Dalziel Lianne: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dalziel Lianne: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 17 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:7730. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to life liberty and security of person. I have just gone through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and I cannot find the right to drive a car. But the member Sandra Goudie has just sat down after saying to this House that she could not find a comparison other than that we set the rules about how people can drive a car and where they can drive a car but that does not mean that we have to drive the car for everyone. That was her response to our statement from this side of the House that the right to liberty is a fundamental human right and that only the State has the circumstances where it can deprive individuals of their liberty. That is something that sits only within the role of the State and I am firmly of the view that it is wrong to generate private profit from the deprivation of liberty. Yet that member thinks that driving a car is a comparison to undermining one of the basic tenets of our New Zealand democracy. I am quite appalled. 
What that member is challenging us to do is to set aside matters of principle. Never mind the fact that National members are driven by an ideology which is that public is bad and private is good no matter what. In response I ask members which sector caused the greatest global meltdown in the financial markets. Was it the public sector or the private sector? 
Hon Members 
: Private sector. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: It was the private sector. I think we are agreed on that. But members on that side of the House have this mantra: if it is public it is bad; if it is private it is good. The legislation that we are debating here in this House is ideological but that member has challenged members on this side of the House not to deal with the bill on philosophical grounds. 
Moving away from the right to liberty being fundamental and the role of the State in terms of the deprivation of liberty let us look at the costs. I think that member has not read her own report possibly because this particular piece of information came from the Department of Corrections. But is it to be found within the body of the report back from the Law and Order Committee as part of the general report back? No it is in the Labour minority report. 
Let us look at the information about costs. The Auckland Central Remand Prison our one experience of the privatised model was under private management from 1 July 2004 to 30 June 2005. When we look at operating costs only we see that they were $35700 per prisoner and it cost $57280 per prisoner if we include property-related overheads. Let us look at remand prisoners held in the public prisons during exactly that same period 1 July 2004 to 30 June 2005. Operating costs per prisoner were $32000 as compared with $35700 under private management and when we include property-related overheads we see that the cost was $50208 compared with $57280. The rest of the country did better than the Auckland Central Remand Prison. 
Sandra Goudie 
: Try comparing apples with apples. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: That member says that we are not really comparing apples with apples because the Auckland Central Remand Prison had extra costs—it was Auckland-based and there were probably other pressures on in Auckland. So let us look at the Auckland Central Remand Prison under public management from 1 July 2005 to 30 June 2006. Costs have of course gone up because it is a year later. Let us see what the figures look like. Operating costs per prisoner were $33900 compared with $35700 under private management. When we include property-related overheads it was $55853 compared with $57280 under private management. So the Government’s proposition fails from first base. 
The evidence from the one example where we had the private management of a public prison shows that it was more expensive to privatise the management of the prison than it was to run it publicly. 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: Why are we doing this? 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: I have no idea. It is purely ideological from the Government’s position. It simply believes that it has to give those people who want to be involved in the privatisation of a core public function access to what essentially is the money that would be put into our public system anyway. There is no value to be offered to the New Zealand public in return for the opening up of prison management. 
I know that the Government likes to present this move as competition as opposed to privatisation but it is clearly the privatisation of a core State function and I do not think that the public will see it in any other way shape or form. Of course the Prime Minister was on record when he was the Leader of the Opposition as saying that there would be no privatisation in National’s first term in office. So goodness knows what it has on its table for next time— 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: There won’t be a next time. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
:—but I suspect it will all come out during the election campaign. There will not be a next time because the public will know exactly what National means by the word “competition”. They know that that will simply be code for privatisation. 
There is another point that the member has not focused on at all and that is the question raised by my colleague—the separation of accountability from performance. We have very strict measures in place to ensure that there is proper accountability for the Department of Corrections to this place to Parliament. We have the select committee that gives oversight to the functions of the Department of Corrections. We have the Official Information Act. We have the use of parliamentary written and oral questions. We have the Auditor-General who at this stage has unfettered access to Government departments and to agencies to inquire into any matter where he or she feels it is appropriate to do so. Then of course we have the role of the Ombudsman which is a very specific role as it relates to prisons. What happens when the management function is privatised? All of these checks and balances go out the window. 
Sandra Goudie 
: Ha ha! 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: The chair of the select committee is laughing. She thinks that is very funny. I do not think it is very funny because I think one of the reasons why the Government wants to create this arm’s-length mechanism is to ensure that it does not have accountability for one of our most important public roles. 
I alert the House to the fact that when we come to the Committee stage my colleague the Hon Rick Barker intends to put forward three amendments. The first will re-instigate the role of the Ombudsman. It will give the Ombudsman complete and unrestricted access to any contracted prison and to prisoners prison records and prison staff to ensure that it can carry out the duties and responsibilities of the Ombudsman’s office in a similar manner as if the contracted prison was a prison run by the Department of Corrections. He will also propose that the Office of the Auditor-General have exactly the same rights in terms of complete and unrestricted access to all aspects of a contracted prison. 
The third amendment that the Hon Rick Barker will put forward is to ensure that there is no contract for the running of a prison under the Act for more than 3 years and certainly no automatic right or expectation of renewal. That is because we want to send a very strong message to those who wish to think about going down this track again: we will do what we did previously. It is not cost-effective to privatise this function. Setting aside all of the principled arguments that we would put to this House Labour will overturn the privatisation agenda of this Government after the next election. Therefore there is no point in any private business going down the pathway of taking advantage of any of these measures. With this amendment we will ensure that at the end of the contract period that contract will not be renewed and indeed we will not be in a position to see any future privatisation agenda take hold in this country. 
I think that the Government is being quite dishonest in terms of the lack of oversight and also in its lack of transparency in terms of the actual costs of the experience that we have had. We could use many overseas examples of private prisons where the costs are higher the rate of suicides is higher the rate of escapes is higher and the cost-benefit as well simply does not stack up. I think on every level this proposition fails and Labour will not be supporting the passage of this bill.