Power Simon: Corrections (Mothers with Babies) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Power Simon: Corrections (Mothers with Babies) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:632;Page:4040] 
SIMON POWER (National—Rangitikei) 
: 
 As the Opposition spokesperson on law and order it falls to me to make some comments about this Corrections (Mothers with Babies) Amendment Bill before we all get too carried away with how well we are all getting on. I personally congratulate Sue Bradford on bringing this bill to the House. I think it is a very helpful initiative to debate. Initially I had to request the bill from Sue’s office to read it because it was not tabled at the time I wanted to have an initial look at it. I have to say that it did not take much to convince me that this bill needed to be supported—at the very least to a first reading. 
As the law and order spokesperson one of the things I will be watching carefully when the bill makes it to the Law and Order Committee is as one would expect the nature of the reciprocal arrangements between the mother and presumably the Department of Corrections. It seems to me that the point has been made well by contributors tonight but that it needs to be made once more for those who might be listening and who consider that Parliament has had a bizarre flight of multiparty fancy whereby everybody has decided that the traditional arguments around law and order should shift to one side. 
The key here is the question of where else these children would get the care and attention they deserve. That is the key thing that leapt out at me when I looked at the bill. The reciprocal arrangements around issues of bonding care well child checks and other such programmes—and in particular parenting courses for mothers and children where needed—highlighted to me the fact that the alternatives to that type of monitored progress and care did not really get a mention in the bill. The needs of the child must be paramount. I understand that as Sue Bradford put it those needs are intertwined with the needs of the mother but I will be looking at the matter primarily from the viewpoint of the needs of the child. I will encourage my colleagues in the caucus and on the Law and Order Committee to take that view also. 
One or two contributors tonight have commented about the need for more resources in order to allow the 13 women who are currently pregnant in our prisons to enter into these types of arrangement. I take this opportunity to remind the House that financial constraints have never really seemed to be a concern for the Department of Corrections and I am sure this particular initiative will have no impact on the broader scale of spending we have seen in recent months. 
I listened to Te Ururoa Flavell make his contribution about antenatal classes reading the right books and trying to make sure that parenthood would be simply an exercise in carrying out what the academic literature recommended was the appropriate course of action. As the father of a 2½-year-old I concur with him that once one has read the first book one might as well biff the rest out. One will find a way to raise a child only by trial and error and those who find themselves in circumstances where error is more likely than not deserve the opportunity to find a path whereby the child will have an opportunity that would otherwise be denied him or her. 
So National will support this bill in its first reading. I congratulate Sue Bradford on the initiative and I will watch closely the progress of the bill.