Coddington Deborah: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Coddington Deborah: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
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DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 We have heard a lot in this debate about women and mothers. I think the whole House loses from the decision by the leader of the National Party that women who disagree will be moved back and I look forward to the day that Katherine Rich is back on the front bench. 
We have heard from the leader of New Zealand First who has suddenly discovered motherhood. He has a very good mother in his caucus. She is on the back bench; we look forward to the day when she is moved forward to the front bench. I applaud the mothers on the other side of the House. Labour is the only party that has a mother and daughter in the House. But I am proud to be a member of the ACT caucus. The three mothers in the ACT caucus have 11 children between them and that is quite an achievement. However I think it was typical of the Prime Minister’s speech that she absolutely ignored the biggest problem facing women in this country today. If the Prime Minister really wanted to make this country one where women could feel safe and confident she would have stood up and said that the No. 1 problem facing women in this country—facing mothers and their children—is violent crime. She would have stood up and said she was as mad as hell and that she would not take it any more. 
What has happened to this country’s safety and security when an 83-year-old woman can spend the autumn years of her life travelling all around the world only to return to her home town of Marton—a small town where she had lived for 45 years—to be stabbed to death in her own home? 
 The same week just 40 kilometres away in Wanganui a 20-year-old girl was found floating naked in the river on the morning of her birthday. She died of massive head injuries. Mrs Morris had never hurt anyone as far as we know. She had worked all her life bringing up nine children in another house in the same street in which she was finally killed. She had 33 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren. One of her adult sons told the local newspaper about his mother’s energy. He said: “The generation that made its own butter is always busy.” That just about sums up that generation. People worked for what they got. They got nothing for doing nothing. 
As the days go past the trail of those murders grows cold. The committed and outstanding detectives we have in our police force are hugely under-resourced. They are stretched to the limit every time two or more homicides occur. Our defence is so under-resourced that violent criminals literally get away with murder. Crime pays because police resources are directed at handing out traffic fines. As we heard earlier when the Minister of Police George Hawkins received a complaint about this he told the constituent not to worry that crims were bad drivers too and that in one way or other they get caught. 
This is a disgrace. There are killers on the loose in this country and that is not an overdramatic statement. Families are shattered. Loved grandmothers mothers and daughters are murdered in towns with tiny populations. Government after Government utters words about getting tough on crime. 
What would a visitor to this country have thought had he or she turned on the television the other night and seen that so-called demonstration against the Waitangi Tribunal led by Tame Iti where cars were burnt on the side of the road and demonstrators with ash all over their faces rode horses and brandished shotguns? Nobody has been arrested. The Minister of Police says that the police are investigating and we hear that it is a matter of identification. For goodness’ sake! They have only to look at the tape. The next day we heard Tama Iti on radio saying that he did not care if it delayed Tuhoe’s claims another 20 years. That is an insult to Sir John Turei who worked for years to get those claims before the Waitangi Tribunal. If I had gone down and demonstrated like that outside the District Court I would have been arrested. 
How tough is it on crime in this country when from 1999 to 2003 1262 adults who were so sick that they had to live on a sickness benefit committed a violent crime? Those adults were not so sick that they could not go out and commit a violent crime. How tough is it when in the same period 624 solo parents who were on the domestic purposes benefit which is meant to be for those parents who cannot manage and is a safety net—and nobody disagrees with that; everybody in this country is quite happy that their taxes help those who are truly in need of some help—went out and committed a crime while we were paying them to look after their children? 
Getting tough on crime means spending much more money on training and on paying top rates to detectives who can bring these people to court so that the trail does not go cold and we do not have so many unsolved murders in this country. In the 1950s when Mrs Mona Morriss was bathing her children and pushing the home-grown vegetables through the Mouli murder was so outrageous that it was on the front page of every newspaper. There were nine murders a year. Now in 2005 it is only February and already there have been nine murders. I cannot bear the apathetic sort of attitude that permeates this country whereby we are now so inured that a murder becomes just another murder. 
Because the justice system sometimes does get it wrong I do not support the death penalty but if it were my 83-year-old mother or my 20-year-old daughter killed by some random maniac I think I would be calling for capital punishment just like some of the good folk in Marton. I can understand how they feel when we have gone so soft on crime in this country. We need tough love in this country with heaps of intervention for those dysfunctional families where the children are in contact again and again with the authorities. We need some stern mentoring with sticks and carrots so that those abused children whom we feel sorry for will not one day turn into criminals that we fear and loathe. 
I will tell members why our women are not safe on the streets or in their homes any more: it is because we have gone soft on crime in this country and because criminals matter more than victims when it comes to rights. At present the Government spends about 18 times more money on welfare than on the police. The ultimate insult to a lifelong worker like Mrs Morriss and to young Tania McKenzie beginning her career in the hospitality industry will be if their killers turn out to be beneficiaries. 
In her speech the Prime Minister said she wanted to get more women into the workforce. At the same time we have the Minister of Education Mr Mallard making it almost impossible or harder and harder for women to access good quality childcare or early childhood education. He brings in 20 hours free early childhood education for people who send their children to community centres and then what happens? The fees are put up outside those 20 hours. So now he is considering a fee freeze in the same manner as Muldoon. He wants to impose a qualification on teachers so that one size fits all in early childhood. Some of them are forced to close because they cannot meet these requirements. How are women going to get back into the workforce when at the same time the Government is making it harder and harder for early childhood education providers to remain viable? 
It is time we ended name suppression in this country. It is time we ended the “we know best” attitude from the Government and from the Department of Corrections. We need to stop this nonsense about criminals having rights. We need to think about the rights of mothers to keep their children safe. I urge the House this year to get the sex offenders registry through so that families can be armed with the information they need to try to keep their children safe.