Mark Ron: Criminal Justice Amendment Bill (No 7) — Consideration of Report of Health Committee Procedure In Committee 
Mark Ron: Criminal Justice Amendment Bill (No 7) — Consideration of Report of Health Committee Procedure In Committee 
[Volume:612;Page:9515] 
RON MARK (NZ First) 
: 
 It is a bittersweet pill seeing the bill on the floor today. I guess it is sweet because finally the House can say that something is being done to address the anomalies in the way in which mentally ill people and people with intellectual disabilities are handled once they become criminals. 
We have to rewind the clock go right back and answer a couple of simple questions. Why are we passing legislation such as this? The answer is that we have created a situation where mentally unwell people are put in situations where they cannot help but become criminals. In Parliament Labour started the nonsense. It would not listen to people in the industry who had been caring for mentally unwell people for generations. No in the years of cost cutting and finding a corporate manner in which to deal with health services Labour amended the mental health and disability legislation led by that astounding Minister of Health whose greatest claim to fame is closing 29 hospitals. She has now been surpassed; her Minister of Education is about to close 200 or so schools. Those guys will have their names chiselled on a granite headstone because that is where they deserve to be for the pain they have inflicted upon the New Zealand public. 
Members should cast their minds back to Sunday night and the three families shown on the television programme  
Sunday 
. [ 
Interruption 
] Now it is hurting; up come the chickens squawking. That party is responsible for much of the pain in our communities that has resulted from the changes brought about by the deinstitutionalisation led by Helen Clark and supported by her entire Cabinet then picked up by Jenny Shipley and supported by people like Ruth Richardson. 
I remember when I was a new fledgling member of the Labour Party trying to talk to our Minister of Health about reviewing her commitment to deinstitutionalisation. I had spent days and months listening to the Templeton parents association which predicted that those changes would end up criminalising their children and family members who had intellectual disabilities because they knew no better; by being put into the community that is the very sort of thing they would be exposed to. The parents’ big concern was the lack of support for their children once they were in the community because we know how that works. The association predicted those things. I came back from the Middle East and it was telling us that in 1990. 
I fronted up to Helen Clark at a meeting in Shirley at a community hall where she was supporting David Caygill in an election campaign. I had had a chat with Mike Moore who was the leader at the time. He had told me to talk to Helen Clark and had said that if she changed her mind then Labour would change the policy and go with her. I had told him that as Labour’s candidate I would not advocate Labour’s policy on deinstitutionalisation. I spoke to that woman and her answer was absolutely dismissive. Her answers to staff and nurses who stood up at that same meeting and asked her whether she would keep the Templeton Centre open were an absolute dismissal of their professional concerns. 
Where are we today? When people like Marc Alexander and the Law and Order Committee go to Auckland to visit the remand prison and talk about inmates there who have disabilities and mental problems the prison tells them that anything between 12 and 23 percent of its inmates have mental disabilities. The staff members tell us those people should not even be in our prisons. Where are we today? When we visit police stations and talk to bobbies who patrol our streets they tell us they are sick and tired of picking up the pieces of a failed deinstitutionalisation policy led by politicians who have no care concern or heart for the victims of those horrendous crimes or their families. 
What do we read today in the paper? I will take a simple press release. The Ministry of Health says it accepts an inquiry’s findings that no one is to blame for serious failings in the south Auckland mental health service 2 years ago. That is becoming a hallmark of the Labour Government. Nobody is to blame for anything unless National is in Government and Christine Rankin is involved. With finding after finding and inquiry after inquiry we can talk about the “goon squad” and about mental health failings till the cows come home but nobody is to blame. I will tell members who is to blame. Helen Clark is to blame for a myopic idealistic focus on deinstitutionalisation that has resulted in murder and homicide victims from one end of this country to the other. The Government accepts no blame. Well the public does not think so. 
The only thing I can say about this debate we are having now is that it is good we finally have this bill after 4 years of the Government sitting on its backside and doing nothing. We rammed through a sherry tax in the dead of night in a 24-hour session to get it through but when it comes to an issue such as this where families have had members murdered where a woman was stabbed through the chest with a chisel and had her head cut off and her daughters found her in the bath it can wait for a jolly sherry tax. Well hip hip hooray; the Government certainly has its priorities totally stuffed up. 
One thing I will not let that party get away with is that it totally rejected every concern raised by nurses clinical professionals and people who had worked in the mental health services for years in pursuit of its ideology. Today we are picking up the pieces and the tragedy is they are human pieces. They are pieces of someone’s family. If Government members think this is the end of it I am sorry to say to them that it is not because the fundamental problem has not been resolved. The Government will close Kimberley and it will not listen to anybody. It has this view of institutions. It opposed the construction of Brackenridge Estate which New Zealand First got as a concession from the National – New Zealand First coalition Government. It works well. The parents are happy and the families are happy. The question we have for that lot over there is why could the same facility not be built up north in Auckland Palmerston North and other places where families do not want— 
Hon Roger Sowry 
: In Levin. 
RON MARK 
: And Levin. Families do not want their children or their loved ones who have mental disabilities and intellectual disabilities criminalised because they are let out into a “care less in the community” programme where time after time they are failed. It is so ironic that the Labour Party which champions itself as the heart conscience and mind of New Zealand cares so little about the victims of the crimes committed by those people. 
The nonsense is that the patient is a victim as well. We should talk to the families who have suffered the heartache of seeing their loved one dragged before a court to face charges for something that would never have happened had he or she been held in care in an institution. But we must not use that word; it is a dirty word. We will call it an asylum a sanctuary or what one will. If that party thinks that care in the community in a community house with one-eighth of an acre of land around it is better than the facilities that there used to be at Kimberley and Templeton it is absolutely nuts. At least those people could roam over grass expanses. At least they had the swimming pool the church and other facilities. All that we had to do was to bulldoze the old facilities and replace them with something modern and efficient but oh no the Labour Party will adhere to its blind ideology despite the fact that the British Labour Party has since recognised the error of its ways and has reversed its policy. 
Deinstitutionalisation is not a bad policy. What is bad is the blind myopic view of total deinstitutionalisation the belief that there is not room for a place for people who need constant 24/7 care because they are fragile. Those people are not able to operate in the community because they will be victimised by normal people who take advantage of them. I have only to mention Mr Truscott to make my point.