is that we have to work very hard to ensure that our services are as supportive and enabling for our customers and as effective for them as they can be, and efficient for the taxpayers.

When I came into the Chamber I heard Jacqui Dean speaking very eloquently about a lot of the work we are doing in family and sexual violence, and members of this Committee will know that I have made this my No. 1 priority in my time as the Minister of Justice. There is a huge amount that we could talk about in that space alone but, actually, in this contribution, having heard the contribution from the chair of the select committee, rather than repeat much of what she touched on, I thought I would focus instead on some of the areas in the justice sector that perhaps do not get as much visibility, because often it is the smaller, less newsworthy, or less exciting initiatives that we do that make a significant difference. I think some of those really do deserve a little bit of visibility.

I talked about the fact that when people come into the court system, they generally want to get through it as efficiently and as fairly as possible, and one of the big focuses for us has been on reducing the times through the courts. I want to acknowledge the work of my predecessor in the role of Minister of courts in this regard, Judith Collins, who really kicked off this piece of work. There has been a focus for some time on saying we need to get the court system operating more quickly and more efficiently than it has been, and I am pleased to report to this Committee that we have made significant progress. If you look at the category of District Court criminal trials alone, over the past few years we have managed to reduce the number of cases that have been there more than 2 years by 73 percent—a 73 percent reduction in aged cases.

In fact, those sorts of reductions of time are not unique to District Court criminal cases. The Māori Land Court aged cases are down 35 percent, Employment Court is down 30 percent, Environment Court is down 22 percent, and District Court civil originating applications aged cases are down 41 percent. So there has been a tremendous focus from all of the staff who work in our court system, and I want to acknowledge them because up and down this country we have thousands of people who work incredibly hard in our courts, all around New Zealand, and they really have a very, very strong focus on getting a better, faster resolution of issues for New Zealanders. Their work has paid significant dividends and they deserve acknowledgment.

I also want to comment on the increased use of audiovisual links. Over the year in question that we are discussing, we saw the continuation of the roll-out of audiovisual links across our courts. As well as being a very efficient and effective way to use technology and reduce cost, one of the unspoken—well, certainly spoken by me, but perhaps unrecognised—benefits has been the reduction in the number of prisoner transports. So it is a reduction in the security and the court time and—actually, helping the victims to find the process easier—through not having to move the prisoners back and forward often quite long distances. When I was visiting Ms Dean’s electorate in Ōāmaru we found that youth offenders were being transported from Christchurch, from the youth justice residence Te Puna Wai o Tuhinapo, all the way to Ōāmaru every time there was a call-over. So, obviously, that is a significant impact.

In the use of audiovisual links, just in the area in question, we saw a 25 percent reduction in prisoner transports just from having that system. These are the sorts of figures you do not hear a lot about, but they make a significant difference to both the offenders in the system and, as I say, the victims, and also the cost and safety of all of our corrections and security staff. I can tell this Committee that since the year in question the use of audiovisual links has gone up and up. So we have gone from about 9,000 instances of use in the year in question—that is increasing and we are now up to around 1,000 a month, which I find very encouraging. The most recent court to get its audiovisual links upgrade is the Waitakere District Court, as part of a $3.8 million refurbishment, which we are going to visit shortly. I am very proud of the work that we are doing in this space.

I am aware, in rising to speak on activity within the justice portfolio, that the justice sector is a really fundamental part of ensuring you have a fair and just society. That may be seen as a given, but not all justice systems are built equal. In fact, what is incredibly important is that in terms of building a society where people have faith in their institutions and ensuring that your justice system is transparent, accessible, and representative, we must ensure that we are keeping a constant check on each and every one of those measures. If people cannot have faith in their institutions, then everything is under threat. I think we are seeing examples—Mr Chair, if I could be so bold—with the chaos that ensues if citizens no longer, for instance, feel faith in institutions like those that gather tax revenue. This is another reason why, for instance, Transparency International uses 12 data sources when assessing a country’s level of corruption and relative corruption, and uses the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index as part of its measure.

Taking that into account, in terms of how fundamental it is to ensure that we have a transparent, accessible, robust justice system, how have we fared over the past year within a New Zealand context? I fear that if you survey across the corrections system, policing, courts, and justice, we have a system where people are feeling increasingly like they are unable to access the justice system that is meant to serve them. Where is the evidence of that? Well, it is pertinent that the Minister of Police has taken the chair, because we have seen a cut in the policing budget in real terms—in real terms, absolutely. The police are having to absorb $300 million in most recent times into their baseline in terms of a cut, and that is having a tangible impact on the front line—and I know that my colleague will expand on that further. There has been a departure from the notion of community policing, and burglary resolution rates are at an all-time low.

But that is not the only the measure of an accessible justice system. If you are a small business owner, for instance, and you have someone who breaches a contract with you as a small business and you are left out of pocket, how are you meant to seek redress on that matter other than through the ability to access our court system, our civil court regime? If you are unable to do that in a cost-effective manner, what happens? As a small business, you cut your losses. You shrug your shoulders. Fundamentally, the rule of law in New Zealand requires that people are able to access the justice system to ensure that the law is upheld. It is not just about criminals; it is also about those situations where if someone sees that the cost is too high, they will not access our courts, and the rule of law collapses.

We have a situation now where to access our legal aid regime you basically have to be on an income of $22,000 or less, essentially. It is becoming increasingly less accessible—I know Louisa Wall will speak on this—but, again, that feeds into this growing problem we have where people have distance from their ability to access justice. That is something that should worry each and every one of us. It expands right across the sector; not just contracts. Even in the Family Court, with the incredible role that it plays as a court of last resort when it comes to custody and property matters, increasingly, there are massive problems, particularly stemming from the reforms that this Government has put in place. These may have been established with the very best intentions—the desire to keep access to the court cost-effective by not having to use a lawyer and by using mediation processes—but what have we seen as a result of those ill-planned reforms? People are making without notice applications to the court in order to (a) access a lawyer and (b) get to the court quickly, and, as a result, we have an absolute backlog—we have an absolute backlog.

The judiciary has been crying out, saying that it is seeing constant failures and that people are coming to the courts representing themselves in unsafe situations. It is a disaster all round, and the Government’s response? “We’ll review it in 2017.” We have massive problems—

Thank you, Mr Chair, for giving me the opportunity to speak in this debate on the justice sector. First of all, I would like to acknowledge the Ministers for this sector, the Hon Amy Adams and the Hon Judith Collins, for their leadership and the work they have been doing in this sector. I would also like to acknowledge Jacqui Dean, the chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee, who is doing a fantastic job in that select committee.

This Government has been working hard to reduce crime, and I would also like to acknowledge the police as well as the Department of Corrections for the work they are doing in helping this Government to achieve its targets in reducing crime. The Government has been taking steps to prevent crime from happening, supporting the vulnerable in our society, and preventing them from being victimised. It is the National-led Government’s priority to provide safer communities and focus on reducing the crime rate in this country.

I would also like, once again, to say that this Government has been very successful by adding an additional 600 front-line policemen to reduce crime. Mr Chair, you are one of those members who have been a policeman. As well as being a member of Parliament, you have been a lawyer and you have seen the court system. Under your leadership of the Justice and Electoral Committee—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Don’t bring me into this debate, thank you.

I would like to mention that during the select committee process of the Law and Order Committee there were issues raised by the Opposition in respect of burglaries in New Zealand. A wide range of crimes is dealt with by the police from time to time, and when the police are called for an offence like a burglary where the offender is still present, the response is immediate. Sometimes the police have to go and handle other cases such as homicides or serious violence cases, and these take priority over crimes like burglary. But wherever the evidence is provided, the police have been successful in their resolution, and they really work hard to make the community safer.

I would also like to touch upon a very important area that this Government has been focusing on, and that is the corrections system. In the select committee process we saw that the Department of Corrections has been doing a fantastic job of reducing the reoffending rate, which has fallen 6.8 percent since June 2011. This means 1,250 fewer offenders returning to the department’s management. The amount of reoffending is down 24 percent as of December 2015, compared with 2011.

The vast majority of prisoners will be released back into our communities, which is why we are committed to ensuring that they do not create one more victim. Through our commitment to prisoners’ education, mental health support, training, and addiction treatment, our work in prisons is making a lot of progress. There is no magic bullet for reducing reoffending. We are tackling the drivers of crime in a number of ways, and we will continue to do so. Thank you.

It is a pleasure to be able to take a call on this matter. I would like to acknowledge my ministerial colleagues involved in the area, particularly Amy Adams, and also the chair of the Law and Order Committee, Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi; the Justice and Electoral Committee chair, Jacqui Dean; and all of the members of those committees. I know that they are all very hard-working committees. I am particularly pleased that the Law and Order Committee is also helping us come up with some solutions—hopefully, cross-party solutions—to some of the issues around gun crimes and the increasing use of guns, particularly by gang members and serious violent offenders. So it is one of those things where it is good to see a committee working so hard to come up with something, hopefully, very sensible—

💬 Tim Macindoe: The public welcomes it.

—and the public does welcome that sort of contribution from us.

Can I say that it is great to be back in the justice sector, and it is particularly great to be able to say that one of our four big priorities when we first came into Government was around reducing crime. One of the first things we did was to bring 600 extra front-line police into the New Zealand Police. It made a huge difference, particularly the 300 going into the Counties Manukau, or South Auckland, policing district. What we have seen is a reduction in the crime rate. We sought to reduce violent crime by 20 percent and reduce youth crime by 25 percent by 2017. We have exceeded two of those targets. Since the base period of June 2011, the recorded crime rate has fallen by 16 percent, violent crime has fallen by 8 percent, and youth crime has fallen by 38 percent. There are 52,448 fewer crimes now, since that time. This is a huge improvement, and in addition to that we can always look to do better, as well.

I think one of the things that has been very helpful is the use of technology, particularly in the police, around the use of smartphones—first off, iPads, and then smartphones—and actually being able to access information about offenders and being able to input information as the police are at the job and not afterwards.

I saw very recently a very good innovation with the smartphones. The police were able to record, with a victim’s consent, the statement of a victim of family violence at her own home immediately following the police having arrived at the house and finding out what had happened. This saves the victim so much effort in having to leave the home, often with children in it, and going into a police station. After all, she has not done anything wrong. It also helps to prevent the offenders and family members from getting to the victim, or trying to stop the victim from continuing to give evidence. This is something that is being trialled in Palmerston North. I have been really thrilled to see that it seems to be making a real difference already—particularly for victims, who are then spared this very difficult and tortuous process of having to give a written statement to a police officer, often in times of deep distress.

One of the good things with this process is that the police are looking at the technologies they have and thinking about different ways of using them. Often when we look at some of these really good innovations, it is not rocket science, but it does not happen unless we have the technology available and we have an attitude that says that actually police officers can come up with great ideas. Let us trial them and, if they work, let us help them.

Family violence is one of our big frontiers when it comes to dealing with crime. We have 41 percent of police front-line staff time spent on family violence issues. It is around about 20 percent of all police work. It is far too high. At least in this country, like Australia, we do actually acknowledge that it occurs and that it is a very serious problem. But, frankly, we need to do a lot better, and that is why the Minister of Justice and I, and other Ministers—17 of us—are involved in cross-Government work in this area. It is something that should be concerning to us all.

In addition to that, I can say I am very pleased with some of the work that has been going on in the Department of Corrections. I know that the Committee will be thrilled to know that Serco paid us $8 million yesterday. It is so much better to actually get the money than to say it is coming. Guess what? The cheque was not just in the mail; it was there. That was great.

Also, we are seeing some really good work going on in rehabilitation, particularly drug and alcohol treatment. I am really pleased to see that we have been able, in the first term in office, to double the number of prisoners who can access drug and alcohol treatment from the measly 500, which we inherited, to 1,000, and now that is going to be growing by up to 4,000, hopefully, starting next year. So we are going to put a big effort into that.

There is a lot going on in our prisons, too, around working prisons, so that all of our prisons are becoming working prisons. I know that all Kiwis will join with me in a silent cheer when I tell them that some prison directors who have come from overseas—OK; it is the UK—have said to me things like: “In New Zealand prisoners want to work.” That is, apparently, unusual, but not in New Zealand—our prisoners want to work. I was really proud of them when they said that. I thought: “They are good, our Kiwis. Well, OK, some of them are very badly behaved, but they want to work.” So that is a good thing. They see work as being of benefit to them, and of course it gives them something—skills—that they would not have otherwise.

Just recently I was at Rolleston Prison in Canterbury and saw the 34th house that the Department of Corrections has rebuilt from, in some cases, very damaged properties—Housing New Zealand Corporation houses. It was being trucked out the gate, off to its new home and to its new tenants. That is the sort of work that I think New Zealanders want to see our prisoners doing—learning new skills, getting a great outcome, and helping other people who are actually, in some cases, worse off than themselves. I hear that that was very well received.

We often hear quite a lot about the prison population in New Zealand. I am often hearing it quoted that it is the second-highest in the world. Well, that of course is complete rubbish. What it is is that we are ranked seventh in the OECD for imprisonment rates, and 72nd in the world. We are nowhere near the second-highest in the world. What would be great is if we were to have fewer people in our prisons, but while they continue to commit violent crimes and where they continue not to be safe on remand, then they will continue to be sent to prison. When they are, then I will be happy to help house them. We have had to deal with that, and I think it is probably a good thing that we have been prepared to do that. It is not a good thing that they are committing crime in the first place.

There are lots of things, too, that we could do further in this portfolio, and I am really pleased that the Department of Corrections has agreed with me, and I have agreed with the department, that mental health is one of the areas that we need to do better in, in our prisons. So the House can expect to be hearing more on that. It does not take a rocket scientist to work out that in the late 1980s and early 1990s when, essentially, modern Western countries decided to empty out the mental institutions, we actually ended up filling up the prisons instead. That should not have been a surprise to anyone, really, but that is what happened.

I am not saying “Let’s go back to those days.”, because these mental institution patients did not have the same rights that people in our prisons have. I think it was a pretty horrendous situation for many people. But do we need more beds for those forensic patients? Yes, obviously, we do. But, unfortunately, it is the sort of thing where, in some cases, prison is going to be the safest place. We are working on something right now, at Auckland prison, at Pāremoremo, where there is a very secure unit being built. It is, in fact, going to be able to house and to treat prisoners with mental health issues who do not pass the threshold where they need to go to the Mason Clinic, but who exhibit very serious behaviours, including self-harm and harming others. I am very pleased about that.

I also want to see more work in the Department of Corrections—and the department certainly agrees—on making sure the Out Of Gate care is better as prisoners leave prison. We do not want to see them back again. There has been a huge improvement in that over the last 7 years, but there needs to be even more. In particular, we could spend all the money that there is, but actually that will not solve the problem until we deal with the issue of gangs and their influence. If you want to look at who reoffends more, it is gang members. They are twice as likely to reoffend as non - gang members and are twice as likely to be in prison for serious violent offences and for the selling of methamphetamine. These are the sorts of situations we are dealing with. This is not just a Department of Corrections problem, it is not just a police problem, and not just a justice problem. Basically, the way I see it, when families fail, Child, Youth and Family and the social welfare system comes in, and when that fails, so does the justice system.

I am really glad the Minister of Police is in the chair because the ethnic communities have asked me to raise directly with her, in the House, the concerns they have about their security, particularly those who are retailers. What they tell me about is the gross inadequacy of the response they are getting to protect them in their communities and on the streets when they have raised matters with the police.

Just a week ago we had the Indian Central Association conference. The president raised with me, and with three National colleagues who were there, the fact that they had had a gutsful of the sort of complacent response they were getting from the Government. It says “It’s all OK because crime is coming down.”, and we have heard that again from the two previous National speakers in the Committee. The ethnic communities say that this is a Government that is increasingly arrogant and out of touch with what is happening in the community.

Let me give the Minister an example of what happened at the meeting we held last Friday night. A lady got up. Her name is Mrs Smruti Patel. She has a superette, the Island Superette, in East Tamaki Road, Ōtara. The day before—last Thursday—a robber had broken into the shop, attacked her husband with a hammer, and left him bleeding and seriously injured. She told the meeting that when she rang the police, they said they were too busy to respond. I find that inexplicable. I am not sure that that can be right, but she said that, and I had hoped there would be a policeman at that meeting to respond to her because I had written to three Ministers—the Minister of Police, the Minister of Justice, and the Minister in charge of Child, Youth, and Family—and said: “We have got this growing concern. The ethnic community wants your representatives to come along to answer the questions, to respond, to have dialogue with them, and to hear their concerns.” You know, not one of those departments turned up. They all said no. They declined to be there. The request we made, and I had made through the Ministers, was respectful; their response was not.

We had the case last week of a young Thai girl who had had her iPhone robbed off her. She has a “find your iPhone” app on her iPad. She found out where the offenders were. She rang the police and said: “Come with me and get my phone back, and arrest the offender.” They said: “No, we won’t.” She had to turn up herself with her taxi driver to retrieve the phone, and with no police to arrest the people who had robbed her of that phone.

I had another case referred to me of a man whose home had been burgled and the burglar had taken his credit card. A service station rang him up and said: “Your credit card’s been used to buy petrol.” He rang the police up and said: “They’ve got it on closed-circuit television. We can find the identity of the offender.” Do you know what happened? The police said “We’re too busy. You’ll have to go down there and retrieve the footage.”, and he did. He went down and he got it, he took it the police, and they said: “No, that’s not enough evidence. You’ll have to find some more.”

Another man who was at the meeting, Indy Purewal, has a superette in the Minister’s own electorate. On a Friday night 3 weeks ago, the assistant, who was asleep upstairs in his bedroom, was woken up by an offender trying to break in through the window. He rang the police while the man was still there trying to break in, but the police said they were too busy.

On the Sunday, again, the same shop assistant was behind the counter when seven teenagers came marauding into the shop, stealing cigarettes, trying to open the till, and taking the goods. I have seen it all on closed-circuit television. He rang up the police and the police said: “We’re too busy to come.” The offenders were still in the vicinity. It was only when the owner, Mr Purewal, turned up and said: “I’m going to go out there with a gun and get these …” that the police then came immediately. But I ask the Minister why that shopkeeper had to do that to get a response.

The police tell me that they are too busy, too stretched, and too under-resourced to respond in the way that every New Zealand citizen has the right to have the police respond to them when they are under attack. New Zealanders have had a gutsful of this, and they have had a gutsful of the arrogance and the complacency and the fact that this Government is so out of touch that it will not respond other than by saying what the Minister of Justice has just said, which is: “It’s all right, crime’s coming down.” If you are the person who is the victim, if you are the person who has been attacked, then that response is not adequate.

I say to the Minister that it is time she got the resources to the police to get, for example, more than 6 percent of all burglaries resolved. If you are a crook in Auckland and you are stealing from houses, you have got a 94 percent chance of getting away with it. Those figures have got worse every year.

I am keen to take a call on this justice segment of the debate. We live in a constitutional democracy. We have a robust judicial system, apparently. We respect the rule of law. It is unfortunate, however, that in recent times, particularly in the last couple of years, the whole question of access to that justice system has gone to the forefront of a lot of people’s thinking, particularly in terms of the cost of accessing the justice system and issues of geography. The fact is that where you live in New Zealand—your physical location—can be one significant determinant of whether or not you can get a fair shake from the justice system. I think that is unacceptable.

The justice community—the judiciary, the legal fraternity, and the like—is an inherently conservative community. By the very nature of what they do they are conservative, which makes it all the more significant that some of the language emerging from that community of interest has been arguably quite radical and quite outrageous in some views. We have been hearing from lawyers themselves and from judges, we are hearing from people who work in the courts, we are hearing from probation officers, and we are certainly hearing from the people who are endeavouring to engage, for whatever reason, with the justice system that the cost is simply too high. There is insufficient support for the least well-off, who often have the highest needs. We are in real danger of finding a situation where New Zealanders will get the best justice that they can afford. That is an untenable situation for a country like ours to find itself in.

One example of that is legal aid. Most people, if you ask them, will assure you that “Yes, for those who cannot afford a lawyer, we have a good legal aid service.” The threshold for legal aid is set at such a rate that if a person is working, on average, more than 30 hours a week on the minimum wage, then they are above the income level for legal aid assistance. That is a ridiculous proposition. For somebody who will be barely surviving, 30 hours a week on the minimum wage puts you above the income threshold to qualify for legal aid. That is a ludicrous proposition. It is not only the least well-off; even middle-income families are finding it increasingly difficult. Where you get separations and the like and you need the intervention of the courts, it is becoming extremely problematic for people to get into that justice system, and that is unacceptable. It is a result directly of policy and of budget decisions. We need to do better; we can do better.

Even in terms of legal aid, a lot of the larger partnerships that historically have done a significant amount of work—some of it pro bono—are starting to back off because they simply cannot afford the level of contribution that they are making to subsidise the inadequate budget that is going to the judiciary, to the justice system. Smaller partnerships, particularly around Family Courts and the like, are simply struggling. They cannot take on work where they will be constantly losing money—that is an unacceptable situation.

One of the safety nets, the community law centres—and I have engaged with a number of them in just the last 4 to 6 weeks—are all over-stretched and under-resourced. They are working on goodwill, and inevitably that pool of goodwill will diminish over time when they have simply reached the point of exhaustion and cannot continue to meet the level of demand. In fact, they are not meeting the level of demand now because their funding is often insecure and insufficient, and it really leaves people with nowhere to go.

I think our Labour colleague Jacinda Ardern was commenting on the Family Court issues, particularly the matter of self-representation. That is a very real and growing problem, as is the phenomenon that so many more people are now claiming urgency in order to have legal representation when they enter the Family Court. That is a perverse outcome, but an entirely predictable one, of the poorly thought-out reforms that we saw in 2014—18 months to 2 years ago. We need to do a lot better in that sense if we are going to continue to be a country with an accessible and a robust justice system. We need to put the resources where they need to go, and stop pretending and stop denying that there is not a problem. Sadly, that is largely this Government’s response—“There’s nothing to see here. Everything’s roses.” When talking to people on the ground, in the community, and in the judicial system, we know very well that is not the case.

I would like to speak briefly about the Department of Corrections. Again, I make it my business to visit the prisons regularly—[Bell rung] Mr Chair.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): David Clendon.

Excuse me, Mr Chair, I will finish there.

OK. Scrub that—by leave. Ron Mark.

Well, it is interesting. Looking at page 596 of this report, regarding the 2014-15 annual review of the Department of Corrections, there is a part of me that says that this is like déjà vu, is it not? I think back to the time when I was in Opposition over here and I was looking at the Hon Paul Swain, who was the Minister of Corrections. Labour was in Government, and we were talking about the Department of Corrections and what an absolute debacle it was. I look at this report here and I see the mention of the advanced control and restraint training, which has been very successful. It brings back visions of the “goon squad” in Christchurch, which, among other things, became very infamous for having initiation tests that required new members to put their penis on the bar at the West Melton pub and withstand it being bashed with a beer bottle. That was the type—and we had Justice Ailsa Duffy’s judicial inquiry into what was known as the “goon squad” in Canterbury, but it was the emergency response team. Thankfully, those days have gone.

I have to say that, looking at this report, it does beg a question. In those days, the Department of Corrections was a debacle. There were many across the House who questioned the view, which the National Party and the ACT Party touted, that we should have private prisons. Looking at this report here, in this era, in 2016, we see where this Government has indeed privatised a couple of prisons. We read that the private management of prisons has likewise turned out to be a debacle, with the Minister herself saying that she has just received an $8 million cheque, being payment from Serco for its failings, some of which are covered in this report.

So, today, in 2016, what does it lead us to think? It actually leads us in New Zealand First to think that, actually, the Department of Corrections has gone through a serious adjustment. The public management of our prisons has improved. The leadership team in the department has definitely improved since the days of Mr McCarthy and the like. But it is this experiment that has fallen over drastically.

I read in this report here that “Serco was fined for failing to meet performance targets in accordance with the contract,”, and then, further down, I see that “The department acknowledged that it was responsible for overseeing the prison and emphasised that it was now focused on making future improvements”, and the Law and Order Committee itself questioned the questionable international reputation of the prison management that actually won this contract. Question: what does this Government intend to do? It has tried its experiment. In actual fact, it is the publicly managed prisons that seem to have picked up their game and are doing better, and it is the private prison experiment that has turned out to be a disaster.

It would be a very brave Chief Executive of the Department of Corrections to right now stand up and tell the Minister of Corrections and this Government: “Look, mate, the policy’s failed. It doesn’t work. All the predictions that were made about privately managed prisons have come home to roost, and we’d be far better off having prisons managed by the prison service, the Department of Corrections, as was always the case.” But, unfortunately, New Zealand First does not see any indication that the Government is getting that message or that the department’s management is giving it that message. Indeed, if we read on further, what do we find? We find: “We heard from the department that it has a contract with Secure Future to design, build, finance, operate and maintain the Auckland South Corrections Facility …”. What do I get from that? I get the message that the Government is wedded to its privatisation policy and it will not change, despite what we have seen.

Going further into this report, there are a couple of things that we can agree with. I agree with the Minister’s comments about rehabilitation, looking at the many drivers around—and here is the comment—the increasing prison population. We are always hearing from this Government that crime is going down and that crime is at record low levels. Match that statement against a later statement that actually says that the prisons are overflowing. Well, it does not say those exact words, but what it does say is it is “reported that the average prison population in 2014/15 was 8732, which is an increase from 8,460 …”, which in 2013-14 was an all-time high. It goes on: “This is largely the result of a steady increase in the population of prisoners on remand, and represented 23 percent of the prison population in 2014/15,”.

Essentially, that paragraph is saying that although the Government has been insistent that crime is going down, our prisons are overflowing. One of these things cannot be true. We cannot have overflowing prisons and we cannot be moving to full prisons, talking of building new ones, and having double-bunking if crime is going down, surely. Match that against the comments that we have just heard from the Hon Phil Goff about police—and I want to get to that as well. If you look at the Department of Corrections and the police hand in hand, and you look at this report and read it, are we succeeding at reducing reoffending? No. We had a reduction rate peaking at 12.5 percent and it has decreased now to 8 percent, so we are failing at rehabilitation.

We talk later on in the report about the effectiveness of rehabilitation programmes that offenders complete, and then, ironically, we talk about how difficult it is to achieve these targets because reintegration is proving to be extremely complex and difficult. But look at the numbers. Out of a $1.25 billion budget, the department is spending only $10 million on reintegration. Go figure. If we are not pouring money into reintegration, if our rehabilitation programmes are not working, and if they have dropped from 12.5 percent down to 8 percent, is it any wonder that our prisons are overflowing? It has to be that, because it cannot be that crime is increasing because the Government tells us every day, ad nauseam, that crime is reducing. It is down to something like 32 percent, I think I heard was one figure.

Let us get real. Let us be honest and truthful about it. Crime is not reducing.

Did anyone watch television last night and watch the news? Four of the five most dangerous places to be are in Auckland. Why? Because you are liable to get the bash. We hear day after day after day about storekeepers, corner dairy owners, and superette owners being attacked at their place of business and police not responding. We hear continually that in rural provincial New Zealand police stations are—well, they are not quite being closed; they are just not open for business. We are hearing continually that people are calling police and getting frustrated that no one responds.

What does all that mean? If, fundamentally, you are not responding and if you are not reacting and catching bad guys and charging them, then crime will go up and your prisons will overflow, and if the reintegration and the—crikey, I am losing my track now. If the reintegration and the corrective programmes are not working, then your prisons will fill up and overflow. Fundamentally, if we were to do a report card right now, in 2016, on this Government’s performance on the Department of Corrections—on its rehabilitation programmes and on its reintegration programmes—it has failed. No amount of fluff and bumf and denial from the Government can change this report. It is what it is.

I would say to the Government that it is time, actually, if we want to get crime down and if we want to get reoffending down, to seriously focus on reintegration programmes. We do have to step up the game on the rehabilitation programmes, and we do have to make sure that we are catching people and locking them up, and make sure that justice is being seen to be done and that law and order is being seen to be maintained. If we fail to do those basics, we will continue to build more prisons, we will continue to double-bunk, and we will continue to sit in this House—it does not matter whether it was 2002, 2005, or now, in 2016—arguing amongst ourselves as to who has done better with law and order and arguing as to whether the public in general is safer and better off for it.

This report is a sad report. It is a fail. I would say to the new Minister of Police and Minister of Corrections that she has got a big task on her hands. I feel sorry for the former Minister of Corrections. I think he got a hospital pass. Some might say that he was unfairly set up to fail. But the facts speak for themselves. We have failure in law and order at both ends—

Let me tell you a story about a member in this House who was driving on a street in Whangarei on Friday evening at 5.30 with his wife, his 4-year-old daughter, and his 13-year-old daughter. A woman ran a stop sign, smack into the side of his truck, and it wrote the truck off. He phoned up the police. Heaven forbid—there was no one injured, thank goodness. He phoned up the police. The police said: “We’re too busy to come.” This was one street away from the brand new Whangarei police station that the Minister of Police had opened—one street away from the police station, and the police said to him: “We’re too busy to come, but make sure you report it to the police within 72 hours.” The witnesses who came over, and this member himself, smelt alcohol on this woman’s breath, and the police were too busy to come.

I ask you, is this the sort of service we expect from our police? Is this the sort of society we have now come to?

Mr Goff has told about six stories of New Zealanders in trouble—in trouble. What do New Zealanders do when they are in trouble? We learn, from as soon as we can dial the phone, to dial 111. Every single one of Mr Goff’s people did that, and no one turned up because the police are too busy.

Whenever a Minister assumes a portfolio, he or she is given something called a briefing to the incoming Minister. Judith Collins got one when she reassumed the police ministry in November, and the No. 1 priority in that briefing was not solving crime, was not resolution rates, was not more cops, and was not more stations. It was fiscal sustainability. The police sent a very clear message to the Minister, saying: “We are in trouble. We do not have enough money to do the job.” We can see this in the crime statistics, and we can also see this in the messages the police themselves are sending us.

I want to say that I have immense respect for the police officers who keep our community safe. They are hugely committed. They are very passionate about their communities, but they are stretched. In the biennial Police Association survey, last undertaken in December of last year, 74 percent of Police Association members said that they were dissatisfied with the number of front-line staff—74 percent were dissatisfied with the number of front-line staff. And 86 percent of Police Association members—so these are the police themselves—are saying that front-line officers are under-resourced. But even worse, I think, is that 27 percent of police—that is, one in four police officers—believe there is a risk of service failure at the front line due to recent cuts. We have a real problem, and this needs to be addressed by giving the police the resources they require to do the job.

Recently, the Counties Manukau crime prevention manager blamed the media for the increase in burglaries in March of this year. He said: “The media around burglaries has been one of the contributing factors to the increase of burglaries because people think it’s a crime they can get away with.” I do not believe that criminals undertake a detailed risk analysis to determine what they can and cannot get away with.

What I would say is that the media’s analysis of this has perhaps led to a general waning of confidence in the police, and this is something that needs to be addressed under urgency. In fact, from 2013 to 2015 the public’s trust and confidence in the police dropped from 81 percent to 75 percent. Admittedly, that is a lot higher than, say, the 25 percent that politicians get, but firemen have a public trust and confidence level of 93 percent and ambulance officers 92 percent.

Sir Robert Peel said that the public are the police and the police are the public. The police do operate well when the public believe that communities are safe. When members of the public see that only 8.7 percent of burglaries in Wellington are solved, then they have good reason to be concerned. When they see that about 6 percent of all burglaries in Auckland are solved, then they have reason to be concerned.

There are basically two facets to policing: you have got the traditional “let’s lock ’em up” facet and then you have got the community policing. What we have seen just recently is the community policing—

It is a privilege for me to speak as part of Labour’s “Team Justice”. I would like to acknowledge Jacinda Ardern, Kelvin Davis, Phil Goff, Stuart Nash, Su’a William Sio, Peeni Henare, and myself. My particular delegations are in the courts and legal aid areas, and what I have been really interested to find out, actually, is that the whole objective of the justice reforms has been about saving $250 million.

In 2011 the Ministry of Justice oversaw legal aid. I would like to acknowledge my colleague the Hon Phil Goff because in 2005, when he was the Minister of Justice, what Labour did was actually expand eligibility for legal aid because we wanted to ensure that low-income working families had access to this money as well. When National came in it saw it as a liability—a $173 million liability—so the first thing it did was change the eligibility criteria. For National, the imperative was to get the cost down to $100 million. What has that seen? Actually, you now have to earn under $22,000 to qualify.

One of the big issues we have in the area is around protection orders. If you are a woman who needs a protection order, you do not automatically get eligibility to apply for legal aid to get a protection order. The Minister of Justice’s response was that women can do it for themselves, but if you go on the Ministry of Justice website it actually says you should engage a lawyer—it is a legal process.

One of the other unintended consequences—who knows—of this whole reframing of access to legal aid has been an increase in self-representation. One of the first things I did was go and talk to an expert, a woman called Bridgette Toy-Cronin. She is a PhD graduate from the University of Otago. She works in the legal issues centre, and I want to commend Mark Henaghan and his group from Otago University for actually highlighting a whole lot of issues in our criminal justice system. What she said was: “There is a difference between access to courts and access to justice. Self-representation allows access to courts, but access to justice within the system is an entirely different matter. It is one thing to get in the door and another having the ability to get the necessary resources or advice to understand the legal system.” This was reinforced by Chris Moore, President of the New Zealand Law Society, who actually said that this phenomenon had happened because of an inability of people to get legal aid.

The other interesting commentator, in March last year, was Chief High Court Judge Justice Helen Winkelmann, who actually sounded a warning about under-represented litigants, or people representing themselves in court. She actually said that this posed “a serious challenge to the civil justice system”. It makes it less efficient, and from some of my meetings with judges and other people engaged in this sector, I think the reforms have been a complete debacle.

Yesterday I was with Judge Harvey. He has got a particular passion for access to justice through IT. I think there is merit in some of his proposed reforms. Actually, if I look at the reforms that have been incredibly successful in the justice system, they have actually come about because judges, who know the system intimately, have proposed some of the reforms that are working.

One such reform is the alcohol and other drug treatment court that—I am just trying to remember her name; she is from west Auckland—Judge Tremewan has championed. The whole objective is about reducing reoffending and reducing dependency on alcohol and other drugs. It is about reducing imprisonment and it is about being cost-effective, and I think that the findings so far have been that it has been an incredibly important addition to the justice system and is actually treating people who need help. So that is kind of the medical aspect of the justice system. It is not making them criminals or treating them as criminals, but it is actually addressing the underlying causes so that we can address issues such as recidivism. In terms of my courts portfolio, it has been really interesting to actually think about the court.

I went to the Manukau District Court only the other day. I intend to go to the courts as part of my responsibility and to get a feel for what being in a court is like. I have never been in one myself, but I look forward to doing that.

One of the issues that has been highlighted is that the centralisation of the Family Courts in Auckland has been a complete disaster. Some clients cannot get into Auckland City, and those who do have to pay $24 to park there for the day.

I think what we are finding is that a lot of the reforms that this Government has introduced in the justice sector have been completely driven by economic imperatives.

Reports noted.

Māori, Other Populations and Cultural Sector