Davis KelvinHon KELVIN DAVIS (Minister of Corrections): Thank you Mr Chair. I would just like to respond to some of the issues raised by the Opposition—first of all Mark Mitchell talking about the need for the police cells. I just spent 10 minutes explaining the fact that we don't need them. We don't need them and it just goes to show how this Opposition has given up and has run out of ideas.Hon Mark Mitchell: What are you going to do?Hon KELVIN DAVIS: What are we going to do? Well we've done it. We have reduced the prison population safely. Now we haven't done it by throwing open the doors as the Opposition and Mark Mitchell charges us with because he knows that the Government he knows that Corrections are not responsible for the release of prisoners. He knows that the judiciary makes those decisions. He knows that the Parole Board makes those decisions. All the Government is doing is getting information to the judiciary and to the Parole Board in a timely manner. I've said it before in this House: only in Planet National" are efficiencies a bad thing—making sure that judges get information in a matter of days or weeks instead of months or years. It's only on "Planet National" that efficiencies are wrong.The rehabilitation—well let me read: "The department was instructed by the previous Minister in 2015 to include a provision stating that people in prison are expected to participate in any rehabilitation programmes they are requested to attend." This clause was never drafted and guess why: because the Parliamentary Counsel Office raised concerns because "an 'expectation' "—in speech marks—"clause is not best practice as it had"—listen to this folks—"no operative or legislative effect." So they were doing something for no reason whatsoever and they think that that's being efficient. There was no purpose to that.Also if they looked in the Act section 51 talks about management plans and part of the management plans are to have rehabilitation. I'll just find that. The management plans section 51: "(1) This section applies to every prisoner who is—(a) sentenced to imprisonment". And section 51(4)(c) says the plans must "outline how the prisoner can make constructive use of his or her time in the prison (including in the case of a person sentenced to imprisonment ways of addressing offending behaviour and preventing reoffending);". So that is in a plan that the prisoner already has and they want to have another plan that has no legislative or operative effect. It goes to show that that party over there is totally bereft of ideas and they spent nine years doing absolutely nothing constructive.In terms of the mail situation we have put up our hand and said "Yes those letters should not have been sent." There is an issue though and what we're trying to do is clear up the ambiguity in the law and also make sure that we don't impact on the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act—so managing the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and the Corrections Act. So the Act as it was said that mail shouldn't go out if it was likely to cause harm. What we're now saying is that we're reducing the threshold to say that mail shouldn't go out if it may cause harm. The issue with the way the Act was was that I could write to somebody directly and threaten them and that's a pretty clear case of a letter that should not have gone out but if you're writing to somebody who shares your own abhorrent views then that person isn't going to be threatened or harmed because they share your views. Where the harm is likely to be caused is if that letter is then shared online say—which is what happened. That's why we've changed it so that we say that the letter may directly cause harm or indirectly and that's a big distinction. That is the reason why we've put that into this Supplementary Order Paper. We've said "Yes it's wrong." and Corrections was accountable. The chief executive said it was a mistake that shouldn't have been made. But we are changing the law so that nobody can be harmed directly or indirectly from mail.The issue was about individuals—in the current Act individuals—being harmed. What we're doing now is changing it so that for groups of people based on their religious beliefs their sexual orientation and their ethnicity—all those sorts of reasons—any mail that threatens or jeopardises or harms them should not be sent."