Goff Phil: Corrections Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
Goff Phil: Corrections Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
[Volume:651;Page:1004] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 Opposition members unlike Government members do not have to read their speeches. It was a particularly inauspicious start for the new Attorney-General Christopher Finlayson. In his very first speech to the House as Attorney-General—the man responsible for upholding the laws of this land—he breached copyright law not acknowledging that he plagiarised what he read from the Leader of the Opposition’s speech and he was unable to be innovative enough to change even one word in it which might have given him some ground for defence. 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: Resign! Resign! 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: Well the Attorney-General pleads guilty and should resign forthwith. 
I want to straighten that member out. He started off by talking about the failure of the Labour Government to deliver on law and order. The new Minister should take account of a few facts. The first is that the escape rate from prisons under the Labour Government was one-sixth of that under the preceding National Government. We reduced the number of escapes by 84 percent. 
The Minister of Justice’s electorate contains a prison called Manawatu Prison. When I became the Minister of Justice in 1999 I got a transcript from the current Minister of Justice’s local paper that stated that there was an enormous rate of drug taking in Manawatu Prison. It was over 30 or 40 percent. The transcript said that one of the problems was that all one had to do to smuggle drugs into Manawatu Prison was to climb over a six-wire farm fence walk up to the window and pass the drugs through. This was a nightly event at Manawatu Prison. 
When it comes to credibility I have to say that the track record of National on the corrections system in its previous times in Government was absolutely zilch—absolutely zilch. Do members know what the drug-taking rate in our prison system was in 1999 when I became Minister of Justice? It was 34 percent. I say to Mr Borrows that it was one in three—one in three inmates was taking drugs under the previous National Government. I say with some degree of pride that a succession of very capable Labour Ministers actually reduced that figure by two-thirds. I expect that the National Government should now be able to build on the groundwork that we have laid. 
I have to say too that the briefing to the incoming Minister of Corrections notes that under a Labour Government we were able to build four new prisons—commission them—without any significant teething problems. That was an enormous achievement because there has been a very large increase in the number of people going into prisons. That is because the law has been tougher and because we did not take away police numbers which is what the National Government did when Chester Borrows was a constable. It had something called the INCIS system which it spent $100 million on. But how was it going to pay for that? By cutting police numbers by 500. The former constable knows that. 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: It was his idea. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: It was his idea? Well nothing would surprise me. 
But I have to say that some really good things have happened in our corrections system. Mr Finlayson is quite wrong. We have vastly increased the number of jobs in prisons. Two-thirds of sentenced inmates are now working which is a huge increase. Under the previous Labour Government we increased the number of beds for drug and alcohol rehabilitation from a mere 40 to 500. The National Government has promised to build on that and I will support it in that respect if I see evidence that it is actually doing it. 
This Corrections Amendment Bill (No 2) as my colleague Clayton Cosgrove has said is the first positive and substantive piece of legislation we have seen in 2 weeks of urgency. The reason that it is positive and substantive is that a Labour Government introduced it and a Labour-dominated select committee got it right. I emphasise that fact about the select committee. This bill is I think the first bill that we are dealing with that has gone before a select committee. The public out there would expect every piece of legislation to be subject to select committee scrutiny and for us to give New Zealanders the democratic right to participate in the process by making submissions to a select committee. 
I say to Mr Borrows that it is a matter of shame that this new arrogant Government has come into the House ramming through legislation some of which—as Professor Hall the foremost expert on sentencing says—is mere window dressing. Some of it is hugely damaging to New Zealanders: taking away people’s right to redress for unfair dismissal and robbing low and middle income earners of $730 million. That exposed the National Government. The financial veto set that figure out; the Government was not going to own up to it. It told the country that that legislation would benefit all New Zealanders but finally here is decent legislation that will make a difference. 
The bill does a number of things. First of all it strengthens the reduction of contraband. It does that partly through creating a legislative framework for jamming cellphones. My gift to Ms Collins as Minister of Corrections—and I give it to her gladly—has been to create a cellphone jamming system. It means that by February next year just 2 months away in every prison in New Zealand—all 20 prisons—inmates will not be able to misuse cellphones because they will be jammed. That is great. I will tell members why it is great. When I went with the chief executive of the Department of Corrections to the Australian Corrective Services Ministers’ Conference earlier this year they said to me that they had not even started to do this and that we had created a role model and they asked whether they could borrow it. That is how far ahead New Zealand is in terms of its corrections system. 
This bill also enhances search powers. That includes giving the right to search staff lockers. Unlike the Minister of Justice who slagged off corrections staff for 6 years I say that the vast majority of people working in our corrections system do a difficult job and they do it well. They are dedicated they are decent people and they do the right thing. But a minority of people behave corruptly—sometimes out of greed sometimes out of threats to their family from gangs and so on. But there is no justification or excuse for a staff member to smuggle drugs into a prison. This bill quadruples the penalty in terms of imprisonment for staff members behaving corruptly in that way and it is important that we do that. 
This legislation also gives prison management the ability to scrutinise any written correspondence sent by inmates to people on the outside. We know that some inmates were abusing the privilege of correspondence: they were threatening people—often their previous victims. This bill makes it absolutely clear that every piece of written correspondence can be monitored and if necessary blocked by prison authorities. We have already done that on electronic communication. During the term of my predecessor Damien O’Connor who did a fine job as Minister of Corrections we set up a system whereby every payphone call from prisons can now be monitored. It is all recorded. I have sat in and listened to the recording and I have heard gang members try to plan crime outside the prison. That system is now a vital part of police intelligence that the corrections system can work with. 
I will finish on this point. I have watched with some amazement as a number of new National MPs and ACT MPs have got up and given their campaign speeches on law and order and I want to see them deliver on that. I will hold them to account on that. They have promised things that I know they will not deliver. The briefing to the incoming Minister makes the point that I have made to Simon Power: that there will be a big increase in prison population anyway—some 2200—and four new prisons are needed. Those new members come into this House with a claim that they will toughen up and put more people in prison. Firstly I say to them that I want to know what that will be at the cost of. Will it be at the cost of health spending or education spending? I also say to those members that although we already have the tough laws that I have put on the Order Paper and got through this House—and I make no apology for that—they must know that in the end we have to address the causes of crime in order to make New Zealand safer. 
I want to know how much money the new National Government will put into early intervention to stop the wee kiddies who are abused sexually and physically from growing up to be dysfunctional teenagers and then growing up to be the criminals and the parents of a new generation of criminals. Labour started that. It started it with some really positive interventions. I want to know whether this National Government will do anything at all to address those causes. 
Debate interrupted.