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:7851. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) 
: 
 There are two issues that I want to raise here. The first I have got to say is really not the fault of the Hon Anne Tolley— 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: What? 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: Well it was not her fault because this is the fault of Judith Collins. It is Supplementary Order Paper 171 which was introduced on today’s date. For a start it is very bad practice to bring in a Supplementary Order Paper at the very last moment the eleventh hour that has not been subject to any scrutiny by the Law and Order Committee and my learned colleague Charles Chauvel says that there are problems too with this new Supplementary Order Paper. 
But what we are doing here is cleaning up a mess that should never have happened and I for one have had a gutsful of Ministers botching up their portfolios because of sheer arrogance. Judith Collins thought that as Minister she was like Henry VIII and that she could decree there should be no smoking in prisons regardless of the lack of legislative authority to do that. The arrogance was so great that she ignored the advice that she was given that she needed legislative authority. I think that Judith Collins should come down to this Chamber and apologise for a botch-up of that nature which allowed a notorious prisoner Arthur Taylor to have yet another victory over a Minister of the Crown—huge expense and he is chuckling away in his cell in “Pare max”because he has beaten the Government again. 
Pride comes before the fall. Judith Collins thought she was so smart and that she could do anything she wanted. I do not blame Anne Tolley for this but I do say to Anne Tolley that when you bring in legislation that has not been examined by the select committee you will not have an excuse when you come back to the House and have to repair it again if that is the case as my colleague believes that it will be. 
But I want to come back to the comments you made before Minister and that was you said you had invited the Opposition to talk about strip-searching and we had not taken it up. Minister time and again I raised this issue in the select committee. The chair of the Law and Order Committee Jacqui Dean can verify that was the case. We put it in our minority report. We raised it with the officials. The reply we got at every stage was that that would not change because it was set Government policy. So it is a little bit rich Minister to come into the Chamber this evening and say that we did not take up the opportunity. We took up that opportunity time and time and time again. 
I say to the Minister that it is not too late to rectify a bad legislative move now. The Minister can either take the time now in the Committee to get a draft amendment and we will talk through it while she does that or she can defer the final debate on the Committee stage of this bill so that her officials can get it right. 
But I say with due respect to the Minister to have a look at what her own departmental report sums up about the submissions particularly from the Law Society. The Law Society says that the current legislative provision for strip-searching strikes an appropriate balance between the function of detecting unauthorised items and protecting prisoners from a potential abuse of coercive powers and loss of dignity. That is the Law Society Minister. You need to take it seriously. You need to take it seriously too when two organisations whose members work in the prison the Nurses Organisation and the Corrections Association both say this is not justified. Both say that this will make their jobs harder and the Law Society asks where the justification for this is when the statistics show that we have been able to reduce the amount of contraband coming into the prisons from 38 percent in the late 1990s down to 5 percent now. 
There is no justification. This will not help the nurses and the corrections officers. It will make their jobs harder. It will break the balance that exists between finding those items and respecting the dignity of individuals. And Minister listen to what the Ombudsman said. The Ombudsman said that this is a power that will be subject to abuse. You got it wrong when you wanted the authorisation of prison managers to be taken away and you acknowledged you got it wrong by removing that clause from the bill. 
What I am asking you now in all sincerity is to look at this. I am not opposing it for political reasons. I am opposing it because it is the wrong thing to do and all of the evidence was there that it was the wrong thing to do. You as Minister now have the opportunity to set it right—[ 
Bell rung 
] Mr Chairman.