Mark Ron: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Mark Ron: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:637;Page:7479] 
RON MARK (NZ First) 
: 
 Firstly I welcome all members back to Parliament—I know we are into the second week of the House’s sittings but this is my first opportunity to speak. I trust that everyone is rested. I would like to pass on my thanks and the thanks of my partner to the people of the far north. We had the opportunity to holiday up in Whananaki at Winston’s home and in Matauri Bay with Dover and his whanaunga. We had the opportunity to spend time up at Whangaroa—and what a beautiful place that is. I thank very much Doug and Robyn Gower for their hospitality. 
I also spent a bit of time camping down in the South Island in Canterbury. The downside of that holiday experience was that once again I found myself the victim of crime. Although I could cry in my teacup about what that feels like when I inspected my property and found that once again it had been burgled and that once again we had lost property—that makes it about the 12th or 15th time that rural property of mine has been burgled—I was reminded of the reason why people do not report crime. It is that quite often there is no point because quite often when people report a crime to the police very little happens. They simply get a number to quote to their insurance company and they get on and make the claim. If people in a particular area do not have insurance or if it is not worth insuring something because the premiums are so high then there is no reason to report the crime. This time however we did report the crime. This was done out of recognition of the fact that if people do not report such crimes the statistics look bad. I have long said in this House on behalf of New Zealand First that the reason some of the statistics that have been quoted in this House look as good as they do and have been painted positively is that two-thirds of crime in this country still goes unreported—my source is the victimisation reports that get tabled in this House too infrequently for my satisfaction. 
New Zealand First will again be focusing on law and order and we hope to do so in as constructive a manner as is possible with the Government in line with the confidence and supply agreement we have with it. In that respect it behoves me having listened to much of the rhetoric after the festive season about corruption in prisons again to remind the Minister that he is not being briefed of all the facts. The question I asked in the House today was based on information passed to me by a prison officer and supported by other people that corruption is again rife not just in Rimutaka Prison and Waikeria Prison but also in Canterbury. I remind the House and the Minister—who is after all the sixth or seventh Minister of Corrections; I have lost count of the number we have had—that although we have a chief executive officer in the Department of Corrections who is new in the job underpinning him essentially are all the same people who were responsible for the activities of the infamous “goon squad” defined by Ailsa Duffy QC as being not only corrupt but illegal and I remind the Minister that no one was fired. If the Minister has any doubt about or any reason to wonder why the information he gets on occasion is embarrassingly wrong he need look no further than the people who are advising him. We in New Zealand First have long said that a clean broom needs to go through the Department of Corrections. I am going to take it upon myself on behalf of New Zealand First to take some things to the Minister and encourage him to get out the broom and start cleaning out the department. 
At the same time as I do that we will be pushing the Government to ensure that our target of 1000 extra police is achieved by 2008. I will also be pressuring this House from a New Zealand First perspective to pass our Youth Offenders (Serious Crimes) Bill so that we might give ourselves a chance in this country to come to grips with violent youth crime. I congratulate Judge Boshier on his brave and courageous statements in the paper over the weekend. I encourage him to step forward and inform his Government and the Ministry of Justice that all is not well in the Youth Court. All is not well in youth justice and we need to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 12 in order to save—and I say “save”—some young people. To allow them to enter a life of crime and rack up 40 50 or 80 appearances in front of the police only to then wonder why we are imprisoning them at the age of 21 for murder is a crime in itself. We are ducking our responsibilities if we do not do this.