Annual Review Debate — Justice Sector

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I rise to take a call in the annual review debate on the justice sector. The Justice Committee conducted hearings and tabled reports from 11 entities, and I want to give a quick highlight of the entities and what the committee heard. We conducted hearings and tabled reports from 11 entities, including the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Corrections, the New Zealand Police, the Independent Police Conduct Authority, the Electoral Commission, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, the Crown Law Office, the Human Rights Commission, the Abortion Supervisory Committee, and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

The Ministry of Justice provides a wide range of justice services to New Zealand. Its core functions include administering the court and tribunal systems, negotiating Treaty of Waitangi settlements, and providing policy advice and administering Vote Justice. One of the highlights for the ministry was that the ministry hosted the justice summit in 2018 and the outcomes will be used in its policy work. Following the justice summit, we heard that Te Rōpū organised separately its Māori summit and that the ministry’s chief victims’ adviser has organised a workshop on strengthening the criminal justice system for victims.

One of the main focuses for the ministry in 2017 and 2018 was modernising and improving the New Zealand court system. For the Department of Corrections, its total revenue in 2017-18 was $1.474 billion—about 11 percent more than that in 2016-17. In its opening statements to the committee, the department outlined some of its significant achievements in 2017 and 2018, including: (a) more than 1,000 prisoners have completed an intensive drug and alcohol treatment programme; (b) nearly 8,000 prisoners undertook rehabilitation programmes in prison, with nearly 90 percent completion rates; and (c) the department’s programme called This Way For Work placed 922 prisoners and ex-prisoners into employment. Since reaching an all-time high of 10,820 in March 2018, the number of prisoners had decreased to 9,661 at the time of our hearing.

The department told us that it is developing a new strategy to address offending by and to improve outcomes for Māori. Currently, over half of the prison population identify as Māori.

For the New Zealand Police, the 2018 Budget included funding for the recruitment of an additional 1,800 police officers and 485 support staff. At the hearing, we were given an update on recruitment and we were informed of other matters such as road safety and police involvement in mental health incidents.

From the Electoral Commission, we heard that it is an ongoing challenge to engage and motivate young people to enrol and vote. In the 2017 general election, the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled was 72.3 percent, which was less than in 2014, which was 76.5 percent. However, the number of 18- to 24-year-olds who enrolled and actually cast their votes increased by 6.5 percent.

The Law Commission reviews, reforms, and develops New Zealand law and has played a very important role in our justice system. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Can I just begin by acknowledging the previous speaker, Dr Raymond Huo, the chairman of the Justice Committee, and acknowledge the good job that he does in chairing the committee and the work that the committee has got through in the last 12 months.

He spoke about the justice sector summit. To me, it’s disappointing when you have a Government now that was in Opposition for nine years and had some very definitive ideas and plans and were very vocal about that in Opposition, and came into Government as the incoming Government and were very clear that they were going to reform our criminal justice system and it was going to be a reformist Government and we were going to see them launch their policies in relation to reform—it’s disappointing that, 18 months in, we still have had no signals. I have no idea at all, as the Opposition justice spokesman, exactly what this Government intends to do around reforms. I’ve been very clear. I’ve been very clear with the Minister, the Hon Andrew Little: if you come up with some good reforms that we think will benefit this country and benefit our nation and our communities, then we’ll support those. But if you come to this House with a bunch of reforms that are fundamentally going to dilute or weaken our parole, our sentencing, and our bail laws, thereby transferring risk back into the community, we will not stand for that and we will take a very strong position against it.

We kicked off with a justice summit, a justice summit that forgot to invite victims. I can assure you that the National Party puts the victims at the heart of our criminal justice system. That’s where they should be. It was a justice sector summit that forgot to invite victims. The reason why I say that is because afterwards they came under so much pressure that they had to go back, and the chairman alluded to it. They’ve now had to put a summit on for victims. Well, it’s good and it’s pleasing to hear. It’s a shame it’s taken 18 months for this Government to actually organise something to hear the voices of the victims that, through no choice of their own, come into our criminal justice system. I don’t want to go too much into the cost of that. It was outrageous. You know, we held the Government to account. A registration desk that cost $30,000 to set up, venison burgers and crème brȗlée! It was an outrageous use of taxpayers’ money.

Then we saw the next step, which was an attempted repeal—this was the first thing they did in their justice sector reforms, as a Government—of the three strikes legislation. Well, the partner threw the justice Minister under the bus. As he went to Cabinet that morning, he had to come out and make a public announcement and say, “We’re no longer going to pursue the repeal of the three strikes legislation.” That was a disgrace, in my view, and I’m still highly offended by it—the fact that the only example they could use to try and make a case for repealing the three strikes legislation was to trivialise an indecent assault against a female corrections officer. That’s the best that they could do, and they couldn’t apologise for it, and to this day, their partner parties have not come forward and apologised either.

Then they bring a bill called the Ombudsmen (Protection of Name) Amendment Bill. This just goes to show how little this Government has done in 18 months. This is a bill that they want to protect the name of the Ombudsmen, something that will affect one group—one group. And, by the way, their own ministry advised them not to proceed with this and not to bring it to the House. There’s got to be more priorities. That’s all that they could bring to this House for the House to debate. That shows how little they’ve got going on in the justice sector.

But they did bring a very good bill to the House. They brought the Trusts Bill to the House—they brought the Trusts Bill to the House. That’s a bill that actually makes a fundamental change and difference in a lot of Kiwis’ lives. But the thing is: that wasn’t their bill; that was the Hon Amy Adams’. That was her bill. That was our bill that they brought to the House that will actually make a difference. Their bill is the Ombudsmen (Protection of Name) Amendment Bill.

They’ve got no plan. There’s been no legislation brought to this House. And I’ll tell you what. Let me make a prediction. Let me make a prediction right here tonight in the House. This is not a reformist Government. We’re not going to see the biggest reforms we’ve ever seen of the criminal justice system. It’s a Government that’s paralysed with indecision, not knowing what to do, and not knowing what to bring to the House. I hope I’m proved wrong, but let’s see. You’re 18 months into it. This is the year of delivery. We’re still waiting to see what you’re going to deliver in the criminal justice sector. Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Look, I’ll just reflect on what the member opposite has been talking about. It’s a real shame actually, because we do have an opportunity and it doesn’t matter who is in power—let’s not look at the last 10 years; let’s look at the last 20 years and actually just take a real good look at this. Actually, as someone who’s been involved in industry, as has the previous speaker, I defy him to say or see anything that really has worked in our time. He’s been a police officer for some time, been involved in the industry, as have I. The reality of it is that we all did our best. We all did what we could to try and stem the tide of what we saw. We did it, whether we were a dog handler, we did it as a detective, and we all did it—everyone involved in the sector. Whether you’re a corrections officer, whether you’re in the courts, we all actually want to do the same thing. Whatever else we do for a day job, we actually live in that community and anything that fails it not only affects us; it affects our families, and it affects our whole communities. So we actually all want to do something different.

I think the reality of it—and I’m probably someone who’s been reasonably guilty of it in the past myself—is thinking that if we just go harder, tougher, dig ’em deeper, hang ’em higher, then we’re going to fix this thing. But the reality of it is it is not going to happen. We actually do have to look at another way to do it. Now, I’m not standing here saying I don’t agree with prison. I actually think that a smarter use of prison has got to be a very important part of what we do.

We heard from corrections about recidivism rates. This is very important. We heard about 47 percent of prisoners released from prison in 2016-17 were reconvicted of an offence within 12 months. Now, we can go through a whole pile of other stats, but really that’s what we’re looking at. Now, we can keep them in for longer. That might actually stop it, but I suspect that that actually won’t do it by itself. I personally am a believer in smarter use of sentencing for—firstly, determine why we’re putting people in prison. The first reason is to prevent crime. Now, there are some people who are incorrigible and actually need to be inside, and some of the quite good work done by the previous Government, I have to say, has meant that we’re looking at identifying those people to make sure that they are where they should be, and I’ll give credit where it’s deserved. However, it’s at that often lower level where the smarter use of prison for disrupting crime is actually what we really need to be about. So disruption can often be as little as six months, where, if you’re a drug dealer, you lose your drugs, your customer base is gone, and you’ve actually been disrupted.

If we take a bit of a broader view of what we’re trying to achieve here, and I know that when I’ve been involved in various strategies in smaller areas, where if you had actually just taken the right people out and had been smarter about it, just forcing ourselves—and it’s not just in New Zealand. It’s a worldwide initiative, where Opposition parties—and, I’ll have to say, probably my own party has been guilty of it at times—build up this whole fear of crime thing because it’s an easy win, and, again, we’ve just heard that from someone who was a very good police officer and who was out there and whose dog was well reputed. But, again, none of the things that he or, I have to say, I myself said really actually made a difference when we tried to turn this thing around.

So in the justice system, putting the people together who are in the system—and I was in Christchurch just last week and I was very lucky to see one of the initiatives down there and to see people that are actually working together. Again, I challenge the previous speaker to recall at the start of his own career how things were dealt with then. They were very much piecemeal, and, actually, it didn’t really work. But now, it’s actually a lot more smarter, and we can be so much smarter about this whole thing.

So I invite them. There will be more speakers here, and we’ll stand up and they’ll beat us around the ears for various other things, and they’re basically hoping that people listening at home will end up scared as heck about crime. That will work. If you want to do that for the next nine years when you’re in Opposition, then fine—do it—and it will probably work. But, actually, at some stage down in the future, those who are responsible for that are actually going to be responsible—they’ll be hoist on their own petard.

So let’s just see if we can actually take a little bit of a cooperative approach to how to do this, and one of the real problems that’s looming—in the last few seconds left to me—is one of the things we know we really are going to have to focus on, because if we get into the big stuff, we’ll forget it. It is organised crime. Each of the entities that came to see us, we asked them about it, and the sad thing about it, I have to say, is that most of those entities didn’t really bring that up. It was only on questioning that we really talked to them about it.

On organised crime and a joint ability, I make this plea, really, to all in the committee. It’s only going to be joint initiatives that are going to really deal with something that if we don’t deal with it, those who come after us in this place are still going to be talking about it for years to come. Thank you, Madam Chair.

In talking to the review of the justice sector, what we, again, see is this massive gap between the promise and the delivery, and I want—

💬 Kieran McAnulty: Oh, rubbish.

The member says that’s rubbish. Well, let’s go and take the core thing: this was a Government that promised radical reform in the justice sector. We had this massive justice forum. The part that I enjoyed about that was the work that my colleague Mark Mitchell did on the money that was wasted on it.

Here’s my question: is there a single bill or legislative reform that has flowed from all that big talk? Answer: absolutely zip—zero. Here we are, 18 months later, at the halfway mark of the Government’s term, and absolutely zero on the non-delivery front. Here’s the irony: we keep passing laws to increase sentences. We did it on stock rustling. We did it in respect of psychoactive substances. We’re doing it in respect of first responders.

So here is a Government that gave us all this rhetoric around “Prisons are a failure. We’re going to have radical justice reform.”, and here’s the truth: when prosecutor Simon Bridges challenged Jacinda Ardern, she wasn’t prepared to defend the turf. Up went the white flag and, just like with the capital gains tax, there is a complete lack of delivery.

I particularly want to challenge Kelvin Davis, the Minister in the chair. I heard him rave for nine years alongside the Green Party on the issue of double-bunking, and here’s the part that’s got me just dumbfounded: the Minister now has a bill before the House to make it easier—

💬 Brett Hudson: Oh, really?

—to have double-bunking—that’s right. So the member who made his career in the corrections area on the basis of undoing double-bunking is now going to make it easier for the Department of Corrections to double-bunk.

Then, the other part that’s amused me is that every time there was a fight or an incident in prisons during National’s nine years, the Minister in the chair raged about it and said they would never happen on his watch. Well, guess what’s happened in the last week in the prisons in Christchurch? Have I heard the Minister in the chair raging about the issue of assaults that occurred in Christchurch Prison this week? He has been a complete lion in Opposition and a total lamb now that he has got into Government.

Now, my colleague Chris Bishop has joined us in the Chamber, and the most interesting part of the Estimates was Chris Bishop exposing the massive gap in delivery around police numbers, because we had these absolutely binding commitments about the 1,800 cops. I’ve got to give Chris Bishop 11 out of 10 for, actually, at the select committee, making a complete wally of Stuart Nash over the delivery of the number of police. It wasn’t like there was a little gap between the rhetoric and what was actually in the delivery. There was a massive gap.

Can I draw members’ attention: here’s my maths. You promised 1,800 extra cops over three years, and 1,800 divided by three is 600 per year. Well, how many did they get? We’re 18 months in, eh? Halfway through the Government—well, that says we should have 900. Do you know what the number is? It’s 267. Now, look, I accept it’s not quite as bad as Phil Twyford promising 1,000 houses and getting 80. No, it’s not in the absolutely D minus class, but you’d have to give it a D. It’s miles off what was promised.

The truth is members opposite promised a big game, and whether it’s been legislative reform, whether it’s been the number of cops, or whether it’s been 17 months of sitting on a report from police to deal with drug-drivers, what sort of an action programme is it? The Minister of Police said he was going to deal with it urgently. A discussion document sits on his desk for 17 months, and he thinks that’s urgent? Why does it matter? Because a hundred lives have been lost to drug-drivers in the 17 months that that report has sat on the Minister’s desk. What these Estimates show is a massive gap between promise and delivery.

Thank you, Madam Chair. It’s a great privilege to be able to rebut some of those outrageous assertions made by members on the other side of the Chamber—absolutely outrageous assertions. Let’s talk about some facts tonight. Let’s talk about some facts.

Let’s have a look at what we’ve heard at the Justice Committee and, in particular, if we’re concerned about numbers and the way they’re tracking, let’s look at what the plan is from this Government. If there are concerns from the members opposite that there is not one, I’d like to remind them of a few things that are going on, and those things have taken a long time indeed to materialise. It’s very quick to be criticising what hasn’t happened in a few months when those opposite have sat on their hands for year after year and watched the numbers go in the wrong direction with an absolutely hands-off response and an ability to call out “Lock ’em up!” without any other underlying response to the root of the problem, and that’s actually why we’re here tonight.

So let’s take a look at what the Department of Corrections’ annual report gave back to the Justice Committee. One of the first things we saw was that it was the first time we’ve started to see—started to see—a decline in the prison numbers in New Zealand, and that’s where we want to keep that tracking. We want to see that reduction of 30 percent over 15 years, and how are we going to do that? The first thing we really need to look at is the rate of Māori reoffending and try to address that. That’s exactly what this Government has done, and the previous one made no real attempt to address it.

So Māori are four times more likely to be arrested, Pākehā are far more likely to get warnings and diversion than Māori, Māori are five times more likely to be charged by a police officer, they are five times more likely to be convicted and caught, and they are eight times—eight times—more likely to go to prison than somebody who is Pākehā. So what is this Government doing about that? You will have seen, as part of this Wellbeing Budget, an announcement in the past couple of days, one that looks directly at a Māori pathway that is whānau-centred and Whānau Ora - driven, and that is a new approach. That is a new approach and a structural change to the way this system has previously worked.

So instead of operating on the same basis of enabling recidivism and enabling Māori to be incarcerated time after time again, this is a Government that’s taking action to try and turn around those areas—and how is that being done? That is being done by jointly funding agencies so that we can have agencies working together for a collective response, and that’s exactly what we’ve got going on.

This is an initiative: the basis of our Māori reoffending rate being targeted by co-designing and implementing it with Māori, corrections, Te Puni Kōkiri, and the Ministry of Social Development working together with hapū and iwi to make sure that we have supported and understood those issues that are going on, to make this problem no longer a significant one for New Zealand, and that’s exactly what’s happening. The unique thing about this—the unique thing about having a whānau-centred pathway to break the cycle of Māori reoffending—is it uses the Wellbeing Budget structure and the wellbeings to jointly fund agencies so that they’re working together, and this is the difference—this is the difference

I would like to use the example of the Gang Intelligence Centre set up under the previous Government, which set up eight different agencies but didn’t fund them together, didn’t enable them to work together, and set them up to have to find that money out of their own departments, which meant non-committal, which meant no ability to collectively work and share information, and which meant an initiative that was set up from the beginning to not deliver. So that is the change that the members opposite are asking for.

That is the difference with a wellbeing Budget that goes further than looking at just trying to get the books in the black. It goes to the heart of where problems are and tries to address those by using whānau, by using the connections on the ground, and by caring about people—and that’s where it’s different: by caring about trying to address those issues and trying to put people first, in a way.

That is why there is a real difference between the direction that we’ve been going in the past and the new direction that this Government takes, because we are committed to turning around that reoffending rate and we are committed to reducing the prison population by 30 percent in 15 years. You can get hung up on targets, but we’re here where it matters—and that is people. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Well, on this side of the Chamber, we are hung-up on targets. I’ll tell you who else is hung-up on targets: the Police Commissioner, because when the Police Commissioner appeared with the Minister, for the estimates we’re talking about, do you know what he said to us? He said, “The good thing about targets is they drive performance incentives and they drive behaviour.” So yep, on this side of the Chamber, we do care about targets because it’s precisely targets that drive behavioural change. The police have a lot of targets in their organisation, and rightly so.

I think, actually, one of the deleterious effects of this Government has been the eradication of those targets. We’ve seen the Better Public Services targets go and we’ve seen a whole bunch of police operational targets—for example, just to pick a random one that members might be interested in, the target of expanding 24/7 police station coverage around the country. Under National, there was a target of 24 stations to be upgraded over the next four years; that target has been scrapped. Now there are police stations up and down the country that were looking forward to having the 24/7 coverage and they are no longer going to get it. I’ll give you a good example: Balclutha, the mayor down there, Bryan Cadogan, is very upset about that. I know my good friend Hamish Walker, the MP for Clutha-Southland, is very concerned about that.

I do want to give the Government a little bit of credit for the announcement made just on the weekend about the integrated safety response pilot, because this was an initiative trialled under the National Government in Hamilton and Christchurch, as members will be aware, in 2016, quite a significant investment and it’s an expensive programme but it’s an investment that makes a difference and it is well worth doing because it does change lives. I do welcome the announcement from the Government about the expansion and the continuation of this programme. I have to say I think that they should have done it in the estimates that we’re talking about. They should have done it in last year’s Budget, because actually the money runs out on 30 June 2019—so in just a few short weeks’ time. Actually, it would have been better to give certainty to the initiative last year, but it’s great to see that programme rolling out, and we look forward to the investment in the Budget.

Look, the interesting thing about the estimates we’re talking about, that we examined in relation to police—which I have the privilege of being the spokesperson for—is that the Minister didn’t get all he wanted. So the Minister was advised by Treasury and by the police, in a leaked Cabinet paper, one of many leaks that we in the National Party get—oh, I see my good friend Hamish Walker’s entered the Chamber. We have just been talking about the 24/7 police coverage down in Balclutha. You’re doing a great job on that, Hamish—I know you’re very concerned about it. But to go back to the point about the money, the Minister was told to roll out the 1,800 police, the coalition commitment to roll it out within three years, which is what they’ve committed to. He required $515.3 million over four years—

💬 Hon Member: How much?

It was $515.3 million—quite a significant sum of money. Well, what did he get in Budget 2018, in the estimates we’re talking about? He got $299 million—$298.8 million to be precise. So there’s a $216 million gap there. I’ll tell you what: if that’s not filled in this year’s Budget coming up next week, next Thursday—just nine days’ time—the Police Association and the police are going to be very upset, and rightly so, because 1,800 new police over three years is a coalition commitment—and I’ll get to exactly how they’re tracking on that in a minute. But they need the money, and the money at the moment is not there. In fact, Stuart Nash admits this, because when I questioned him about it in the select committee, he freely admitted “Oh, I’m going to have to go back and get a top-up. I have to go back to Grant Robertson.” Now, Grant Robertson is no fiscal Scrooge. On this side of the Chamber, we would certainly not regard him as some sort of fiscal dry—certainly no fiscal discipline. I’m telling you now that Ministers of Finance do not like it when Ministers stand up in Parliament or the select committee and admit that they have to go back and get more money, because I’ll tell you what that does: that puts the pressure on him to deliver the money, and Ministers of Finance do not like being pressured. You know, old mate Stuart Nash has done it. Good on him, and I’m sure they’ll be having a constructive and robust, I think is the language we use—“robust” is the word of the day when it comes to working round here. It will be a robust conversation between Stuart Nash and Grant Robertson.

Just on the 1,800 new police: well, this is a fail—this is a dismal failure. Stuart Nash has now been reduced to counting back to July 2017, when he wasn’t the Minister of Police, to counting all the new cops that the National Government funded and then he starts to try and count the cops—he doesn’t take into account all the attrition, even though he’s on the record as saying he has to take account of the net new police. Well, the real number is 496 in 18 months. They are not on track to delivering 1,800 new police over the next three years. This is an incompetent and useless Government, and the Budget in a few days’ time will show it.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’d like to take this opportunity just to address a few of the issues raised by the Opposition. First of all, I’d just like to say that this side of the Chamber, this Government, has averted a catastrophe when it comes to the prison numbers. Now, to go back to the justice sector forecasts from a couple of years ago, at this time it was predicted that we’d have close to 12,000 people in prisons. We’re just hovering around 10,000—2,000 lower than what was predicted two years ago. The thing is that we’ve got a programme where accommodation is being built in prisons. That accommodation would not have been in place if the previous Government was still in—it would not have been in place; I do not know where those 2,000 extra prisoners would have been housed.

I just want to address the Hon Dr Nick Smith. He’s criticised me tonight and the other day about the double-bunking and saying that we’ve made it easier for double-bunking. Now, what he should have picked up on in the select committee process is that if we didn’t make this small change that we’re doing in the Corrections Amendment Bill, then it would have left corrections with a risk of a legal challenge. Now, he was praising the previous Minister of Corrections, the Hon Louise Upston, for the great work that she had done, and yet what he was praising was this element that would actually have left corrections at risk of a legal challenge if we didn’t fix the loophole.

He also spoke about how there’s been a few assaults in prison recently. Well, assaults happen in prison, sadly; it is a fact of life, and it’s unacceptable. I just want the Hon Dr Nick Smith to know that the rates of assaults are 0.12 per 100 prisoners. Under two years ago, that rate was 0.24—sorry, it might be a thousand prisoners, sorry, not 100 prisoners. So the rate under this Government has actually almost halved in comparison to the previous Government. I hope he’s listening, because he’s full of criticism, but then, when the facts come out, we realise that he was wrong.

He spoke about the lack of legislation. Well, look, the reality around corrections is that we’re not responsible for who comes through the gate at corrections. We don’t have any say on the numbers of people committing crime and who enters the gates. But we have to make sure that when they arrive in our care, we give them the best chance to rehabilitate and emerge out the other side and contribute to their communities. We’ve done this without the legislation that they’re saying we must implement. All we’ve done is create efficiencies in the system. Corrections has had a look at what we can do better and have made those efficiencies, and the result has been that we have 7 percent fewer prisoners in prison now than we did in March of 2018—7 percent fewer.

The new justice sector forecasts made a really interesting statement. They said these forecasts are a future but they are not the future. We on this side have determined that it doesn’t matter what the forecasts say; we have the ability as a competent Government to change the future. We don’t have to actually use those forecasts as a prediction, like the previous Government did, but we use them to make decisions to make things better.

The high-impact innovation programme has been exceptional in the work they’ve done to reduce the prison population. I think that the Opposition need to give credit where credit’s due. They have done this without changes of legislation. I think, because we have averted a catastrophe, that the Opposition should really just say thank you, because this country was facing a disaster because of the lack of work that they did. They didn’t believe it was possible to actually reduce the prison population.

💬 Dan Bidois: What have you done for Māori?

The Māori pathway—thank you; someone just said what have we done for Māori—$98 million has just gone into Māori pathways, a pathway where Māori will enter from the start of their sentence through to the end of their sentence and beyond. We’re doing it through the Department of Corrections, Whānau Ora, and the Ministry of Social Development cooperating, working together. Now, these are for the hardest to reach prisoners—those Māori males 30 and under who are at the greatest risk of reoffending. But we’ve taken the bold leap—myself and my fellow Ministers—to address this head on. We’re very proud of the work we’ve done.

Very briefly, I just want to tell the Minister that he’s too modest by half, because without his outstanding leadership, this turn-around in the prisons would not have occurred. I sat on the Justice Committee on this review, and I must say I was curious, because the officials and the CEO of the prisons gave a very good presentation but I wanted to go and see for myself. So I took the time to go and see Christchurch Men’s Prison and Christchurch Women’s Prison, because I think you get an entirely different view when you’re there. I’ll tell you what: the corrections staff in those prisons had a different attitude. They were relieved that at last they had permission to help the people who they were incarcerating. They were relieved.

I was disappointed on that committee when I heard the National Party members express concern. They expressed concern because corrections staff were helping inmates with bail applications and with parole applications. They said, “Oh my goodness. Doesn’t this mean we might be putting dangerous people out on the streets?” No. What it means is that people are getting their rights and entitlements. If someone is deserving of parole or deserving of electronic bail when they’re on remand, then the fact that they can’t write effectively should not be a barrier to it.

That is part of the turn-around on the prison numbers—that all of a sudden corrections staff have been given permission to assist these people to find the best place in the community for them, whether that be out there on bail, whether it be on parole, or, in some cases, whether they remain in prison. I must say that the recent announcement of the Māori pathway is just another example of that with various departments coming together. Whānau Ora, Minister Henare, and Minister Sepuloni, the Minister of Social Development, and Minister Davis—three fantastic Ministers committed to working together with their departments to make sure that there is a continual pathway so that a person who receives a prison sentence receives all of the attention they need at every level—and bringing in hapū and iwi and bringing in their family as well.

This is another example of the fact that we don’t need to use the sledgehammer of legislation. What we need, simply, is to change—to use the tools we have got and change the approach and change the culture.

Had we not done this, we would have had a huge amount of double-bunking. I went in and looked at some of those cells, and some of the cells that were having to being used when we had our peak muster were, quite frankly, horrid. They were tiny, and they weren’t fit for purpose. There was a row of empty double-bunk cells that were no longer needed, and that was a fantastic thing to see because it meant that our prisoners could be kept in conditions which recognise their humanity far better.

So I want to congratulate all the Ministers involved here—Minister Davis especially, for initiating his high-impact innovation programme, for looking at ways in which we can lower that prison population and reduce reoffending. All of the statistics—the assaults, the escapes, and the prison muster—they’re all falling. We’re on track. We’re doing something right, and we’re going to keep doing it. This was an outstanding review of an outstanding department.

Strangely enough, the new Crown-Māori relations portfolio is under the justice review, so I’d like to take the opportunity to talk about the work that’s been done to establish Te Arawhiti. Now, last year we set about on initially 18 hui around the country to talk to people about what the new Māori-Crown relations portfolio should look like. Due to popular demand, that number of hui increased to, I think, 33.

There were some consistent messages that we heard from people throughout the country in terms of what they wanted to see from—well, it wasn’t named Te Arawhiti at the time—the portfolio. One of the things that they kept saying to us, one of the messages, was, “You know, Governments, you’ve got to stop going around and telling Māoris that they’re the problem and that we’ve got the solution.” They said, “Stop telling us what you’re going to do. Come out and talk to us and have the discussion about what the solutions are going to be.”

Te Arawhiti was formed. Te Arawhiti, translated into English, means “the bridge”, and it’s a great analogy for what we’re trying to achieve. The name comes about because of a sermon that I used to hear from one of the old uncles up north, an Anglican minister by the name of Charlie Shortland. He spoke about there being a Māori world—like a river bank—and a Pākehā world—the other side of a river bank. Te Tiriti o Waitangi was a bridge that connected one world to the other world.

He asked the question: how often and who has crossed from one side, from their world, into the other side—learnt the language, learnt the customs, learnt everything. Almost entirely, the traffic has been from the Māori world into the Pākehā world, and Māori have learnt the ways and the customs of Pākehā. The question he posed was: how many times have people from the other world crossed back over that bridge into the Māori world and learnt the customs and the language and everything? He said it does happen but very rarely.

To use that analogy to describe what Te Arawhiti is doing, it’s, basically, bringing Government ministries, agencies, and departments from the Pākehā world across that bridge into the Māori world so that public servants understand how Māori think and feel and why we do the things the way we do. Part of it is to stop, to prevent, Māori having to continuously justify our world point of view. So that’s part of what Te Arawhiti does. It’s trying to bring people across that bridge, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, into the other world. The question is whether people actually want to cross from the Pākehā world into the Māori world, because that would be telling if they don’t want to.

Aside from that, one of Te Arawhiti’s jobs is to monitor the post-settlement commitments. Now, there is something like 10,000 of them, and the monitoring of those 10,000 commitments was, basically, done—it was paper based: spreadsheets and things like that. So what we’re developing is a portal where somebody can tap in something to do with their Treaty settlement and that will come up, and they’ll be able to see all their commitments around that. It’s quite intensive work and, hopefully, we’ll be able to launch that portal properly in a month or so.

Just a couple of examples of the great work that Te Arawhiti has been doing: one, Waitangi Day. People will know that Waitangi Day over the last two years has gone really smoothly. One of the things we’ve done is depoliticise the occasion. I think, as politicians, we all need to take ownership of the mess we caused because Waitangi Day became a bit of a popularity contest—who can bring the most people wearing red or blue or green or black on to the marae, down the bottom of Te Tii Marae, and make it into a sort of popularity contest. We’ve depoliticised it.

We want Waitangi Day to be a day that we can all celebrate as New Zealanders, and hence that’s why we all go on together. We have made sure that the Leader of the Opposition, the leader of New Zealand First, the leader of the Greens, and Labour speakers all have an opportunity to speak. We all stand up and sing and support everybody so that we depoliticise that occasion so that we can create a great celebration of our national day for all New Zealanders.

Quickly, the other great thing that we’ve been doing is working with the Iwi Chairs Forum on shared priorities, on shared work streams, and reporting back together at the quarterly meetings—as opposed to how things were in the past when, basically, random Ministers turned up and spoke about the random things that they’re doing, with no real direction on how it all fits together. Kia ora.