Borrows Chester: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Borrows Chester: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:648;Page:17488] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 I want to talk about a couple of matters in relation to the Police vote and we will see if we get to the Serious Fraud Office. The first matter is one that we raised at the estimates hearing at the Finance and Expenditure Committee not too long ago. I guess the glaring disappointment over the last few years has been the public’s loss of confidence in the police and their loss of respect for them after the Schollum Shipton and Rickards fiasco. That was something that had gone on over a period of over a decade—over a couple of tenures of Government—and was washed up thankfully over the last few years. 
I hope we can move quite quickly to put that behind us. But unfortunately there are a set of circumstances around the Bazley report and the recommendations that came out of that that stick in the craw slightly. One of them I guess was the length of time it took to deal with Mr Rickards. That is the system of justice we have I guess and the employment laws we had to operate in as far as the Government and dealing with his employment situation were concerned. 
The whole purpose of the Bazley report was to deal with sexual conduct within the New Zealand Police. What we have found is that we now have a code of conduct that does not deal with sexual misconduct at all. In asking those questions around the New Zealand Police administration the comments of Dame Margaret Bazley when she stated in her report that in her view the implementation of a code of conduct for sworn police is a critical requirement for the effective management of sexual misconduct did not seem to be addressed at all. 
It is a real shame that although the code of conduct covers a wide ambit and does that very well this glaring expected requirement is not there. It is difficult to word—I understand that—but the point is that this is what everybody was looking for. The delays are undermining the assertion that the New Zealand Police are taking the recommendations of the commission of inquiry seriously because what has happened now is that the New Zealand Police has said it will write and implement a document that will run parallel to the code of conduct and that has never been addressed. We are hoping that it will be released soon. We were told that it would be released in June. It is apparently going to the Minister in July which is nearly over so we expect to see that before too long. 
I want to comment on another matter. My colleague Ron Mark has talked about police numbers and police numbers have obviously come up. We have seen two tranches and we expect to see the other tranche completed within the term and I offer my congratulations on the implementation of that. We have to say of course—and the member will remember this well because he has a vice-like memory—that that was National Party policy at the last election. The Government said it was rubbish. The Prime Minister said that anyone who was talking about extending police numbers in the thousands was not on the same planet. The Government conceded 250 community cops and now it has conceded that they will be part of the 1000 police and the 250 support staff. 
I recently had cause visit to South Auckland and what bothers me there is that I believe that the success of any Government administration in respect of the police will be measured by how well it does policing in South Auckland. If we look at some narrow points—because I have only 1 minute left of a 5-minute speech—we see that the frightening prospect we have there at the moment is that there are for instance 157½ members of the Manukau district criminal investigation branch. Eighty percent of those staff members are not qualified as detectives. How does that affect the ability of the police to perform? Well there were 56 aggravated robberies of commercial premises such as the robbery of the liquor store of Navtej Singh between January and June this year and only five of them were solved. 
Thankfully a special task force has been mounted to investigate commercial aggravated robberies and it has solved 20 in the last month. But the terrible thing the hugely distracting thing about that is that when those officers looked at the files they found that the suspects and the number plates of the vehicles were named but they did not have the staff to address it. They did not have the staff working in those areas. There were nearly 500 street robberies in the Manukau district in that same period of time and they are not receiving attention. So although we can do a lot with staff numbers what is important is the placement of those staff and their ability to respond according to public expectation and to cover those horrific homicides that crop up from time to time and drag staff in from somewhere else. There is no real salvation in being able to investigate murders when one is dragging staff away from investigating crimes that the public expects will be addressed. 
Debate interrupted.