Annual Review Debate — Justice Sector (continued)

Members, the House in committee for further consideration of the Appropriation (2016/17 Confirmation and Validation) Bill. I remind members that this is the debate on the annual reviews of departments, Officers of Parliament, Crown entities, public organisations, and State enterprises as reported on by select committees. The time remaining in this debate is three hours and 56 minutes. When we were last considering this bill, we were debating the question that the reports of the committees relevant to the justice sector be noted. The Hon Ruth Dyson moved that progress be reported, and the call is now available to her or any other member.

Oh, thank you very much, Mr Chair. It’s a pleasure to take a call on the justice—I don’t want to say Estimates. It’s not the Estimates; it’s the annual review. Look, we had a very interesting conversation with the Commissioner of Police at the Justice Committee, and I do just want to canvass for the House the conversations we had and the discussions we had in that select committee. One of the issues this Government is going to confront is the issue of the cost of the extra 1,800 police, and I see the Minister of Police in the chair there.

It’s fair to say the cost estimates of this grand promise of an extra 1,800 police—you know, almost a thousand extra police on top of what the previous National Government promised in Budget 2017—are going to be expensive. It’s particularly apposite, I think, in light of the scaremongering we’ve heard from Government members in the last few days and in the last few hours about how there is no money and the cost to social services and to the State sector is so vast.

Well, we had the Prime Minister, in October last year, talking about the cost of an extra 1,800 police being about $100 million. The same day, interestingly, she also said it would be $80 million, and, of course, we’ve also had an estimate from the Prime Minister of $40 million. Now, that’s all down at the bottom end of the scale. You could make, I think, legitimate criticism about how it’s a bit strange to have three different estimates all for the same number of police officers, but it’s certainly down at the bottom end of the scale. But what we heard in the select committee was that the actual cost is going to be far higher than that—at least $250 million; possibly, I would venture to suggest, probably nearer the $300 million over the next three years. So let’s wait and see where we come. The police Minister has been noticeable by his reticence to give any numbers whatsoever. We’ll wait and see. We’ll have to wait till the Budget.

The second issue I want to canvass is the very important issue of standards, because we had an interesting conversation with the police commissioner where he assured the Justice Committee that standards in the police will be maintained. That’s what he said. He said to us that standards will remain high—they will remain high—and they will be maintained.

But what we see is standards already changing. The physical appraisal test—it’s easier to pass. They don’t have to have a swimming certificate any more. My fear is that the Government’s desire to meet their very, very ambitious goal of 1,800 extra police, sworn officers, over the next three years—my worry is that that will lead to a diminution in standards, and that will be to the detriment of the public of New Zealand.

So I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but I am very concerned it will happen, just because of that political pressure they’re going to come under. I mean, this is a promise—it’s a commitment—in the Labour - New Zealand First coalition agreement. It’s a very, very significant commitment, and my worry is that those standards will be lowered, to the detriment of the safety of the New Zealand public. And we canvassed that in the annual review hearing with the police commissioner.

The other issue I want to cover is, of course, the issue of Better Public Services, because we haven’t heard a lot about Better Public Services from the new Government in recent weeks and months, and I think there’s a very good reason for that. It is that they are embarrassed by their popgun decision, basically, to abolish the Better Public Services targets that the previous Government had set in place. If I was a Minister in the Government, I would be embarrassed by that as well, because it was actually just simple spite. It was very churlish of the Prime Minister to say, “We’re getting rid of these Better Public Services targets—we’ll have our own ones, but we’re just going to get rid of the previous Government’s ones.”

💬 Hon Maggie Barry: That’s not very positive.

And I just want to quote to the House—exactly; not very positive, my colleague Maggie Barry says—what I asked the police commissioner and what he said. I said to him, “Why are targets important?”, and this is what he said: “Because they drive performance. The right targets drive the right performance.” He’s exactly right, and that’s why the police have their own nine targets, that the Government, to their credit, is keeping in place—so far.

So my question, really, for the Government and for the Minister and for the House is: if the police commissioner himself says that the right targets drive the right performance, why would you want to get rid of a target like having 10,000 fewer serious crimes by 2021? Who could possibly object to having that as a target? This wasn’t just whipped up willy-nilly; this was a target set by the Government, in consultation with the police—one that is achievable and realistic, and, of course, once you set that target in place, the police and the officials driving it put in place the systems and the plans and the mechanisms to get to that target. So why, if the police themselves back these targets and back setting performance targets in place for their own organisation, would you want to have a Prime Minister who stands up and, on a whim, in response to a question, gets rid of Better Public Services targets? I think it’s disgraceful, Mr Chair.

Thank you for the call, Mr Chair. Well, what an absolute hospital pass of a hand grenade that this Government got within the justice sector. We have got an outrageously high prisoner number—outrageously high prisoner number—and climbing, and climbing. What we’ve heard from Mr Bishop just now is an example about perhaps why that’s occurred. He talked about the cost of the extra 1,800 police, and what’s been brought up, at least this week, is highlighting how the National Party always knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing—the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

You know, we heard Matt King last night, when he was speaking on this sector as well, and, apparently, the police force are all hunky-dory—they’re all happy. He spent five minutes patting them on the back saying how hard working they are—because they are—but what he didn’t recognise was how much harder they’ve had to work under the National Government just to get their heads above water. How can the police force be happy and hunky-dory when we’ve got stats like this?

Riddle me this, Mr King—riddle me this. From 2012 to 2017, there’s been a net loss of 16 sworn police officers—a net loss. At the same time, over that same period, there’s been an increase of 400,000 in the New Zealand population. Negative—

💬 Matt King: Fake news.

Oh, it’s fake news—there was a member that said, “Fake news.” I can table this document if he wants. That’s just sworn police officers, but that member knows, being an ex-police officer, that there’s non-sworn police officers—the backroom people, right? So if you add them all up, the total police number, including the sworn and non-sworn, was 12,109 in 2012. That went down, by the time it got to 2017, by 269 in total. That’s the level of underfunding, which has been quite the topic this week and, I’m guessing, since the election, really, when this Government has looked at the books and looked at the infrastructure, but especially over the last couple of weeks—the total underfunding of basic services in this country.

Now, one thing that John Key promised when he came in, in 2008, was to ensure that the police numbers didn’t go down below the ratio of 1:500 sworn police officers per number of people. That was 498 in 2012, and it’s gone skyrocketing to 542—1:542—in 2017. That’s the highest it’s been—the highest it’s been. But, according to the National Party, who’ve been taking speeches on this justice sector, it’s been hunky-dory. It’s been fine! The justice system is fine! Oh, and what did we hear as well? Crime’s down, apparently. Crime’s down! The youth justice system is working quite well!

If crime was down, why have we got overflowing prisons? Think about it in a very logical sense. Why would we have to be spending an extra billion dollars on another prison if the crime was down?

💬 Matt King: It is.

See, this is the fake news. They just don’t get it. They just don’t get it. They just can’t understand the basic equation. How can it be down if the prison numbers are going up—skyrocketing?

The other thing that Mr Bishop was talking about was Better Public Services targets. Well, I’m pretty certain that he has forgotten that just recently, when the National Party was in Government, they got rid of a certain Better Public Services target because they didn’t achieve it—because they didn’t achieve it. The target I’m referring to is the target to reduce reoffending. Was that the one that we were talking about, Minister? The target to reduce reoffending by 25 percent—the National Party, when in Government, didn’t even achieve 5 percent. They didn’t even achieve a 5 percent reoffending reduction.

What did the National Party want to do? What did the National Party want to do? We just got lectured by that member, Mr Bishop, who said, “Why would anyone want to get rid of targets? Why would anyone want to get rid of Better Public Services targets?” So National didn’t readjust the target or explain why they couldn’t and say, “Let’s put more resources in.” They got rid of it. They just got rid of it.

National also had a target to reduce violent offending. What happened with violent offending? It went skyrocketing. It went up. So what happened to those targets, Mr Bishop? You got rid of them. The National Government, in the last year, has underfunded this sector.

Thank you, Mr Chair. The thing that amazes me at the moment is that I’m waiting for a Government member to stand up and tell us what you’re doing. Actually be positive; be aspirational. Tell us what you’re doing, because all I’m hearing at the moment—all of you, you’re acting like the Opposition; not like the Government.

If I can, firstly, acknowledge that it’s good to have the Minister of Police here in the debating chamber and also—

💬 Hon Todd McClay: Rather than in the gym.

That’s right. And can I acknowledge Greg O’Connor too, who sits on the Justice Committee and, of course, has got a big background in terms of public service with our police service and with our association.

I want to just very quickly raise an issue. Mr Ball just got up and made a huge issue about—his last point that he was trying to drive home was around the prison population. And yet, a fortnight ago, he voted down a bill that was in this Parliament that would have actually stopped people and helped prevent people from going back into prison.

💬 Darroch Ball: No, it wouldn’t have.

Yes, it would have; yes it would have. Let me explain the bill to you. The bill was quite simply this: anyone that’s been convicted and, as part of their sentencing, they’ve got the opportunity to do community service—right? So they go out and they’ve got an opportunity to put something back into the community, and they’re collecting a Government payment of some sort, and they refuse, after three warnings, to turn up and actually engage in their community service, then they can start to have some of that taxpayer-funded payment reduced—right?

Now, the reason for that was to give them another chance and stop them going back into the prison system. So what did Mr Ball do? What did Mr Ball do to try and support that bill and stop people going back into the prison system—the one that he just stood up and made a big deal about? How do we stop people going back into prison? What did he do? He voted the bill down. He wouldn’t support it. So don’t stand up there preaching to us and lecturing us, Mr Ball, that you’re worried about the numbers in our corrections system when you didn’t support a bill that actually would have stopped those numbers from growing. You’re talking out of both sides of your mouth.

There’s one issue that I do want to raise, and that Mr Bishop raised, while I’ve got the Minister of Police here and while Greg’s in the debating chamber also. This is a genuine concern. The 1,800 new police officers—that’s great. We’ve invested heavily in technology. We recognise that technology is working and our front-line staff, especially, have been huge beneficiaries of that. It’s actually got front-line police officers out of the police stations and back out on the roads and in amongst the public, where the people like to see them and where they do their best work. So that’s great. Chris has highlighted the issues around the funding. I’d like someone—I know that Greg’s probably going to take a call—to stand and actually tell us what the real funding for this policy is going to be.

The other really important issue that he raises is around standards, and this is one that I personally am very worried about. It is the lowering of standards. He raised just one simple standard that may be removed and that’s the requirement to be a proficient swimmer or to be confident in the water. In my experience, in the history of the police service, a lot of the bravery awards that have been handed out relate specifically, normally, to police officers turning up to a scene where a vehicle has gone into a river and the occupants are trapped, or someone, for whatever reason, has got into difficulty in a rip. Police officers will often respond to that. They’re the first responders, they’re the first ones there, and they have to have a basic ability to be able to actually enter the water and recover and bring that person back to safety.

If we’re talking about starting to remove standards and remove those requirements, I’m going to be the first one to stand up and say that I’m deeply concerned about that. If Greg’s taking a call, then I’d like you to talk to that and give us some comfort around the fact that there’s not going to be a reduction in standards—they are important—and how much the policy is actually going to cost. These are fundamentally very important things.

I just want to very quickly acknowledge the staff in the justice sector. It’s huge—70 percent of them are front-line workers. They do a tremendous job. I know this through personal experience when I was the Associate Minister of Justice. We were having these terrible dairy robberies and assaults. We went out and did public meetings, and I felt fully supported with officials—as high as the deputy secretary—in those meetings, to hear what the genuine concerns were and then to develop a very robust set of policies and how we were going to address those.

I am going to run out of time, but I was going to talk about our young serious offenders policy that we rolled out just before the last election. It was going to take some serious steps towards addressing what was a serious issue overall. Youth crime has reduced. But we did have those 150 young people that were committing top-end violent-type crimes. We had a very good policy in place to deal with that. I’d like to know whereabouts that’s going. Thank you, Mr Chairman.

Thank you very much, Mr Chair. I feel very privileged to say that I’m the Minister of Police—one of the best police services in the world, one of the least-corrupt police services in the world.

We love coalition politics, because, under the Labour - New Zealand First coalition agreement, we have promised to deliver 1,800 more police into our communities. Let me know where this has come from—let me know where this has come from. It’s from a whole lot of conversations that Darroch Ball, New Zealand First MPs, and Labour MPs have had in our communities with people who are concerned about law and order in our neighbourhoods, in our communities. We decided we needed to do something about this.

Let me tell you something about the New Zealand police force and the latest workplace survey. Over 80 percent of the men and women who serve in our service said that they were totally committed to the New Zealand police service and they value and love the communities they serve. But over 60 percent of those men and women who filled out the survey said that they experience undue workplace stress and that they weren’t delivering on the promises they were making to their communities.

In a nutshell, what we’ve got is some very committed men and women who value the job, value the communities, but just know they’re not resourced to do the job that needs to be done. This is why Labour and New Zealand First have said, “We’ve got to deal with this.” So we are putting more police on the streets in our communities than has ever been done before—about 20 percent more police into our neighbourhoods. This is the biggest increase in the history of the New Zealand Police.

Let me tell you a couple of things about the New Zealand Police. They have a Prevention First operating model. It is absolutely fantastic. It is a sea change to the way that they do things out there. They’re about preventing crime. Mr Bishop, the target you talk about—a reduction in serious crime—still exists. It is still there. We are not removing that whatsoever. What we are doing is we’re going out there. We’re working with our communities to prevent crime. The last thing the police want to do is put people in jail. What they do want to be doing is working with our communities, with the agencies, making sure that people don’t end up in jail. There are some fantastic programmes that our police service is running to ensure this happens.

Let me tell you a couple of things about our police service as well. In the last 10 years, they have implemented 47 specific recommendations for change. There has been a sea change in the culture of New Zealand’s police service. Mr Bishop is worried about the new recruits coming through. I can assure him that I have been to all but one graduation since I have been the Minister, and the new recruits are first class. In fact, the number of people we’re getting into the service who have university degrees, who have worked overseas, and who have wide experience has increased substantially. One thing that we’re working incredibly hard on is ensuring that our police service represents the diverse communities that it serves.

Last year, we celebrated 75 years of women in the police. Now, we’re not where we want to be—ideally, we want to be at 50 percent—but the New Zealand police service is working incredibly hard to get those figures up. This is an organisation which, I believe, is incredibly well run. The commissioner has a vision for where the New Zealand Police wants to be, and we buy into it 100 percent. I am forever grateful, and I think, as New Zealanders, we should be grateful for the men and women who are out there doing the sorts of jobs that we wouldn’t want to do.

Last year, there were 27,000 general mental health call outs that the police had to respond to. There were 20,300 attempted suicide events that they had to attend; so they’ve changed the programme. In the past, they had three hours on how to deal with mental health; now, in the Police College, there are 50 hours on how to deal with mental health call outs. This is a service that’s responding to the needs of our community. Last year, $300 million worth of assets were restrained, $168 million forfeited. Last year, the New Zealand police service dismantled 10 significant transnational crime groups operating in New Zealand and preying on our communities.

The last thing I would like to say is that we are rolling out 1,800 police because we think this is the right thing to do and it needs to be done. Mr Bishop talked about the cost; well, this is coming in the Budget, but let me tell you that we believe the New Zealand Police service disrupted about $1.6 billion worth of harm in our communities. So when the member says, “How much does it cost?”, I say, “Not enough.”

It’s a pleasure to take a second call on this. I’d like to acknowledge the Hon Stuart Nash. I’m actually quite heartened to hear some of his language about the police, being an ex-police officer. I think he’s going to be almost as good as the Hon Judith Collins in the role. He talks about having an extra 1,800 police, and I hope—I hope and I pray—that that’s what’s going to happen. During the election campaign, they promised 1,800, and the language has changed now to “strive towards”. I really do hope that that’s the number they get to.

I want to talk about what Darroch Ball talked about earlier. Previously, I talked about the police in a good light because I wanted to acknowledge them, much like Stuart Nash did, and the good job that they do. I never put forward that they were doing a brilliant job; I’m just saying that they don’t get the acknowledgment, and I was praising them because that’s what I felt was the right thing to do.

So the language has changed, and it’s now “strive towards”. I see that’s in the document. Well, what’s going to happen when you get 1,800 new police—you actually have to have 3,000 new recruits to account for the natural attrition, and 3,000 new recruits is one hell of an ask over three or four years, whichever Government’s in.

If you talk about funding and resourcing, they’ve got to have vehicles, they’ve got to have radios, they’ve got to have laptops—they’ve got to have everything that comes; it’s not just a bum on a seat. So there’s a hell of a lot of cost. I make no apologies, on our side, for looking at the dollars and actually being realistic about how much it’s going to cost. It’s going to cost a lot more than what you’re allowing for.

I remember, as a hard-working detective in Kaikohe, in the mid-2000s, under a Labour Government, I had a stack of serious crime files on my desk. There were four detectives in our office and we had one car with 180,000 kilometres on the clock.

💬 Chris Bishop: And a few king-hits.

Ha! Talk about under-resourcing; we were begging for resources—four qualified detectives doing their best, in one car. You’ve got to have bums on seats, but you’ve got to have the resourcing to go with it. So, like I say, I hope the Hon Stuart Nash delivers on his promise; I really do. I genuinely believe that.

In terms of lowering standards, I see the physical competence test has changed, in that if you’re weak in one area and you’re strong in another, they can carry across, like carrying across credits. That is a lowering of standards by another name; it absolutely is. You don’t get to choose, when you’re chasing an offender, whether you’ve got to climb a fence or swim through a river. You don’t get to say, “Oh well, I’m good at one but I can’t do the other.” You’ve got to do it all. So, like I say, I hope that they get where they want to. I also recall that just having a bum on a seat—it needs the back up of resourcing, but I would have forgone a pay rise in my day to have an extra one or two people to share the load. So 1,800 police—I wish you all the best.

Now, I’d like to acknowledge the men and women that work in the New Zealand Police. They do a great job. It’s a hard job, and I say to them that as long as I’m in Parliament, they have a friend in this House. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I want to start by acknowledging my two ex-colleagues here, the Hon Mark Mitchell and Matt King. It’s interesting listening to them, and, gentlemen, I do share your concerns around the way that the crime rate has gone and where we are now. But I can assure you that you did join the police many years ago—I’m sorry, Mr Chair; the honourable gentlemen did join the police many years ago. I will ask you to remember that when you did join, those who went before you said, “You’re not as good as we were.” That tends to be a generational refrain. I suspect that when those two gentlemen joined, police officers had to be 5 foot 8 and couldn’t wear glasses, and there were about 2 percent female in the job. So, to those gentlemen, I can absolutely reassure them that times have changed, and they will continue to change—in the same way that the types of activities that the police carry out also need to change.

Also, one of the speakers previously mentioned Better Public Services and how, applied, they were some sort of panacea—that the whole Government service was going to be a better place; cure everything, perhaps, from the common cold to the latest disease to come out of the Third World. However, those Better Public Services actually became cheaper public services.

Just to give an example of how they did fail, in choosing Better Public Services and very specific targets, often—and I found it in the police—it’s about a five-year lead in. You can get a strategy in place and things are working well, and often when you change strategies, when you change emphasis, it’s about five years before you really start to see the results of those changes.

A very good example of that is methamphetamine in gangs. Through the period of about 2008 to 2011, at a time when all the emphasis was going on to areas where the surveys were showing the public were most concerned, what wasn’t coming up was gangs and methamphetamine. Now, the police officers in those situations, whether it be the district commanders, right down to the police on the ground, knew that they had a major burgeoning problem with gangs and methamphetamine. There was a methamphetamine strategy introduced, which did have some effect in the early days, but, ultimately—and as I, in my previous position, went around the countryside, I was being regaled, being lobbied hard, by district commanders and area commanders saying, “We’ve got to get the right to police our gangs, because if we don’t, they are going to grow out of control.” But, again, because those gangs weren’t showing up as a problem in the surveys, the work wasn’t being done. In fact, I can tell you now that there were people being told they weren’t to police, they weren’t to do search warrants on methamphetamine; they were to leave the gangs alone. The emphases were in other areas, and we are now paying the price for that.

As we sat through the Government departments—and I have to say that, as a new member, it was pleasing to see the emphasis and the examination we can put our Government departments through—I think anyone who’s worried about where their taxpayers’ money goes should see the hard work that’s done by these organisations, particularly emphasising or focusing on the area of corrections and on police. It was summed up, I think, as we spoke to the Department of Corrections, who talked about, and I can quote: “Prisoners with gang connections are nearly twice as likely to reoffend as those without gang affiliations. In 2016-17, gang-affiliated prisoners made up about one third of the prison population but were responsible for two thirds of the prison assaults. Gang levels in prison have nearly doubled in the last decade. Corrections strategy is spreading the gang population around the prison so no clusters occur.”

So there’s a clear problem of gangs in prisons. Also, when we talked to the New Zealand Police, the commissioner pointed out the very clear problem that gangs—current, home grown—are exacerbated by the returning prisoners from Australia. We now have a situation where over half the people in prisons are either gang or gang associates.

The annual review reports for the Ministry of Justice, Department of Corrections, and New Zealand Police make for sobering reading. This is an expensive sector. It’s an expensive sector to fail in. It’s expensive in real terms—in terms of harm to victims, to their whānau, and to communities, and in the broader harm to our society of having crime on the rise, having more and more of our population locked up in prison—and it’s also expensive in terms of the bottom line.

This round of annual reviews confirms, sadly, that New Zealand continues to imprison people at record rates, while doing that does nothing to reduce crime—in fact, it does the opposite. So we have learnt that spending billions of dollars imprisoning, essentially, people from certain demographics—Māori and Pasifika young men—convictions have gone up for serious crime. Convictions for serious violence and sexual offending have gone up by 5 percent. Convictions for illicit drug offending have gone up by 15 percent—and we know that that’s in the most serious types of drug offending. We know that, in terms of offending relating to the supply, manufacture, or importation of methamphetamine, those types of offences are about to overtake the prevalence of cannabis-type offences in our justice system. No wonder our courts are overburdened and hardly functioning. Offences relating to robbery and theft are up by 11 percent, and, incredibly, offences relating to weapons are up by an astounding 20 percent.

We keep hearing that the justice policy under the previous nine years was somehow effective, but the numbers are there in black and white in these annual reviews. The backlogs are up. Prison numbers are up. Nine years of policies being adopted to make politicians look tough whilst we knew that they were making our communities less safe and costing us billions of dollars that we could have invested in policies that we knew could have reduced crime—that was callous. It’s unacceptable.

It’s also horrifying to note that whilst we were imprisoning record numbers of people and crime was on the rise, National contracted Serco, a multinational corporation, to run some of our busiest prisons. At Mt Eden prison, this resulted—and most people will remember this, because New Zealand was horrified. That correctional facility saw the rise of things like fight clubs, contraband, and corruption. That contract had to be terminated—a failure. But we’re still under a 25-year contract for Auckland South Corrections Facility with Serco.

Those types of problems didn’t exist at this kind of level in New Zealand before that so-called public-private agreement to privatise our prisons—let’s call a spade a spade. Our prisons are now at capacity, and, incredibly, this report, in this previous period, shows that some 49 percent of people that we imprison are going to be imprisoned again within the next five years after their release—horrifying. That means—as anyone who’s been at the front lines of our justice system, like I’ve been, and anyone who’s working in corrections, knows—our prisons no longer have the staffing capacity or resource to provide proper rehabilitative programmes for the people that we do detain.

We don’t have programmes sufficient to provide drug and alcohol treatment, mental health care, anger management treatment, or literacy programmes. So people aren’t getting paroled, because they can’t do their courses, and we’re holding them for longer, but then we’re releasing them without actually helping them to be rehabilitated, fit to join society, at a low-risk of reoffending. That is ineffective, and it is a failure, and these reports show it.

So, instead of actually providing for services out in the community that we know actually stop crime, like mental health care before people offend, like drug and alcohol treatment before people reoffending, that Government—[Time expired]

Reports relevant to the Justice Sector noted.

Māori, Other Populations, and Cultural Sector