Newman Muriel: General Debates 
Newman Muriel: General Debates 
[Volume:608;Page:5189] 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN (ACT NZ) 
: 
 The Labour Government is in denial. There is a crisis in policing in New Zealand and it is trying to pretend that nothing is wrong. Well it just does not wash. Just this week it has been revealed that the police are too busy for car-crash inquiries. They are telling victims to deal with offenders themselves even though criminal activities such as dangerous driving could be involved. We learn today that the police are now too busy to prosecute serious fraud. Instead they are sending letters to notorious criminals stating: “We’re on to you. Clean up your act or we’ll lock you up.” The police are too busy to investigate car theft or burglary yet those entry-level crimes are often the breeding ground of hard-core criminals who are the perpetrators of serious violent crime in this country. 
I would like to remind the Labour Government that when it came into power 92 percent of New Zealanders wanted the Government to get tough on law and order. What did we get? We got a Government that is soft on crime and a Government that cut police-set prison sentences in half and a Government that we now know lets prisoners stay free for months while they apply for home detention. 
We have a Government that builds prisons that are more like holiday camps. We have a Minister who cancelled the police recruitment intake after he was elected and that is the cause of the serious police shortage we have now. We have a Government that does not treat policing as a priority. It has slashed core spending on police by 5 percent since coming into power. 
By cancelling the police recruit intakes and slashing core police funding the Government is putting enormous pressure on the police force. Sworn officers are now owed 267000 days of leave—that is more than 700 years. The stress is causing families to split up it is driving officers out of the force and the Labour Government does not care. Further Labour’s failure to sort out the problems associated with “perfing” is causing experienced senior officers to leave the force. 
The problems do not stop there. Police paperwork is now out of control—for some offences police have to write the name of the offender 17 times. Each day on the beat means the police have to spend a day in the office doing paperwork instead of being out there fighting crime. It is simply crazy and this Minister is doing nothing about it. 
In New Zealand gangs outnumber the police by three to one. Yet in Auckland no one is dedicated to looking at the affairs of the ethnic gangs even though the ethnic gangs are driving drugs and organised crime. There are no full-time dedicated officers on the clan laboratory teams investigating methamphetamine manufacture even though the number of those laboratories has increased by 300 percent in the last 12 months—and we understand they are now growing like mushrooms. 
That this Government has allowed that to happen to policing in this country is a disgraceful state of affairs. The police have already admitted that “meth” crime is out of control. As a result of the increasing use of methamphetamine the police are now struggling with an escalation in violent crime. Yet Labour is ignoring the problem. It is trying to pretend that everything is okay. Labour members are intimidating the Commissioner of Police demanding that he echo their claims. I suggest to the Commissioner of Police that he stand up for his police force stand up against the bullies of the Labour Government and tell them the truth—tell them that the police are short-staffed under-resourced and under stress. With this Labour Government resourcing has now become the key determinant of justice in this country. 
New Zealand is one of the most under-policed countries in the developed world. We would need 1700 more police to match the numbers in Australia 2500 to match those of the UK and 4000 to match those of the United States. It is clear now that New Zealand needs more police and that the police need more funding. Crime violates our lives our homes and our public places. People rightly need and deserve a safer community. New Zealanders should not have to fear crime and that is why the core role of government is the maintenance of law and order. The Labour Government is failing.