Little Andrew: Urgent Debates — Serco—Decision to End Contract for Mt Eden Corrections FacilityText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLittle Andrew: Urgent Debates — Serco—Decision to End Contract for Mt Eden Corrections Facility[Sitting date: 09 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8710. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition): That speech from Amy Adams illustrates why even with the sacking of Serco and even with the sacking of Serco with 14 months’ notice New Zealanders have no reason to feel assured that this Government is actually going to do anything to prevent the disaster that happened at the Mt Eden Corrections Facility happening again. That speech was just another defence of the ideology that led to the letting of a private contract for the management of incarcerated prisoners yet again. That is why New Zealanders should continue to be worried.They should be worried anyway because the Minister who is about to take over next Monday Judith Collins is the author of this shambles. Here is what she said at the time when she happily and merrily—and no doubt coquettishly—signed the agreement that led to Serco picking up the contract.Fletcher Tabuteau: I can’t picture it. I just can’t see it.ANDREW LITTLE: She was certainly coquettish yesterday on television. We will see how coquettish she is once she takes up the job. She said when defending the contract going to Serco: “Serco has a strong track record in managing prisons. I’m confident that the company will bring the high standards of professionalism safety rehabilitation and security expected by the Government to Mt Eden …” That was from the Minister who let the contract. And then after that she was let off the hook of course because of her superior performance. She went on to do the job that the last speaker now does the Minister of Justice and she mucked that up too. She then found herself on the backbenches for the last 12 months. Now she is going to go back into the very post that led to the letting of the contract to Serco.It is interesting to hear her comments from just the last couple of days. She said of the situation at the Mt Eden Corrections Facility and the contract with Serco that she is going to go into that relationship with an open mind. She is going to ask some questions. According to Judith Collins the putative Minister of Corrections there are two sides to every story. Apparently the video images we have seen of fight clubs the stories we have heard of prisoners being thrown over balconies the affidavits we have read of contraband being smuggled in—these apparently are just one side of the story. She is going to go and find out what the other side is. It will be interesting to see whether indeed she now does that and sees what the other side of that story is.Well we know what the other side of the story is. The other side of that story is ideologically driven blinkered Ministers. It was a pity to see the Minister of Justice just now defending that. Perhaps that is just the normal course of events. But she is a good Minister of Justice who has started doing some good things. Why she would find the need as indeed Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga had difficulty doing to defend an ideological position about privatising prisons—it frankly beggars belief.Judith Collins started it but she now no longer has the responsibility to finish the disaster that is Serco and the Mt Eden Corrections Facility. But we must all now be alert to the possibility that she remains unshaken in her ideology and she just thinks that it can all happen all over again. That would be a great pity for the New Zealand taxpayers who in addition to having contracted a lemon to run the Mt Eden Corrections Facility now find they are paying for it for another 14 months. When I was an employment lawyer I used to deal with workers who had underperformed—sometimes disastrously in fact. The idea that they might get 14 months’ notice when they got dismissed for poor performance—I mean that would be manna from heaven. If it is good enough for workers to be subject to summary dismissal it must be good enough for poor-performing underperforming disastrously performing private contractors to face the same fate.There is an important principle here. It is a basic constitutional principle. One aspect of the rule of law in a democratic tradition is that Parliament as a democratic institution can make laws that can deprive citizens of their liberty and do it for good reason. When citizens offend against their own to such a level of moral opprobrium it is right that they be deprived of their liberty and withdrawn from society hopefully with the idea that their conduct is corrected and that they have the support or the help or the intervention they need to get them back on the straight and narrow. That is what we ask of a corrections facility. It is about taking citizens who offend against the rest of us and putting them in a facility that means they can return to society as healthier and better citizens. That is why we have a prison system. It is a question of the democratic State making that decision—that we can and we will take people from society and withdraw from them the privileges that go with living in a free and democratic society so that they learn a different path learn a better way. That is why we do it. We should never ever contract that out.Hon Anne Tolley: Labour never funded that.ANDREW LITTLE: I am not surprised that Miss Tolley speaks up. She has overseen it. She is driven by the same poor ideology the same failure of thinking the same intellectual bankruptcy that leads them to turn a blind eye to the realities of privatisation and say that when it comes to citizenship responsibility and depriving citizens of citizenship we should just blindly hand it out to the private sector.The private sector is not motivated by returning citizens who have been deprived of their liberty back to society as better citizens. It is primarily motivated by one thing—it has to be motivated by it because it says so in the Companies Act—and that is profit. It has got to maximise profit. The reality is that when it comes to dealing with people who are sentenced or remanded in prison they do not fit a commercial model. The commercial model is about dealing with similar products; dealing with a process that has great similarities so you can manage it and you can make it efficient so you can make a profit from it.Dealing with people from the vast array of backgrounds and health difficulties that they have in a correctional facility is not the same as managing a commercial service with a level of homogeneity. It is not the same as managing a production process and making a product on a mass basis that has a level of sameness. That is not what you are doing when you are managing a correctional facility. You are dealing with people who maybe come from extraordinarily deprived backgrounds—sometimes actually from a privileged background but they are just silly people and they are doing it again and again. You are dealing with people with health issues with addictions with all sorts of manner of behavioural problems that need to be managed as if they are individuals. And all along the way you are making sure that they are still safe that they are secure that the rest of the community is secure and most important that the right steps are being taken to put them in a fit state either to return to court to plead to their charges or for their conduct to be corrected. That is what we have it for.The idea—the ideological purity of the National Party—that we just hand that over to the private sector to do has now been shown up for what that is because Serco has been brought to book and shown up for what it is. It cannot manage a correctional facility. It cannot manage the range of difficult hard-to-manage and hard-to-deal-with personalities in a correctional facility.Hon Anne Tolley: Go and have a look at some.ANDREW LITTLE: They say: “Look at Wiri. Look at Wiri.” Serco has not been doing it for that long. It has not been doing it for that long. We look at Serco’s track record in the UK and it has been a disaster. I am sorry Miss Tolley. You may have your blinkers on but the rest of us do not. We have seen it for what it is. This Government if it is truly going to be responsive and responsible to the taxpayers of New Zealand if it truly wants to be in touch with New Zealanders will say: “We’ve done the experiment. It doesn’t work. We’re not going to do it anymore. We will not be privatising our prisons anymore.” Nothing less will do.