Corrections Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Corrections Amendment Bill.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon MARK MITCHELL: I move, That the Corrections Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

The Corrections Amendment Bill is an important step of modernising the Corrections Act. It will improve rehabilitation, reintegration, and safety in our prisons. Corrections operates in a dynamic environment and prisoners require increasingly complex management. Violence and aggression in prison poses an ongoing challenge for Corrections’ front-line staff. Increasing staff safety is one of my priorities as Minister of Corrections, and the bill’s explicit powers for intelligence will improve safety for staff, prisoners, and the public.

The intelligence provisions directly respond to the reality of the challenges that Corrections faces every day and are a key part of this bill. These new provisions give Corrections clear powers to improve prison safety and respond to new types of technology that prisoners can use to communicate. These provisions also include safeguards to ensure transparency and limits on how Corrections exercises those powers.

The bill also helps to ensure the internal disciplinary process in prisons is effective, alongside strengthening processes for the authorisation and use of less lethal weapons. It is important for corrections’ front-line staff to have tools to keep themselves safe and maintain the safety and security of prisons.

Increasing access to effective rehabilitation for prisoners on remand is one of this Government’s priorities. The bill enables limited mixing of remand accused and convicted prisoners for non - offence-based programmes. It also places more explicit requirements on Corrections to deliver programmes and services for all remand prisoners. The bill also makes a series of other amendments that improve Corrections’ ability to operate prisons safely and efficiently, strengthen staff safety, and support prisoner wellbeing. These changes include the expanded use of body imaging searches for prisoners to further prevent contraband from entering prisons.

There has been a lot of discussion about the Treaty of Waitangi provisions that were removed from the bill. I want to be clear that it’s important to me that Corrections continues to work closely with Māori to continue strengthening its operations to address the overrepresentation of Māori in our corrections system.

The bill will help achieve my priorities and support Corrections to achieve its core purpose of improved prison and public safety, as well as managing sentences safely, securely, humanely, and effectively. The changes in the bill will help support corrections officers and the important work that they carry out on a daily basis in prisons. These changes also contribute to better outcomes for victims by enabling greater oversight of prisoner communications, supporting the wellbeing of prisoners, and ensuring our prisons operate effectively and efficiently. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and thank you for the opportunity to talk a little bit tonight about the Corrections Amendment Bill at its third reading. I was expecting the Minister to perhaps spend a little bit more time introducing and summing up and selling the Corrections Amendment Bill to us tonight.

Quite frankly, most of his contribution paid lip-service to some of the good work that’s in the corrections bill and some of the terrible things that are in the corrections bill, but I guess he’s just not feeling up to it. Therefore, let me go over the bill in a little bit more detail as to what it does.

I conceive of this bill essentially in two parts, the first part being the good things that the bill does and the second part being the fundamental error that the Government made in removing Tiriti o Waitangi clauses, which fundamentally gut the bill and run risk of diminishing all those good things, but we’ll go through those one by one.

The bill, as the Minister said, does modernise the Act by introducing new powers enabling Corrections to monitor, collect, and disclose prisoner communication and information sources for intelligence purposes. Essentially, what that means is that since the last amendment bill, communications have moved on, and there is certainly a need, I think, in a more modern world to make sure that those processes are more modern and up to date.

The bill also makes changes to the disciplinary processes in prisons to ensure the process is a little bit more timely and a bit more weighted, I suppose, towards incentivising good behaviour and making sure that those processes are, again, a little bit closer to that gold standard and world-leading.

The bill enables the limited mixing of remand prisoners and convicted prisoners to complete some rehabilitation programmes, and I think that’s worth reiterating because the Minister himself likes to make a big deal about the fact that he’s very benevolently providing rehabilitation services for people on remand. This point was actually the impetus for a lot of the changes in this bill, most importantly adding Te Tiriti clauses into the bill, because it was that cohort that the previous Minister was thinking of when he saw fit to update this bill.

Also, the bill seeks to strengthen the processes for authorising and using what we now term to be less lethal weapons on prisoners. It was a chunky piece of consideration throughout this process, and there were lots of really important things to take note of, to ask questions about, and to hear evidence on, and to ask the Minister questions on as we’ve gone through the first and second readings, the committee of the whole House, and this third reading tonight. It is important because it matters to the real lives of real people.

As I said, many of those things that we’ve touched on we don’t have a problem with per se, because most of this bill was ours. We supported it at first reading because most of the work was done by us, but it’s been absolutely fundamentally novel to now see the withdrawing of those clauses that were a complete not just safety net but underpinning of all of those measures, and it just kind of beggars belief that you could accept 90 percent of someone else’s work, make a couple of tweaks toward the end, and then rip out something that held it all together.

On 25 March of this year, Cabinet confirmed decisions made earlier on, on 20 March, by the Cabinet Social Outcomes Committee, to make additional changes to the bill and remove Te Tiriti of Waitangi clauses. Even by that sentence alone, for anybody who hasn’t kept up with the process, you will be well informed of that fact that, therefore, we didn’t have a chance to know that this was happening, and people who had submitted on the bill prior to this didn’t know that this was going to happen. The removal of these clauses was contrary to the majority of the public submissions we heard when the clauses were still there. Most of those submitters wholeheartedly welcomed the inclusion, and a fair few of them also thought it could go further. It would have come as quite a surprise to them, as it did to us, for them to be summarily yanked from the bill at such a late part of the process.

The inclusion of these clauses in the first place, I think it’s worth noting, followed extensive consultation with Māori experts and with iwi throughout the country, and it wasn’t something that was just drafted without having done all of that work and without having made sure that there was partnership involved in creating amendments to the corrections bill—one of the most important bills when we talk about Māori involvement and the overrepresentation of Māori in the corrections sector. I think it’s a real shame, having done all that work, having invited all those experts, having invited iwi and Māori experts to contribute, that, without even letting them know, it was pulled from the bill.

The third thing I’d like to consider is that, given the significance of overrepresentation of Māori in the corrections system, it was worth noting in the advice to the Minister when this was imminent, very late in the process, that officials considered it was likely that there would indeed be some concerns raised about the change in this approach. I suppose in one way the Minister was able to put paid to that because the Minister, as he has admitted, simply did so in the process of no consultation, a process that was undertaken on the paper to remove the principles. It was snuck in towards the end of the select committee process, so I suppose that was one thing he didn’t have to worry about.

In his Cabinet paper, Mark Mitchell said Corrections already had operational programmes under way to meet the needs of Māori, and we’ve just heard the contribution from him tonight, again, paying lip-service with one or two sentences to the fact that he has confidence that the Corrections department will indeed carry out all the necessary things they need to do at an operational level to ensure that this wicked problem is resolved. But, I ask you, it certainly hasn’t been resolved to date, and without a legislative foundation to hold those changes and all of those provisions to account, I’m not sure that we could hope for much better.

It certainly removes an important opportunity, I think, to have done something that was really worthy and something that we could have felt quite proud of. No piece of legislation is ever perfect but this one having these clauses removed for no apparent reason—and there’s no rhyme or reason to this. It’s not as if we went through a process and thought this feels a bit wrong, or this doesn’t feel like it’s joined up properly, or this feels like it’s in the wrong place.

It was simply a matter of removing an important opportunity to provide legislative foundations that address something that’s really fundamentally important, and we should all, as a House, be striving to do something good towards, and it means that Corrections just simply lack clear legislative guidance now on supporting those very good rehabilitative and those really good reintegration changes that could have been good, and particularly in relation to Māori offenders in alignment with Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

I know that there will be other contributions that follow from me that will speak about all of those points in a little bit more detail or choose a couple of things to focus on, but it feels as if this is indeed another breach.

The Minister had the audacity, I think, in the in the committee of the whole House to make this statement. He said that Corrections have got no control over who is coming into the system—and I acknowledge the fact that further on in the process he did backtrack on that a little bit and did try to explain what he had meant a little bit more clearly as opposed to what he said—but saying that Corrections have got no control over who was coming into the system is just utter rubbish. Corrections have a huge amount of control over who comes into the system. The recidivism rates in New Zealand are high, and the recidivism rates everywhere are high, but they’re particularly high in New Zealand and they’re particularly high for particular demographics and certain types of offences.

The Department of Corrections can and should have a huge role over who is coming into the system, and I really would have expected the Minister of Corrections not to have led off with that particular sentence, with that particular argument, as a deflection to the criticism that he was facing from members of this side of the House about not doing more about it.

As I said, Labour supported this bill at first reading. Most of it was our work, but it has not been fundamentally undermined. It’s been completely nobbled. We feel quite aggrieved about the fact that the Minister will stand there and take all the glory and none of the responsibility, and for that reason alone, we do not commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora, Madam Speaker. I’m really disappointed that the Minister took three minutes to talk about such a significant piece of legislation that impacts tens of thousands of people who are in the custody of Corrections. That’s just an example of why we can’t support this bill and have not supported this bill throughout the entire process.

I want to talk first, broadly, about prisons in Aotearoa, and then I’m going to move on to some specific issues that we’ve raised throughout this process. Our fundamental issue with the approach to this bill is that prisons have become the default answer to so many societal problems in New Zealand. They have become a response to poverty, to mental health and addiction issues, to neurological and behavioural problems, and to intergenerational trauma. We take people with the greatest need and the least support, the least opportunity in life, and we throw them into concrete cages where they are completely forgotten about in society.

Prisons are not only expensive but they’re ineffective and they do not make our communities any safer. An overwhelming number of people are rotting in prison because they are poor and because they are vulnerable. Yes, there are some people in prisons who have caused significant harm, but because our prisons are designed to punish rather than to rehabilitate, we often entrench those harmful behaviours.

When you look at the poverty that is being fuelled by this Government—cuts to public healthcare, public education, a lack of job opportunities, cuts to benefits—it’s no surprise that people make poor decisions when they don’t have the right support or are trying to survive. Too often, people end up in prison simply for the crime of being poor or the crime of being Māori or the crime of being disabled. Any social worker or organisation that actually works with people in prison will tell you that. Locking people up after a crime has happened is no service to victims; it only creates future victims. A service to victims would be addressing the drivers of crime so that it doesn’t even happen in the first place.

The first obvious thing that this bill does is it removes the Treaty provisions that were put into this bill as it was being developed—which is a shame, because we know that Māori are overrepresented in our prisons, and it is a national shame. We all know the statistics that despite the fact that Māori only make up 17 percent of the general population, they make up half of the male prison population, two-thirds of the women’s prison population, and two-thirds of those in youth justice residences. There were Treaty provisions inserted into the bill to try and address this overrepresentation. It would have required Corrections to have a strategy to reduce Māori overrepresentation. And it would have required Corrections to make sure that Māori in prison have equitable access to rehabilitation and reintegration and cultural activities, regardless of which prisons they are in.

These Treaty provisions were taken out not because of the merits of those provisions but because of the coalition agreement, because the Government chose to anticipate what they knew would happen. That’s not even a reasonable ground to remove something so significant. Then Corrections advisers were in support of taking out the Treaty provisions, saying that they felt they were doing a good job for Māori—clearly not, when you look at the numbers.

During the committee of the whole House phase of this bill, I tried to put those Treaty provisions back into the bill, but this was voted down by the Government, again; not because it has anything to do with Corrections or anything to do with the people in prisons but because of an ideological commitment to erasing Te Tiriti o Waitangi in over 40 pieces of legislation. I’m not saying that Treaty provisions being in the Corrections Act would fix everything overnight, but I am saying that it would at least represent a genuine and sincere commitment by Corrections to address the gross and unfair overrepresentation of Māori in our prisons. Now all we have is an expired Hōkai Rangi strategy, which means nothing at the end of this year, and no formal commitment by Corrections to honouring Te Tiriti or addressing Māori overrepresentation in prison.

This leads me to my next point about solitary confinement. One of the recommendations during the submissions was that we looked into ending the use of one of the cruellest and harshest tools available to Corrections, which is the use of solitary confinement. Solitary confinement is the practice of socially and physically isolating a person in conditions of confinement for 22 to 24 hours per day. International conventions say that solitary confinement should never be used for more than 15 days in a row, but we know, thanks to a report by the Auckland Prison’s Prisoners of Extreme Risk Unit, that some prisoners have spent over 900 days in solitary confinement in Auckland Prison. Solitary confinement isn’t good for people who are in the cells, or the people who have to manage that person in the cells. It heightens risk and animosity and it completely undermines the effectiveness of rehabilitation. It’s long overdue that we end the barbaric use of solitary confinement within our prisons.

On to the use of weapons—the final point that we want to make about this bill is on the use of weapons in our prisons—this bill makes changes to the references to non-lethal weapons, changing them to “less than lethal”, and it sets out a process by which the Minister can say yes or no to different weapons being used within prisons. This raises real concerns for us, because one of the thresholds for the Minister to approve weapons is whether it undermines the humane treatment, human rights, or dignity of the people in prison—and I’m not sure that the Minister has those things at heart, as reflected in his three-minute speech.

We’re calling for a ban on weapons in prison that are currently used that are completely violent and destructive. Specifically, we’re talking about the Cell Buster pepper spray and the use of spit hoods. Cell Buster pepper spray is used by putting a cannister under the door of the cell and, effectively, gassing a person in prison. This was shown in the Karma Cripps v Attorney-General case, when an asthmatic woman in Auckland Women’s Prison was gassed using this pepper spray. And spit hoods—the Ombudsman has been calling for an end to the use of those for people who are mentally vulnerable or young. We’re calling for a complete ban on the use of spit hoods, as has been done in Australia—in South Australia and in New South Wales—because of the risk that they can be used incorrectly and the risk that they can cause asphyxiation and suffocation of the person that it has been used on.

At the end of the day, this all comes back to the way that we treat people while they are in our custody. When you recognise that a significant amount of people who are in prison are going to come back into society at some point, the way that we treat them while they are in our custody is of the utmost importance, because if you teach people that violence is OK, when they come back out into the community, they will use violence because it’s been reinforced on them by prison guards, by the State, and by the people that they’re with in prison that violence is OK. Humiliation and punishment undermine the ability for rehabilitation to be successful, or for people to even accept the support that they need to turn their lives around. To summarise that: if you treat people like animals, don’t be surprised when they act like animals.

The final point I want to make on this bill is on the mixing of accused and sentenced prisoners. The fact that the remand prison population will soon quickly overtake the sentenced population is a reflection that it is too hard for people to make bail. There are too many people in our prisons and on remand because they don’t have a bail address—most likely because they don’t even have a home or because it has become more difficult to get bail. A review of the Bail Act is needed. The mixing of youth and adult prison populations is also deeply concerning. This really reinforces the belief that there is a pipeline from the cradle to the grave within the justice system, from birth to State care to prison, and endless cycles of recidivism. Putting young people with adults in prison—you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that that is a recipe for disaster.

For all of these reasons, and many more, we oppose this Corrections Amendment Bill. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to make a short contribution on the Corrections Amendment Bill. I don’t think I got to speak in the second reading, so it’s good to be able to make a contribution tonight.

Just in response to the last contribution, from the Green member Tamatha Paul, another reason people are on remand is that our court systems are clogged up. But don’t worry: help is on the way. Nicole McKee is working on unblocking our court system and getting justice delivered faster. This bill actually complements the overall package of law and order measures and court measures that this coalition Government is doing. While I’ll acknowledge the bill was started under the last Parliament, and under the Labour Government, it’s perfect that we were able to pick this up and modernise our Corrections Act with these changes. It does modernise the way that around 8,500 prisoners that Corrections need to look after every day are treated.

With some of the changes, which have already been covered, it really does allow additional powers around looking at prisoner communications, for intelligence purposes; some of the disciplinary changes to make sure our prisons are actually safer and that staff can put in place proper disciplinary processes. We heard about the limited use of mixing of prisoners to deliver rehabilitative programmes, and, again, I do actually agree with the member from the Greens that we do need to focus on rehabilitation, but Corrections only gets people that are sentenced to them; they actually can’t intervene beforehand. I think, again, this Government has got plans on actually how we build the economy and get people more jobs, etc., so that we actually give people hope and stop them turning to crime. Again, there are some important changes around non-lethal weapons and actually making that safer. There are times, unfortunately, when prison staff do need to use those methods, so let’s make sure that is done in a way that is overseen and done.

So, really, I think this is a bill that is important in the modernisation of our corrections system. It does add to the suite of changes that this law and order - focused coalition Government is making, and so I really do commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

I rise to speak in support of this third reading of the Corrections Amendment Bill. I applaud the work that’s done in this bill and acknowledge the work that has gone in previously by the previous Government towards developing some really practical tools to support those that are working within the corrections system. I would take a moment to reflect on the fact that the people that work in the corrections system are not our enemy. They are absolutely working towards a rehabilitation process. They are absolutely committed to turning around recidivist offending. Most importantly, when we give them additional powers, those additional powers are about supporting prisoner wellbeing. The easier and simpler ways of quelling violence and making other prisoners safe is critically important.

The fact is that people are in prison for a range of reasons that occur through society, and we are, as this Government, committed to improving educational outcomes, improving housing situations, improving our health system in order to contribute to these better social outcomes. Therefore, we will continue to make sure that those who are working in the front line, those who are carrying the burden of making sure our society and the public is safe, and protecting those victims—including the huge number of Māori victims who are the real victims in this process. It is the reality that these people are in prison because they have done harm and they need to be dealt with in a way that not only protects society but also enables them to have access to solid rehabilitation processes. These additional powers are important. The expanded rehabilitation rights are essential, and therefore I take great delight on behalf of New Zealand First in commending this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka. Tēnā tātou. E tangi auare ake nei te ngākau i te āhua o te whakawhiu ture o tēnei Whare. Tōna whai whakaaro kore ki te iwi Māori. Tōna whakaparahako, tōna karo i te Tiriti o Waitangi. Tōna kore hāpai i āna i whakawhiwhi ai i roto i Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Ngā aupēhitanga i runga i ō mātou mātua tīpuna kua roa, roa e mau kino nei, ū nei i roto i te iwi Māori hei pēhi.

Ko te hiahia o taku ngākau kia karawhiua te katoa o aku kōrero ki te reo Māori, engari ka tahuri ki te reo tāmi a te iwi nā te iwi Māori rātou i pōhiri mai, nā rātou te Tiriti o Waitangi i tuhi hei hāpai mā rātou, engari he ōhākī tē kitea atu ai.

Nō reira ka huri au ki te reo Pākehā.

[Thank you, Madam Speaker. Greetings to us all. My heart is deeply saddened by the nature of the legislative abuse of this House. Its lack of consideration for the Māori people. Its discrimination, its avoidance of the Treaty of Waitangi, and its failure to uphold what it received under the Treaty of Waitangi.

The oppression of our ancestors has been long-lasting, deeply rooted in the Māori people, serving as a means of suppression.

My heart’s desire is to deliver all of my statements in the Māori language, but I must now turn to the language of oppression, the language of the people who the Māori welcomed, the people who wrote the Treaty of Waitangi to support them, but it seems like a dying wish that has gone unfulfilled.

Therefore, I will now switch to the English language.]

The justice system in Aotearoa was born out of brutal racism, colonialism, invasion, and suppression at the end of a musket, a turret, a man-of-war gun—all of these things. It’s where the poverty Māori have been stuck in for more than a century comes from. It’s where the privilege Pākehā have had for more than a century comes from.

Mark Cameron: Relevance.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Ah, and there they are—there they are.

Mark Cameron: Speak to the bill. Try speaking to the bill.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Oh, you don’t understand—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: It’s relevant.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: —that I’m speaking to the bill.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: It’s relevant.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: That tells me everything I need to know. If you want a more authoritative source, then Moana Jackson’s life work examining the justice system of New Zealand and its impact on Māori are readily available to you at the end of a Google search on your phone—literally a library of examination.

Here’s what Moana did: he did three examinations of the New Zealand justice system, the first one in 1986, when the Māori women’s prison population was 6 percent—6 percent. Today, it’s 67 percent. Somehow, between 1986 and 2024, Māori women turned into giant criminals and all got locked up. That should tell you there’s something going on in there, and Moana spent his life understanding it. It’s all published, but we’ll just ignore everything. I’ve said this in this House about six times now, but just ignore it! I’ve said it in the Justice Committee I don’t know how many times—just ignore it! There’s a word for it—I’m not sure what it is, but obfuscation comes to mind.

The removal of Te Tiriti o Waitangi from the Corrections Act: when this came up at the Justice Committee, I ripped a strip off them. Do you mean to tell me the system that’s been incarcerating Māori unfairly for 160-odd years now believes it’s good enough to take Te Tiriti o Waitangi out of its Act? You have got to be kidding. Here’s what they told me: “Oh no, no. We do a lot of kaupapa Māori programmes now.” So that exempts you from responsibility to your Tiriti partner, and you’re the Tiriti partner? That exempts you—because you do a lot of kaupapa Māori programmes!

I’m a bit tired today because we’ve done a lot and I know that I’m wasting my voice and energy speaking to you lot. But here’s the thing, right? All of your new laws have a—

Mark Cameron: How many “you”s do you want to put in there?

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Oh, go for it—go for it, Cameron, go for it. All of your laws have a direct, negative—

Hon Members: Our laws.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: All of the Government’s new laws have an actual negative impact on us and our families and you don’t even care to understand it. We do not commend any of your bills, especially this one.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. There are a couple of things I would like to address with this bill first. The first is something that my colleague Tamatha Paul has spoken about: the Green Party’s disappointment at the removal of Te Tiriti clauses—deleting clause 7, which inserted new section 6A—post the select committee hearing process so the public didn’t even get a chance to have their say. Why? That is unnecessary. The public also did not ask for it.

Not only was Te Tiriti clause removed, so was anything that had any relevance to cultural activities. We’ve heard from the Minister during the committee stage that, “Oh yeah, we still do things.” Then why remove it? Why not just leave it in? If you already do it, then keep it in. Don’t remove it. I can’t think of a single reason to remove Te Tiriti clauses from this bill other than for sinister reasons or for the reasons that when the going gets tough, they don’t need to hold up their obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi—our founding document of Aotearoa. That’s my first point.

My second point is the broader idea of what this bill is trying to do—trying to bring rehabilitation programmes to those who are remand accused. Remand is seriously problematic under our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. It is diminishing—it actually removes our obligations under section 25(c) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, where we have the presumption of innocence.

One of the reasons we have these issues and the highly disproportionate number of Māori and Pasifika—and particularly wāhine Māori—in our prison system is because we have decided to forgo that innocence. We have decided to forgo their fundamental right under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and then we still come over here and say, “Look, what we are doing is good for them.” No, that is not correct. If you look at any study that’s been done on remand, it is not a system that works. What we are seeing here, by providing rehabilitation, is simply the ambulance at the bottom of a cliff.

Now, on to the content of the bill itself. My colleague Tamatha Paul has mentioned solitary confinement, and I want to re-emphasise the inhumane nature of the fact that some of our prison whānau spend more than 900 days—900 days. That’s almost three years in solitary confinement, basically just every day being with themselves, just on their own. Imagine, anyone in this House; imagine what that would do to you from a mental health perspective. Now, we heard earlier today from the Hon Matt Doocey that it is Mental Health Awareness Week. What about their mental health when we’re looking at something like this? It is not humane. It is not what humanity should be doing to each other. That is not what this House should be allowing our corrections facility to do to each other.

Now, another point I would like to raise is around the support for those who are neuro-divergent or who have dyslexia in our corrections system. When we were looking at rehabilitation, we heard from the officials that there was no real meaningful way that the medium of rehab delivery actually engages those with dyslexia or those with neurodiversity. That’s simply not good enough. We are not seeing the support that our prison whānau really deserve for them to have the rehabilitation experience. You just don’t throw a flyer at them and expect them to learn and expect them to change. We need to make those meaningful and hard changes to that.

Mostly the reason why the Green Party is not supportive of this bill is the fact that we want to see real change. We want to see preventative change. Corrections, again, is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. What does prevention mean? It means adequate housing. It means access to housing. It means access to mental health support. The fact that we’re doing everything we’re doing now—poverty is a political choice. Diminishing our rights is a political choice, and this is not the solution that will really address the seriousness that we have in Aotearoa.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is a good bill; it does many, many things, as introduced by the previous Government. The one thing it does which will make the biggest difference to our men and women in the corrections system is it allows for rehabilitation to be provided to prisoners on remand. Those prisoners who are languishing on remand will now be able to receive rehabilitation under this bill. This is a good change; it should be supported. I’m shocked that it is not being supported. I commend it to the House.

Oh, well, there we go; a fantastic, derisory contribution by the chair of the Justice Committee, James Meager—someone who is fully capable of giving a thoughtful contribution. I don’t know whether he’s been told by his Minister to keep it short, or perhaps it’s that he doesn’t want to delve too deep because it’s a little uncomfortable for him. I heard the Minister of Corrections in his also derisory speech—at least he took three minutes of his potential 10 to talk about some of the things in this bill. He did that thing that the National Party does, he uses a little metaphor and says, “Oh, more tools.”—more tools. Well, the only tools that that Government seems to want are crowbars and sledgehammers to tear down the house, because that’s what’s going on here.

There are some things in this bill which were in it when the Labour Party sent it to the Justice Committee which were good, which had two important themes. They were protective of victims in terms of monitoring of prisoner communications for intelligence and other purposes—that’s one thing—and they were protective of prisoners, such as putting stricter constraints around the use of force and weapons. But this Government comes in and what do they do to a perfectly good bill that’s not troubling at all—a bill that simply, in a quite unalarming way, says, “Let’s make sure that within a Treaty framework, Corrections approaches its job in an appropriate way. Let’s make sure that when it offers programmes to people, it does so in a culturally sensitive way, a culturally appropriate way.”? It’s not even necessarily about Māori, but they didn’t like it. They gutted it—

Hon Jan Tinetti: Of course they did.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: —of all cultural—that’s right, they did. They gutted it of all cultural references. Of course, there wasn’t the Treaty clause that was in there saying—and, look, one of the problems of that Government is that they are, essentially, in dereliction of their duty to tell the Government agencies how to do their job. It’s no good saying, “Don’t worry. Corrections does the Treaty anyway.” It’s the Government’s job to require Corrections to implement Treaty principles.

If you look at the Hōkai Rangi programme, the programme of a kaupapa Māori approach to prisons—

Dan Bidois: We’re funding it.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: Well, so you should. But do you know what? There’s no requirement anymore on Corrections to deliver it, because the Treaty principles are no longer in the legislation, because that Government doesn’t think it’s important. It’s yet another little chip by the axe of the National Party into the tōtara of the Treaty and our constitution in New Zealand. They’re chipping away and chipping away and on every front.

If you think about this, the approach of this Government when we look at problematic agencies—and Corrections is deeply problematic. Anyone who has sat on the Justice Committee—and there’s a number of members across the House here who have—knows that Corrections are incapable in their current form of meeting their basic obligations under the Corrections Act. Tamatha Paul spoke eloquently about the use of solitary confinement. Double-bunking is problematic, visiting times are problematic, and management plans are problematic. We have heard the Ombudsman come more or less with his head in his hands, saying, “Our corrections system is broken. I tell them to do their job, not in some exemplary manner, but do the bare minimum, do what’s required by the law, and they don’t. Time and again, they don’t.” The reaction of that Government is not to require them to meet the bar; it’s to lower the bar—“Don’t worry, we’ll get rid of the inconvenient Treaty obligations there. And sure, just make sure you make the Treaty noises.” They’re lowering the bar, and they’re doing it across the board.

More tools in the tool box generally means more tools for shortcuts, and that’s what this Government is interested in. Their approach to prisons is equivalent to a health approach by building more graveyards, because that’s what prisons are for people in the justice system—they are the last stop. We know they don’t work, but that Government—and we’re going to talk about two more pieces of legislation tonight which are designed to increase our prison population. They think that’s an answer to law and order and justice issues. It’s not. What is needed is a corrections system which is genuinely rehabilitative, and this bill in its original form was one step in that direction.

We heard the pretty fierce speech from Tākuta Ferris, which I don’t entirely endorse every word of, but it certainly made the point that prisons are not friendly, they are not accommodating of kaupapa Māori, and that is an issue. One of the challenges that we have to make sure that there are fewer victims is to have a corrections system which is a corrective system and not an exacerbating system. At the moment, we know that the biggest predictor of someone going to prison is if they’ve been there before, right? Now, what we would like to see is that if someone’s been to prison, it’s more likely than not that they don’t return and that that is a high predictor of them not reoffending, not that they’ll have a greater risk of reoffending, because we all want fewer victims. We want prison to be somewhere where offenders come to grips with their offending and can recognise the harm that they’ve done in our community, not where they are alienated from their families, from the community in which they’ve offended, and are not capable of making a restoration of the harm that they’ve done, not capable of building back and redeeming themselves in the hands of their community.

This Corrections Amendment Bill, because of its approach to Te Tiriti, is making that harder, because one of the tools is now not needed, not necessary. The good work that we’ve done in looking after victims’ rights in terms of monitoring their communications, making sure that the disciplinary process within the prison works effectively and is timely, to keep prisoners in check, and incentivising their good behaviour so that they can get back on track, and making sure that, as one member of the other side mentioned, there are rehabilitative programmes which are appropriate to non-offenders available on remand as well—all that’s good work. But if you whip away the foundation of doing it in a Treaty-compliant way when more than half—more than half; this is a mind-boggling figure—of our prison inmates are Māori, and the obligations owed by the Crown to Māori are found in the Treaty of Waitangi, Te Tiriti, and yet for no reason whatsoever, for an ideological reason, if any, that has been removed from this bill.

You know what? That party used to be the party of pragmatism. It used to be the party that said, “Look, we’re not one to stand on high principle. If it works, we’ll do it.” Well, having a system within the prisons which can deliver services in a kaupapa Māori - appropriate way, in a culturally appropriate way across cultures, works, so why are you throwing out pragmatism for ideology? This will in fact create more victims, so why don’t you get on board? Look further than tomorrow. Look further down the track to months and years, and reduce the number of victims.

I was going to use this third and final reading of the Corrections Amendment Bill to talk about rehab for remand prisoners, but a respected legal expert has sent me a text: “Cam, the Treaty provisions have never been in the Corrections Act. We didn’t remove anything from the Act.”

What we need to distinguish here, in this late piece, is that they were in Labour’s draft bill but they were never in Labour’s—i.e., Helen Clark’s—Act in 2004. Why was it a bill, when they had six years to push it through—six years and 65 MPs, an absolute majority? They didn’t progress it beyond the first reading. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you. We might actually have a real debate here because I want to address that very point that the MP Cameron Brewer has just raised. I first of all want to talk about the nature of what was going to happen here tonight and what won’t be happening. There’s a lot of good stuff, but when I hear on the other side that the Labour Party doesn’t care about victims, etc., I get quite angry because, in fact, this bill is mainly the work of the Labour Government. Most of the things in this bill were put there and were going to be put there by the Labour Party, including the recognition of the Treaty principles and the recognition that there needed to be an approach that was culturally appropriate for a lot of prisoners.

That’s because, Dr Duncan Webb is right, we have over 50 percent of prisoners being Māori. That doesn’t come out of a vacuum. I was interested to see that Judge David Carruthers said some time ago that, in fact, it didn’t used to be the case that most of the prisoners in New Zealand were Māori. They were Irish—that’s what they were; Irish people got imprisoned early on. What happened was there was a tearing away of people from land in New Zealand, and we recognise that that happened to the detriment of the indigenous people here, and it caused huge trauma because people were disconnected from their whānau. We know that happened historically. We all know that in this House. We know the consequences were devastating, they were traumatic, and they caused a lot of issues which actually resulted in people becoming criminals, but also people becoming poor and people becoming illiterate.

These things happened because we did not handle things appropriately in this country with regard to peoples’ right to land, and with regards to the partnership between two very different populations. We went from the Irish being criminalised to the Māori being criminalised in this country, and what this bill was going to do, which it will not do tonight because of the decisions that have been made by the Government, is it was going to connect the dots, and it was going to make sure that the programmes were there for Māori. Not only that—that the ethos was there, because as leaders in this country we get to set the tone.

Now, there is a really interesting article in the Al Jazeera Magazine. It’s from 2016 and it interviews a prison guard who later became somebody who was in charge of one of the prisons. He talks about turning up at Pāremoremo. He says that, when he got there, the attitude was, “Give them nothing, take them nowhere.” That was in 2016 he was saying that had been the attitude, and the attitude was changing. What the parts of the legislation do that are being removed tonight before this goes through is they were that ethos that we move from a system of “Give them nothing”, to a system which actually starts to give people what they need to rehabilitate. They need a culturally appropriate system, they need reconnection, they actually need a bit of kindness. Kindness has been mocked in this country in the last little while by the Government, but it’s a very good principle. It’s a very Christian principle, for those of you wearing crosses on the other side, and it’s a very important principle that we are compassionate and we understand.

I just want to make that link a little bit further. In the words of that prison officer who turned into a leader—his name was Neil Campbell, I don’t know him, he was the director of Māori in the Department of Corrections at the time of the article. He talked about the importance of literacy and numeracy, and the generational problems that disconnected people in their wider whānau. He talked about issues like adoption being an issue, and he raised the issue of social welfare families—being brought up in a social welfare family causing issues. Now, we know in this House what that means because we’ve just had a giant report on it. It means that people were subject to abuse—a lot of abuse. We are now having to apologise for that abuse. Those are all individuals that are not cleanly victims or not victims. Thank you.

It’s a privilege to be able to the stand in support of this bill. Before coming into this House, I had 26 years of serving in the community sector, and two of the works that I enjoyed and valued the most was my work at both The Parenting Place and Te Whakaora Tangata. In both cases, we worked in various prisons and rehabilitation programmes. I’m a huge supporter of them, which is why I’m so excited about the fact that this bill extends rehabilitation to prisoners on remand.

I want to congratulate the previous Government for their excellent work on this bill. I’m sorry that, for political reasons, you can’t support this now, but, again, I thank you for your work.

Well, the reason we don’t support the Corrections Amendment Bill is because it has nullified the elements of the Treaty of Waitangi provisions, and I thought the member Greg Fleming would have recognised the importance of that. It’s quite clear that that’s not happening in this House today, because by taking away the provisions that speak to the Treaty of Waitangi, it undermines the entire purpose of what this bill sets out to achieve.

When I think back to the generous three minutes that we got from the Minister of Corrections at the beginning and to what he laid out in terms of ambition and what this bill wants to do, those same words that we heard, which must be key lines or something—which we got from officials from the Department of Corrections as well—are that “All the good Māori things that are happening will keep going. They’re going to keep happening. They’re going to keep on going. We’re going to do all this great Māori tikanga stuff that’ll be happening in our prisons, and so even though we’ve stripped away the Treaty provisions, it’s going to be sweet as—nothing’s going to be different in any way.” It begs the question—it begs the question—then why take it away? What is the problem with having those provisions in there if everything is going to be the same, as the Minister has told us tonight?

If all these great programmes, like Hōkai Rangi—which I hope will keep continuing on as part of Corrections’ work programme—and if all of these great initiatives that enable Māori prisoners to receive the support and the rehabilitation in a culturally appropriate context are going to occur, then why were the provisions that relate to the Treaty of Waitangi removed by this Government? It’s still unclear. It’s not in the first reading, it’s not in the second reading—or we didn’t know in the first reading. They sprung it on us after the select committee, but we have never actually been given a good reason as to why those provisions were removed from the bill. The only answer we have is that there is a clause in the coalition agreement with New Zealand First that they’re going to review all legislation that makes reference to the Treaty of Waitangi. This one happened to come up first and so they ripped it out, and that’s about all we’ve got to go on, so far.

I find that really concerning, because this example of the Treaty provision being taken out after select committee submissions had concluded is just another example of the absolutely shocking process that this Government has taken, and the process is anti-democratic. It removes consultation, it denies the public having their voices heard, and it shuts down democracy in a way that has never been seen before in New Zealand. Time and time again, we are seeing condensed periods at select committee, or no select committee; we are seeing urgency being used to ram legislation through; and we are seeing people’s democratic rights being ridden roughshod over, left, right, and centre as there’s a frantic haste for each coalition partner to tick off their list of voter wishes, and it’s quite sickening, to be frank. My concern is, in this particular instance, that all of those submitters that took the time to read the bill and to come and give their time to the select committee were denied the opportunity to specifically comment on a part that was added after the fact.

What we hear as an explanation when we question from this side the process and the rationale and how this doesn’t seem to fit with some of their other reasons, the answer we get is—and this even gets given to submitters in the Justice Committee; we hear it from the Government members—that this Government got a mandate at the election to do these things, and that’s it. “You don’t get a say any more. You don’t get to have any comment back. That’s because we have a mandate, and we’re going to continue to do that.”, and that attitude of being born to rule and that attitude of self-entitlement prevails strongly within this Government. They don’t believe they owe it to the population of New Zealand to give them the right to consult through select committee and to have a say on provisions like removing the Treaty of Waitangi clauses from a corrections bill. If that’s the prevalence that this Government will continue on—that mantra, that dialogue, and that view that will continue to prevail as this Government goes on—as they steamroller things through, there will be a growing number of New Zealanders with discontent at the lack of consultation and engagement with people who care about bills such as this one.

I’ll get back to the bill after talking about the process. The bill does do some good things, and we support the fact that it’s strengthening some of the areas. It’s getting ready for the huge onslaught of new prisoners that the taxpayers are going to have to fund, and my question really is: how well equipped are our prisons for these growing numbers?

Under the previous Government, they had to change, and the previous Government had to change, under National, and that was pre-charge warnings. They were flicking people out of the justice system because the prisons were jampacked, and we had double-bunking, triple-bunking. We had Portacoms going in, and there were some really dire situations when we had public-private partnerships and had Serco coming into prisons. We had privatisation that was causing fight clubs. We had high levels of prisoner rape and abuse as a result of the build-up of people in the prison without the adequate investment in those facilities. I see some of these measures in improving the effectiveness of the prisoner disciplinary process in preparation for the appalling conditions that we saw flourish under the previous National Government, and that is a real concern.

It is a real concern because, under that previous regime, we also saw that those rehabilitation programmes became a tick-box exercise. They became an outcome or a “frickin’ target”. They came as a short-term way of showing that something had been done. The quality of rehabilitation for sexual offenders or for violent offenders, or even for things where people wanted to gain literacy skills—all of those things became condensed, and they were not as effective. They didn’t have long-term benefits, in terms of preventing reoffending. That is my concern once again, as we see this, which sounds great—that people in remand, the growing remand population, are going to have access to these rehabilitative courses.

Well, we will be watching closely on this side of the House to see the quality of those courses, the length of them, and how they are delivered. Waikeria Prison, with its new facility for mental health, has been groundbreaking in terms of some of the good work that has gone on there. We don’t want to see short-term tick-box exercises that show someone has had rehabilitation without seeing good evaluation that those courses actually contribute to helping to drive down reoffending.

The measures in here I hope work well for the corrections staff. I hope that they get the support and help they need. They have an incredibly difficult job, and when I’ve met with them and toured and looked through prisons, I’ve seen the challenging circumstances they have to deal with day to day. I genuinely hope that these additional measures, initially started under Labour and continued under this Government, do give those powers that enable prisons to work as well as they possibly can. I also genuinely hope that we do not see the increase in violent incidents when we see double-bunking. I really hope that we do not see increases of prisoner-on-prisoner violence, which we have previously seen, and I also genuinely hope that the rehabilitation that’s been promised by this Government starts to deliver by contributing to reducing the recidivism that we see.

There is a small number of people in New Zealand who commit crime again, again, and again, and, largely, a big proportion of those people have a head injury. A third of people in prison have a head injury; those people have addiction, whether it be through methamphetamine or alcohol; and they also have mental health issues—quite often, undiagnosed foetal alcohol syndrome or other neurodiverse issues that have not been diagnosed. It is those people that cause a lot of harm to themselves, their whānau, and also to our community, and they cost the taxpayer a lot of money as they cycle around and around and around our justice system. I hope this Government is thinking about how to stop that recidivism, and not just how to tick their box of targets to make themselves look pretty on TV.

It’s a pleasure to rise and speak on this third and final reading of the Corrections Amendment Bill, but this pleasure is genuinely underpinned with sadness because of what I’m hearing from the other side of the House, that the Opposition parties will not support this bill, and this bill has the potential to do so much good for so many people.

I’m going to highlight what hasn’t been highlighted enough, from the other side of the House: the fact that this bill will enable prisoners that are on remand to have access to rehabilitation services. This is very important, and it shows that, yes, we are a Government that is focusing on restoring law and order but at the same time we understand that we need to bring in measures to help people address those underlying issues that are driving them to criminal behaviour. Almost 50 percent of prisoners are on remand. One of the provisions in this bill will allow those prisoners to access rehabilitation services and will help bring down the numbers of the overrepresentation of Māori amongst victims. I commend this bill to the House.