Ryall Tony: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Ryall Tony: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:627;Page:22208] 
Hon TONY RYALL (National—Bay Of Plenty) 
: 
 As I speak to the appropriations for Vote Police people up and down New Zealand will be asking themselves whether they remember a time when the police were held in worse esteem by the people of New Zealand. There is no other. This Parliament is meeting on what may officially be its last day of this session and we know that every single piece of market research information shows that public confidence in the New Zealand Police has plummeted. New Zealanders no longer believe that this Government’s priority is dealing with crime and drugs; they believe its priority is dealing with revenue gathering. 
Up and down the country communities know that if they dial 111 the chances are that they will not get the level of service they want. The Opposition revealed a few weeks ago that 180000 phone calls to the police communications centres had gone unanswered. The Opposition has revealed case after case of human tragedy involving the 111 system. Iraena Asher dialled the police when she needed them most and got a taxi. Then we had the folks from Te Puke Mr and Mrs Bentley. Mrs Bentley dialled 111 when they needed assistance because crazed lunatics with a gun were beating up Mr Bentley. What happened? She was lied to and the police did not arrive in time. The emergency services were not informed that a gun was involved. It was an absolute catastrophe. Time and time again we hear those kinds of dreadful stories of events taking place under the watch of this Minister of Police who does not even deign to come down to the House and face accountability for his appalling performance as Minister of Police. 
We have never seen a time when New Zealanders have had less confidence in their police force. Let us look at the reason for that. It is because of a complete and utter lack of leadership by this Minister and because of appalling leadership by the Commissioner of Police. Neither of them has grasped the full extent of the understaffing and the under-resourcing of the New Zealand Police. Right now New Zealanders know that if they need the police the policemen and policewomen of New Zealand will do their level best to provide the sort of service they want but that those people are under incredible staffing pressure. The Opposition revealed a few weeks ago that 1100 unallocated cases were sitting on the desks of police officers in Counties-Manukau Police District. Do members know what happened then? The police administration picked up the phone and said to every police district in New Zealand that it should quickly move the unallocated files and put them on officers’ desks. The districts were told that it did not matter whether the officers actually dealt with the files but the administration could say they were allocated. That is why we got the incredible situation—even in my own police district—where when we rang each of the police areas to find out how many files were unallocated and we added them up the total was about four times what police headquarters said it was. 
In Counties-Manukau we had and still have today a number of unallocated sexual complaints that the police have not investigated. We found out that in south Auckland nine serious sexual assaults were not being investigated because of police understaffing. Information that will come out in the next 24 hours will highlight to members of this Parliament how bad the understaffing of for example the Criminal Investigation Bureau in central Auckland is and the fact that the police simply have not had the resources they need to keep up. Our police staffing is way below what any New Zealander would expect of the police force and that is because of this Government’s priorities. This Government has made revenue gathering the priority over crime and drugs in this country. This Government has increased the number of traffic tickets by over 65 percent when still only one in every nine burglaries is solved and the time it takes the police to respond to priority one calls is getting longer and longer in every police district. 
I have a message for the communities of New Zealand: help is on the way. Support for the police will come.