Nash StuartHon STUART NASH (Minister of Police): Thank you very much Madam Chair. Under this coalition Government we are in the process of delivering the greatest increase in the New Zealand Police service in its history: 1800 more front-line officers are heading to our communities and it is not only 1800 more front-line officers but 485 back-office staff as well. Now how did this come about? Well how it came about is because in the last annual plan of the previous Government it actually said in the appendices There will be no more police until at least 2020 and we expect police to do more with less."—no more police. This was at a stage where in the last workplace survey 60 percent of respondents—so these are front-line officers—said that they experienced an undue level of workplace stress and only 40 percent of these officers said that they were meeting the promises that they were making to our community. But the surprising thing was you had over 80 percent of officers saying that they were completely committed to the New Zealand Police service and committed to the communities they served. So what we had was a group of men and women who were passionate about the job they did. They knew what needed to be done to keep our communities safe but they just did not have the resources. The problem is when you get 60 percent of a workforce saying they have an undue level of workplace stress then cracks begin to appear. What happens is that partners—their husbands their wives their partners—say "I know you love your job dear but I can't put up with this level of stress. I can't put up with you coming home every single day absolutely stressed." So something had to change. Something had to change and I'll tell you what that change is. For the second time Labour and New Zealand First came together and said "We really need to drive change in this area. We need to do something differently." We're using technology pretty well—that's a given—but the thing that we knew was going to make a difference was actually having more men and women on the front line keeping our communities safe. What I will say is everyone from the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister down buys into the police's operating model of Prevention First. This is about having men and women on the front line working in our communities and engrained within our communities and knowing what is going on to the point where they can make decisions at a very early stage as opposed to fighting fires and locking people up. That is not the way to run a modern police service and it's certainly created huge problems for our whole justice sector. So 1800 more police is what we said we'd deliver and we'll do it. Now the interesting thing is I have said that I have only two key performance indicators (KPIs) for the Commissioner of Police. One is 80 percent trust and confidence—i.e. 80 percent of our communities have trust and confidence in the New Zealand Police force. That is also one of the commissioner's KPIs. The only other KPI that I said I want from a governance perspective is that 90 percent of the New Zealand Police officers say that they have the resources they need to deliver on the promises they make to their Government. That is up from the 40 percent that it was under that Government and it was only going to get worse because there were going to be no more police for at least three more years—three more years. Now I understand my role. I understand my role. My role as the Minister of Police is to ensure that our men and women on the front line have the resources they need to keep our communities safe. That is my role. The role of the Commissioner of Police is to determine how to best allocate those resources. The Commissioner of Police has been in the New Zealand Police service for 40 years—for 40 years. Imagine me coming to the commissioner and saying "You must do this. You must allocate your men and women here. You've got to keep that station open 24/7." Well I suspect that the commissioner knows more about policing than I do. I suspect that the men and women who are in charge of our policing districts know more about how to best allocate their resources to keep our communities safe. So I am not going to tell our police officers how to run operationally. Let's get down to this mental health pilot. If that member Chris Bishop really wants to know about this in the last Budget there was $100 million of unappropriated money—$100 million unappropriated. So when they talk about a scheme they hadn't even allocated any money to it. There was no money in the Budget for it. There was no money in the Budget for it."