Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Police): Can I begin by acknowledging the New Zealand Police and their contribution here at Parliament today another difficult day—a day I think New Zealand Police were nervous about. I for one as a member of Parliament welcome back protesters to the forecourt of Parliament. I think it is healthy for democracy that we once again have protesters assembling on the front lawn. I also congratulate the New Zealand Police for a very well-executed operation that saw those protesters able to exercise their democratic right to protest and leave again and I hope that we will see more of it because I think it is important that people are able to protest out the front of Parliament. The police did New Zealand proud today in their response. There were no issues there. I congratulate the organisers of the protest as well—I want to acknowledge that—but also the police who I had the opportunity to thank for their contribution because I do in my first remarks in this Estimates debate want to acknowledge the difficult circumstance they found themselves in earlier this year with Operation Convoy and the images that we all saw on TV that evening. Some of us saw them a little bit closer than that when that operation was unfolding. I think it is good that we have had a protest at Parliament today where those scenes were not repeated and I hope that that is a sign of things to come. In terms of the 1800 extra police that the member Mark Mitchell mentioned I can say that we have made a clear commitment that we will hit the 1800 by the middle of next year and in fact we may well hit that if not by the end of this year then very early next year. So we're sitting at having over 1500 of those extra police on the job now. There are about 240 due to graduate from the Police College who are at the Police College right now training to be police. That will get us very very close to that 1800 but it may well be that we achieve it by the end of this year or more likely probably very early next year we'll see that extra 1800 ahead of schedule. In terms of ram raids I don't agree with the member's assertion that the police are responsible for ram raids. The young people doing the ram-raiding are the people responsible for ram raids. Police will never be able to be outside every business or standing beside every car to make sure young people don't hijack them and use them for ram raids but what the police are doing is exactly what we would expect of them which is that they're following up each and every one of those incidents. There are consequences of that offending for those young people and so I'll give the member some numbers: 768 prosecutions for a wide range of offences relating to ram raids are under way or have been under way 324 youth referrals and 69 incidents are still under investigation. I went through with him the number of charges and the number of individuals that have been followed up on across Auckland and across the Waikato in particular in question time recently. I think the police are doing the right thing in following up to make sure that they are identifying those individuals. Sometimes it does take some time for them to identify the individuals concerned and then they follow up with appropriate action. They are also following up with the local businesses as well—particularly those businesses that have been repeatedly victimised—to make sure that they are getting the support that they need. In some cases there isn't a lot of additional support that those businesses are asking for and in other cases they're asking for some significant extra support and the police are working through those with them. There are consequences for young people involved in ram-raid activities. But the solution ultimately rests beyond just the police and it looks at all of the other things that we are doing to make sure those young people are positively engaged because at the end of the day the police can respond to events and they can respond to offending but actually the entirety of the community has the responsibility to make sure that we're doing everything we can to prevent that offending in the first place. In terms of those young people I have some sympathy for the challenges that the police are faced with particularly with some of those repeat offenders.