Little Andrew: Urgent Debates — Mt Eden Corrections Facility—Serco’s PerformanceText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLittle Andrew: Urgent Debates — Mt Eden Corrections Facility—Serco’s Performance[Sitting date: 21 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5124. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition):I expected that the Government might actually have an interest in this matter because it is a very serious matter. The contracting-out of State functions has been fashionable for some time but it has always been problematic. It has been the stock-in-trade of this Government in so many areas and in so many respects and it comes from the point of view—at least of this Government—that those with a profit motive can serve the public interest. That is why this Government thinks that it can contract out wholesale very important State functions now including one of the social support functions and if it cannot contract them out hand them over to private investors would you believe for a return on their investment. This Government applies that principle of contracting out to the private sector indiscriminately. But there are some State functions particularly those involving the deprivation of liberty—the custody of those detained to serve penal terms—which in my view fall into a completely different category and should not be the subject of contracting-out. That is the Labour view and we have stood aside and watched what has happened—in this case in this part of the prison service: Mt Eden Corrections Facility—noting that the contractor that is running it is now responsible also for the guarding and detention responsibilities at the new Wiri Prison. There are hundreds of prisoners under its charge; hundreds of prisoners its responsibility.We do not deprive people of their liberty very easily in our society and we should not. When we do so we do it according to the rule of law. People know what the charge is when they are facing something that can result in the community taking their freedom away from them. They have a right to see evidence of the wrongful behaviour that justifies the removal of their liberty. They have a right to be heard in court and to be adjudicated by an independent judge free of the strictures of ministerial or other State or Crown interference. That is our judicial system. We take it very seriously when people act in such a way that they offend against the mores of our community of our society and when they do so in such a bad way that we find it necessary to take their freedom away from them. That is why we have a criminal justice system. That is why we have a system that we invest a great deal of authority in and give extraordinary powers to to deprive people of their liberty. That is an important part of our constitution and it is an important part of our community and our society.The badness of the actions of somebody whose liberty we are depriving must justify their removal from the community. It must be proportionate to their actions. So we do all that right up through the police investigation through management through the judicial system and the criminal justice system and yet we now have this slow erosion of those important public service constitutional responsibilities at the corrections end of the process. It is vital that public confidence be maintained throughout the process from the time that we send in a publicly funded police force to investigate and from the time that we put in publicly funded judges and a judicial system to rule upon what has happened to cast a judgment and to sentence and send people to prison and deprive them of their liberty—we invest a considerable amount in it. The question then is whether we should continue to maintain that responsibility as a State as the Crown while the person is being detained and their freedom denied them.We suspend prisoners’ many citizens’ rights but they do not stop being a citizen and I see no reason why when we do that we should hand over their custody and their care to private organisations whose basic motive is to make a profit. In pursuing that motive and in making a profit they have an interest in cutting costs and in doing the bare minimum so that the owners of that private business get to benefit. That is what is happening here and as I said before we should note that Serco the company responsible for managing Mt Eden Corrections Facility is also responsible for managing the Wiri Prison. So when we look at these events of course we need to ask how on earth it is that events such as a fight club involving many prisoners at a time can be allowed to continue. Clearly it had been organised. Space and time had been set aside. And the prisoners were allowed to assault each other freely in a way that no one would ever expect to be allowed to happen in any prison in any civilised country anywhere.Then we have the issue of those fights being recorded on smartphones or cellphones or whatever means were used which means that contraband is getting through the prison gates and into the hands of prisoners and is being used to record these events. Then there is the act of uploading the footage shot on those cameras or phones to Facebook or elsewhere on the internet. So how does that happen in a prison environment in which prisoners are meant to have their access to things like the internet if not totally denied at least heavily restricted or conducted under supervision. Those are legitimate questions. And why does what happened at the Mt Eden Corrections Facility not appear to have happened anywhere else?So the Minister of Corrections has now launched these investigations which will focus on the conduct of the management of Serco and as Kelvin Davis has rightly speculated most likely on the conduct of the prisoners themselves. But the prisoners are only responding to the environment around them. Typically that is what happens in highly controlled environments. It goes back to the responsibility of the management and ultimately to where the authority—the real authority of Serco—lies and that is the contract between the Department of Corrections and Serco itself. But that contract is not the subject of any investigation or inquiry. The Minister claims proudly: “We are broadening the inquiry.” Well he is broadening the inquiry into areas where questions do not arise—into the public prison system. No one has raised a question about that. There is no evidence of this conduct happening in the public prison system; it is what is happening in that privately managed prison facility Mt Eden Corrections Facility that is the issue. If the Minister was serious about broadening the inquiry in a way that is helpful to the public of New Zealand and in a way that is designed to give confidence to the public of New Zealand then he would broaden the inquiry into that very agreement and into the very policy of contracting out custodial services to private operators who are doing it for a profit. That is the real question but it goes against of course the DNA of this Government to do anything like that; to challenge or question the ability of those motivated by private profit to act in the public interest and to take on a public service of such importance as depriving the liberty of those sentenced by a properly mandated and authorised court in order to serve penal time in the interests of the community.That is what must be investigated. That is what must be examined. It is not just what has happened on these occasions which has been recorded and uploaded to the internet and is there for all the world to see and is now being broadcast on TV; at the heart of this is this Government’s policy—this Government’s arrangements—and the agreements it has entered into with the likes of Serco whether for this facility or for any other corrections facility that it has contracted out. The public must have confidence at all times that our corrections facilities our prisons are operated to the highest possible standards that the greatest possible security is maintained and that the citizens—innocent citizens; law-abiding citizens—are protected. Of course there will be gradations of security but for those who are prone to fighting to committing assaults to committing offences in the way we have now seen recorded in would you believe a prison facility something has gone seriously wrong. If the Minister is serious about getting to the bottom of it he will look at his own department’s actions in a truly independent investigation not just with Ombudsman oversight but also involving a Queen’s Counsel or a District or High Court judge looking at the total arrangement the total policy—nothing less is required. The failure of this Government and this Minister to do that means that they are not taking this issue seriously. Once again the citizens of New Zealand are being treated as if they just do not matter.