Goff Phil: General Debate 
Goff Phil: General Debate 
[Volume:647;Page:16685] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Minister of Defence) 
: 
 When I attended the Sikh temple in Takanini with John Key on Sunday I thought that it was an exercise of bipartisan concern by members across the floor of the House for the family of— 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: I am reluctant to do this but I seek leave to table what the Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft did say which is the complete reverse of what was said by Mr Key. I have the document right here and I want to table it now.  
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: I thought that visit was a genuine effort by members across the House to show our sympathy for a family that had been deprived of a son a husband and a father. I spoke in that light and I thought that Mr Key also attempted to do that. It was what the National Party did subsequently that absolutely outraged members of the Sikh community. I have their statement here. They said that National members in their haste to make a political issue out of this tragedy seemed right from the first day to be more interested in having their views aired in the media than in consoling the grieving family at yesterday’s meeting. I resent that sort of mean-minded narrow political capital - making and so did the 2000 people who were at the Sikh temple on Sunday. 
There is an old saying that the first casualty of war is the truth. Well it seems from Mr Key’s speech that the first casualty of law and order debates is the truth as well. Let us look at some of the truth of this situation. When I first became the Minister of Justice in 1999 I got papers from the previous National Government that showed that it was going to cut police numbers by 500. In three consecutive Budgets the National Government cut police funding. National Party members opposite were responsible for $100 million of wasted funding on the INCIS computer system; $100 million went down the drain. And National’s answer to protecting our society was to cut police numbers by 500. 
Well I am proud of the fact that this Government has increased police numbers by nearly 2000 since that time—1000 in this parliamentary term. I am proud of the fact that it was this Government after the National Government had spent 9 years doing nothing to toughen the laws on violent crime that brought in the Sentencing Act and the Parole Act and that said to people who commit aggravated robbery and murder—like the murder of Navtej Singh—that the starting point for their sentences would now be 17 years not 10 years which was where it had been left by National over the preceding decade. So we have tougher laws and we know we have tougher laws because the number of people in our prisons today is 71 percent higher than the number when we took office—71 percent. There are four new prisons—2300 more prison beds have been added—because the laws of this country are tougher on serious offenders today than they ever were under the National Government. Those members opposite pretend to be lions in Opposition and are lambs in Government. They did nothing. 
When I look at the statistics I find that the Parole Board is now knocking back 72 percent of those who come before it. I ask Mr Brownlee what the figure was under National. It was 52 percent. The enforcement of parole is much tougher now. When I came in I took over from Tony Ryall who did not have the strength to put tougher provisions into the bail law. We toughened the bail law and that bail law now results in at-risk people being put in prison. That is why the number of people on remand in our prisons has increased faster than the number of sentenced inmates; that is why the number is so high today. 
So I do not want Mr Key to come in here and say things that are not true in relation to who toughened the laws in this country. We did it. We put the police on the ground. We put the laws in place. I make no apology for the tougher stand that we took. But being tough by itself is not enough. We know that we have to address the causes of that crime. We have the strong suspicion that the man who pulled the trigger and committed that senseless act in that liquor store must have been on methamphetamine. That behaviour is a classic symptom of a person on that drug. That is why we made that drug a class A drug. The manufacture of a class A drug as Chester Borrows knows now attracts a sentence of life imprisonment. It was this Government that took the hard steps that the National Government had failed to take in its 9 years in office.