Alexander Marc: Budget Debate 
Alexander Marc: Budget Debate 
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MARC ALEXANDER (United Future) 
: 
 Before I get on to some of the broader themes I would like to address the law and order aspects of the Budget. I am quite pleased with some of those but less pleased with others. Certainly the $1.5 million that is directed towards Victim Support groups is an absolute plus. In fact more money could have gone into Victim Support because the amount of money being directed there is fairly paltry. I certainly hope that some strings are attached because the last thing we want to see is money being tied up in bureaucracy when it should be going to the victims of crime of whom there is an increasing number in this country. Many aspects of the victims’ rights legislation have yet to be implemented and I hope that this money will deliver some of the promise of that legislation. Similarly the $4.4 million that is allocated to restorative justice programmes will be of some benefit because restorative justice programmes although they are still pretty much in their infancy and have had scattered success around the country do show great promise further down the track. Again I would like to think that the money will go towards ensuring that the programmes stay viable and true rather than becoming overladen with bureaucracy as is the wont in terms of most Government interventions. 
If we look at where the other money is to be spent we see $180 million over 3 years is to be put towards the construction of four new prisons. Obviously that has to be good news because we are running out of space in our prisons. As a lot of people still have to come before the courts no doubt the system will become overloaded. The last thing we want to happen is for inmates to be let out earlier than necessary simply because we are running out of prison beds. I question whether the capacity of the four prisons will be enough particularly if we really want to put some meaning back into meaningful sentencing. 
One of the things I am concerned about is the $30 million increase in the 2004-05 Budget rising to $40 million in the year after that for staff training property maintenance and prison health services. I suspect that a lot of that money will go into staff training. Part of the reason may be that the Department of Corrections is to take back the management of Auckland Central Remand Prison and I am sure that that will boost the costs quite dramatically. Why the Government has decided to get rid of the private management of that prison and the savings it delivered to taxpayers—some of whom happen to be the very victims of crime who now have to pay twice—escapes me. However I understand that it is an ideological matter and I hope that the situation will change when and if the next Government comes into being. I believe that the issue will become one of United Future’s planks. 
The Budget provides the sum of $73.4 million to tackle court delays—and it is no wonder it does so because 35000 people are waiting for their day in court. What sense of justice is there for the victims represented by that number? It makes no sense to me that we are looking at infrastructure when we have the facilities. Why do we not open up the courts at night and have judge-only night courts to get the proceedings through in a much more timely fashion? Money is also provided to address domestic violence and nobody can disagree with that. 
I will refer now to some of the broader themes. Nobody can deny that the Government possibly had its heart in the right place in the sense of what it is delivering to middle New Zealand in the Budget. But the mechanism has been utterly wrong. What I sense here is that if work does not pay—because we are seeing a dislocation from what people are earning from work when they are then having money redistributed back to them via the Government—then maybe crime does pay. We will need more prisons because work simply will not pay. It is the Government I suspect that is being greedy. It is being greedy because it is taking the wealth off the people who created it. How on earth can this Government be arrogant enough to assume that the people who created the wealth ought not to keep it? It is their labours that put the wealth together. This Government which arrogantly says that those people are being greedy needs to look at itself. For example it wants $21 million to sell this Budget to the public and that is nothing more than a vote-grabbing exercise. The Government is being greedy not the people who created the wealth.