Goff Phil: Corrections Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Goff Phil: Corrections Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 13 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:7834. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) 
: 
 I was hoping that the Minister in the chair the Minister of Corrections might take the opportunity to answer some of the relevant questions put to her by my colleague Charles Chauvel but perhaps I can add to those questions and seek a response from her on them. As she will know the Opposition worked constructively on this bill the Corrections Amendment Bill. We did not oppose everything. We got some changes that we needed to have. Maybe the Minister could explain to us for example why the original bill wanted to have strip-searching without the approval of the manager of the prison. That seemed a crazy idea to members on both sides of the Law and Order Committee and we were able to get some changes. But there were some areas very clearly where no changes were made because there were ideological differences. 
I should say that the privatisation of prisons is an ideological view. Maintaining prisons within the State sector and having decisions made about the liberty of people and the rights of people who have their liberty and rights properly removed by the courts—we do not believe that that should be subject to a profit motive or a commercial organisation. But I wonder whether the Minister actually read some of the submissions that were made to the select committee by some fairly authoritative groups. We are not talking about people who came in with nutty submissions; we are talking about very thoughtful people with a lot of experience in the prison system who came in with questions and suggestions. 
If I look at the delegation of authority to private contractors for security classification or for temporary release from prison for example it was argued very strongly by people like the prison officers themselves that it was inappropriate for the chief executive to lose control over private contractors by delegating power to them. Both the Corrections Association and the Public Service Association made that point. JustSpeak which is a group that focuses very much on how our prisons are run considered that delegating the chief executive’s powers to contractors breaks the chain of accountability through the chief executive to the Minister in Parliament and I think that was a fair point as well. 
Another group is the Human Rights Foundation. The Human Rights Foundation receives funding from the Government because it performs an important role and everybody in this Chamber respects and wants to safeguard the human rights of all New Zealanders. Some New Zealanders who commit serious crimes lose some of their rights but they do not lose all of their rights. The Human Rights Foundation considered that delegating the chief executive’s power to private providers—in particular the powers of temporary release and removal and the powers relating to security classification—increased the risk of human rights violation. The foundation was less convinced that a private provider working under a profit motive would uphold those rights because their motive of course is that they are running a business. They see it only as running a business. Therefore they will cut corners and if that comes at the expense of rights that are properly retained by detainees then they will do that. 
Some submitters considered that giving certain powers to private prison contractors would create perverse financial incentives. In particular you have got financial penalties for escapes. In one sense that is quite good. It sharpens up their act to try to make sure that they are managing the prison properly albeit the private providers because they are out to make a profit have cut the staffing-inmate ratios they have reduced the conditions of employment of those who are working there and they have less concern about the security of the public. If it is going to cost them money to do it they do not want to do it. So the Government decided to counter that natural tendency of bringing the profit motive into prisons. It would penalise private contractors that allowed escapes for example—or where escapes occurred in that regime—by putting financial disincentives in. But because you have got financial penalties for escapes the submitters put to us—and I think it was a fair point—that private prisons would be less likely to grant temporary release even where it might be justified or to assign low-security classifications where it might be justified. 
So you have these important submitters like the Law Society the Human Rights Foundation the Corrections Association and JustSpeak. You have got the Ombudsman which raised concerns about these sorts of issues. 
 What I want to know is really given the experience of Serco as the private contractor that runs Mt Eden Corrections Facility and as the private contractor to which the Minister has given the contract for the new Wiri Prison it is going to make $1 billion over the next 25 years—$1 billion it is going to make from the taxpayer’s money to run prisons—and that money is going to go out of the country and back to the shareholders in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Well that is not a very good idea for a start. But the Minister must have looked at the record of Serco both in New Zealand and overseas. She must have looked at the fact that out of the 34 conduct standards or performance standards it failed 19 of those. That must worry the Minister. 
This is a brand new prison. You know it is the easiest prison in the country to run because it was built to modern standards by the previous Government. I signed that off personally. It is much easier to manage that prison yet Serco has failed. It has released people who were not meant to be released. It has detained people who were meant to be released. There was at least one escape there. The track record really is pretty poor. You might say “Well it’s a settling-in period it’s teething.” But if you look at the record of Serco in Australia in running its immigration detention centres such as Villawood in Sydney and if you look at its record in running health institutions in the United Kingdom a common theme comes through of what happens when Serco is put in charge and that is that it tries to cut its costs by cutting staffing and when it is understaffed problems occur. There are breaches of human rights; there are things that should not happen. The security of the public is lessened and the service it is provided with is not as good as it should be. 
I wonder whether the Minister has looked at that record and if she has looked at that record why she gave Serco a contract for Wiri Prison out of which it boasted to the London Stock Exchange it will make $30 million a year. 
We have seen these submissions to the select committee. Responsible experienced articulate people are saying: “There are these problems here. You should not be going further down the track.” but still the Minister persists in doing that. I think she owes the House an explanation as to why she has continued down this track when there is no evidence at all that the privatisation of prisons is going to improve the quality of the prisons and reduce the cost to the taxpayer. To the contrary I think it will increase the cost to the taxpayer and the country. That money will go out of the country and the quality of the service will be less. You cannot compare Mt Eden with some of the ancient prisons we have got yet Serco did not succeed in meeting its quality performance standards in its first year. As we have seen overseas it might get better but then inevitably there are problems as the profit motive comes in and it cuts corners and that comes at a cost to public security and the proper incarceration of people in this country. 
So that was the first of the issues and it is fundamental to this bill. It is set out under clause 5 “Delegation of powers and functions of chief executive” and I think the Minister needs to answer those questions. She has had advice from her officials. She should be equipped to answer those questions. But I have got to say that listening carefully to all of the submissions that were given these submissions were powerful submissions they made compelling points and we have not seen any evidence that would justify the ideological viewpoint that somehow the privatisation of prisons is best. Is this just another way of cost cutting? That is what it seems to be to many people in this House across a range of different political parties. 
Privatisation does not deliver what we want. It does not deliver the level of security it does not deliver the quality of services it does not maintain the rights that need to be respected it puts the staff of the prisons at risk because it cuts the staffing and it puts the security of the public at risk. I do not think that is good enough and I think there should be an explanation on those points. 
I want to come—and I will only just start to touch on this—to clause 26 “Definition of strip search”. Look I understand that you have got difficult people in prison whom you are dealing with I understand that you have to have a way of preventing contraband entering prisons and I understand that there are times when the most intrusive form of strip-searching may be justified. That is recognised under the current law which says that if the prison manager has reasonable cause to suspect then he can employ that most intrusive means—that is the use of illumination the use of mirrors around the genital and the anal areas. But the current law also makes another point which is that where somebody is simply coming back from a work party into the prison and there is no cause to suspect subjecting people to that form of intrusive strip-searching just is not justified—just is not justified. 
We heard again a range of submissions that made that point very clearly. The first point of course was made by the people who work in the prisons. You know you would expect them to be pretty hard-headed about their decisions. But the Corrections Association itself acknowledged that this change—to have the most intrusive form of strip-searching on every occasion including routine occasions—was going to have a detrimental effect on relationships within the prison. The association said to us that it did not support the provision. It was unequivocal about that. It said that it is simply not needed and that it would constitute a serious impingement on the dignity of prisoners and also on the staff having to conduct those searches because it is awful for the inmate but it is equally awful for the staff member who has got to conduct a search of that nature. 
The association made this point—and Minister I want you to focus specifically on this point. It said: “If we’ve got a real cause to suspect that somebody has concealed a drug or other form of contraband internally what we do is we put them in a dry cell and nature inevitably takes its course.” If they are concealing something internally that object will sooner or later be passed by the prisoner in the dry cell and the prisoner will have no way of concealing it no way of hiding it. What is more when we went to Rimutaka Prison—Jacqui Dean was there and it was a cross-party group; it was a very good visit—in front of my colleagues I asked the manager whether if a person has actually got something concealed internally this intrusive form of strip-searching will reveal that object. His answer—and Jacqui and Asenati and the others who were with me will back this up—was: “No we won’t be able to tell.” So you are bringing in this intrusive form of strip-searching which the managers and the staff say is not the right way to find concealed objects. 
The association pointed out as well that if there is good cause to believe that there is a concealed object the staff can use scanning and they can use what is called the BOSS chair which I think is in one of the Auckland prisons—the Paremoremo maximum security prison. There are other ways of doing it that are more effective. But the association made this point as well and this was a point made by the Law Society particularly strongly. It asked first of all where the evidence was that we need to increase the intrusiveness of strip-searching because there is a growing problem. It said actually that the opposite is occurring. 
When I was shadow Minister of Corrections back in the late 1990s I was appalled. I remember going to the prison in Linton actually in my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway’s electorate. I think the security was a seven-wire fence and open windows. But I was appalled that 36 percent of the inmates after a long period of a National Government were testing positive for drugs. That was just not good enough. You know it was easier to get drugs inside the prison than outside it. 
Labour brought in a range of measures—a range of measures—that actually tightened the security in prisons. Both as Minister of Justice when I supported it and as Minister of Corrections when I did it we managed to get the level of positive testing for drugs down from 36 percent to 5 percent by the time the National Party took office in 2009-10. So actually we dramatically improved the situation of security in prisons so that people were not able to smuggle objects in. Of course we closed off the cellphones by jamming the cellphones so there is not the order and supply that there used to be back in the 1990s under the National Government. These measures are working. [ 
Bell rung 
] Mr Chairman.