Bindra Mahesh: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBindra Mahesh: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5602. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MAHESH BINDRA (NZ First): I would like to highlight the lack of taxpayer funding being allocated to one of the most important sectors of our law and order machinery and the most important of our public services which is the corrections system. We need prisons to be safe for both staff and prisoners and we need them to function in a way that they will deliver the services they are being paid for. At the moment it is not happening.Serco has been given the contract for some years now to run the old Mt Eden Corrections Facility and Serco was branded by the Minister of Corrections as having the most successful and the highest-performing prison in the country. Well that is not a fact because time and again Serco has proved that it is not up to the game. There were the infamous fight clubs. There have been extortion calls going out to community members. There has been drug taking and home brew being used by those prisoners in Serco’s prisons and the reason for that is that Serco does not maintain the same staff-to-prisoner ratio as the Department of Corrections has. And Serco does get away with it.With the $30 million - odd Serco gets every year its aim is to save the maximum and send it overseas as profits because that is what it is—a profit-making corporate. It does not have the safety and the security of prisoners and officers in mind; what it has in mind is its profits and it has been able to achieve that. But what we have not been able to achieve is getting the service that we pay for. The taxpayers are not getting their money’s worth from Serco and that has been proved beyond doubt starting with the fight clubs the extortion calls that have been going out to the community the use of banned cellphones inside the prison the weaker prisoners being stood over as they call it and the weaker prisoners being thrown off balconies being injured and then being passed on to other Department of Corrections - run prisons just to cover that up. So there is a real danger to the safety of prisoners and staff.Now after the so-called fiasco the Department of Corrections has posted 20 staff from the corrections system to assist with the management of the Serco-run—or rather the Serco-mismanaged—Mt Eden Corrections Facility. Those 20 staff are actually filling in for the shortage of staff that Serco has been making money on. So now our question is: what will happen after the dust has settled? Will they be called back to corrections prisons and if that happens what will happen to the staff-to-prisoner ratio in Serco prisons? That is a question we need to get answers for. Serco-run prisons do not have the rehabilitation programmes that Department of Corrections - run prisons have. Serco had cut funding to that also just to make profits.It is a shambles at the moment. We have got prisoners absconding to Brazil we have got offenders killing women while on electronic monitoring and we have got them cutting off bracelets so they can have some free time on the outside. That is really concerning. We cannot have it and we cannot have prisoners organising fight clubs bullying prisoners or injuring prisoners and even killing them. We just cannot have it. This Minister is letting this slip by on his watch.So why are we even thinking of funding such a public-private partnership? Serco has proved time and again that it is not capable of running a prison like the Mt Eden Corrections Facility and yet it is being rewarded which is a double whammy. It does not deliver and yet it gets rewarded. Recently the Department of Corrections chief executive officer declared that he is going to fine Serco half a million dollars. Well that actually is not a fine; that will be deducted from the bonus it would have otherwise got had it performed to standards—and clearly it has not.What we have suggested is that instead of putting our own staff at risk our own people at risk and our prisoners at risk we should withdraw Serco’s contract altogether.