SpeechHon CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Thank you Madam Chair. One of the great ironies of the ongoing hyperbole of Nick Smith is that on the one hand he champions democracy and on the other hand opposes the ability for the ordinary person to have access to vote on election day. He's in favour of keeping the structural barriers that currently exist to prevent people who have not made it on to the electoral roll to actually vote on election day. So let's just call a spade a spade.When we became Government in 2017 the country faced some huge endemic issues from nine years of neglect under that previous National Government. What we did was we committed to building a strong economy and we also committed to introducing alongside that a values-based approach to governing: compassion kindness fairness—CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): That's very interesting—Hon CLARE CURRAN: —those things that the National—CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): Member Order!Hon CLARE CURRAN: —Party scoff and laugh about—CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): Order! Order! Order! The member should be debating the Estimates before us. Now it's not about a strong economy; it's about Vote Justice Vote Corrections and Vote Police. And when I call Order!" the member stops speaking.Hon CLARE CURRAN: Point of order Madam Chair. When the—CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): A point of order the Hon Clare Curran.Hon CLARE CURRAN: The Opposition was shouting so loud I couldn't hear the Chair and I apologise. I would have stopped immediately. Thank you.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): You may continue but focus on the vote in front of us.Hon CLARE CURRAN: Yeah so—Hon Members: She hasn't read it.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): That's not helpful.Hon CLARE CURRAN: —one of the things that we needed to do was to look at new ways of measuring success which is why we're focused on wellbeing. One of the incredibly important parts of a wellbeing approach is—and this goes to Vote Corrections in the justice Estimates—to focus on offenders and offenders' mental health access to drug and alcohol treatment the overrepresentation of Māori in the justice system successful reintegration and our high imprisonment rate compared with other jurisdictions.So between 2002 and 2018 the prison population trended upwards. From 2013—and you know get this: former National Government—to 2018 it spiked rapidly placing huge pressure on the prison system. One of the goals of this Government was to reduce that prison population by 30 percent over the next 15 years. That's a significant thing to do and it requires a lot of measures.So the focus on wellbeing is genuine and necessary given the fact that 91 percent of prisoners have a mental health or substance abuse issue. Investing heavily in ensuring that prisoners have got access to appropriate mental health and substance treatment programmes is about successful rehabilitation which is about reducing the prison population. That is what success looks like.So what are we doing? This is the High Impact Innovation Programme which is aimed at finding ways to: reduce the prison population remand triage support for defendants to apply for electronic monitoring more home detention and parole-ready strategies—that's the high impact innovation programme. Along with that: $128 million for mental health and addiction to enable an extra 2300 offenders with mild to moderate needs to receive mental health support.Nearly 42 percent of the prison population is Māori although they make up 15 percent of New Zealand's population. So what we're doing is focusing on improving the work with Māori; completing a new strategy with the aim of building stronger partnerships with iwi and strengthening its cultural capability. What does success look like? Lowering the population of Māori in prisons and support for victims—I could go on and on. I absolutely commend this to the House."