Borrows Chester: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Borrows Chester: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:637;Page:7944] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 Youth crime is growing in intensity. Violent crimes committed by offenders under the age of 16 have increased by 27 percent since 1999 and sex crimes committed by young people are up by 46 percent. This is during the tenure of a Government that promised that it would crack down on youth crime. Labour put that promise on its pledge card in 1999 and again in 2002. So one has to turn one’s mind towards wondering just how much this Government really cares about the risk factors for youth offending. 
The Government set up a high-powered Minister’s group on youth offending. Who was on that? The members were the Minister for Social Development and Employment the Minister of Education the Minister of Corrections the Minister of Police and the Associate Minister for Social Development and Employment (CYF). Given the concern about youth offending and the pledges Labour members made in 1999 and 2002 they would get really stuck into it let us look at whether a lot of innovation was put before the public. Let us see whether some real good was done. How often do the Ministers meet? Once a week? Once a month? That would have been pretty good; one would expect them to have come up with something. No they did not meet for 3 years. That gives one an indication of just how much the Labour Government cares about youth crime. 
Chris Auchinvole 
: 3 years? 
CHESTER BORROWS 
: For 3 years there was not one meeting. 
What about the programme to provide health and education assessments for young people who are attending family group conferences? Those are the young people who may well go on to find themselves in youth justice residences so surely we would want to know what is going on inside their heads and inside their bodies. We know that 83 percent of all prisoners are addicted to some substance or another usually alcohol or a drug of some kind but frequently and especially among young people to glue and the rest of those sorts of substances which wind them up and make them do crazy things. But no we have not implemented anything to find out exactly what is going on inside our young people’s heads or inside their bodies. At the same time we check them into cells and keep them there because the Labour Government does not care enough about them to do that. One of Labour’s key youth crime prevention programmes was a reducing youth offending programme. It has failed to reduce offending and reoffending at all during the tenure of this Government; in 3 years it has had $12 million to spend to achieve nothing. 
What we do know about the young people who end up going to jail is that the biggest single thing that can prevent them from going to jail is engagement in school. The common denominator of people who find themselves in jail is truancy—frequent abject truancy. So the Labour Government made a promise that it would set up a national student database to combat truancy to find out who was in school and who was not in school to hold their parents and caregivers to account and to make some prosecutions. In my electorate we have a school called Waverley High School and it is undergoing some chronic pressures at the moment. It has been stated that up to half the students were absent on any one day. That is contested by a number of teachers and pupils but we do know that truancy was at an all-time high and was a huge problem for local people in Waverley. How many then were referred to the district truancy service? Well it does not appear that any of them have been referred. Apparently there was a register or a bit of one from time to time but no one cared enough to make any referrals at all. 
One would expect the police to know who was on the street—young people out offending; real candidates for a life behind bars in jail. Let us see what they are doing; the Minister of Police is part of the high-powered Minister’s group on youth offending. Well the police do not keep statistics on the number of truancy operations that they run. No doubt they would argue probably quite rightly that they are busy enough. But addressing truancy is a key plank in Labour’s policy towards reducing crime with young people. The police cannot tell us how often they have gone looking for truants or how many operations they have run to try to find them. If we look at the police national youth policing plan for 2005-06 we find truancy is mentioned once and then only in a diagram that lists risk factors for youth. 
This Labour Government has an appalling record on youth crime. Although youth crime is remaining relatively static we do know that youth violent crime has grown exponentially under this Government and there appears to be little that is happening to combat that. We are seeing huge concern about some areas to do with youth and children. For instance with the vote that is before Parliament today we have seen a whipped Labour Party voting to outlaw the smacking of children yet we have young people who are running foul of the law being uncontrolled in our communities and causing older people to be frightened in their homes. Those young people are behind home invasions in my electorate shootings and those sorts of things going on around the country. There is more youth homicide than we have ever seen before and the Government is letting the country down badly in respect of youth offending. 
Labour has had 8 years to deal with youth crime after putting it on its pledge cards and nothing has happened. The youth prisons that have been built are costing $1 million a bed to construct and about $300000 a year per bed to maintain. There is no real strategy to keep youth out of those facilities and it is just very unfortunate that after making the big promises the Government is not following through with policies that will keep those young people away from a life of crime and safe at home.