Turei Metiria: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Turei Metiria: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8093. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 How funny it is to listen to this Minister Judith Collins talk about iwi involvement in prisons. How terrible it is to listen to her talk about how great that would be. Do we remember that when this Minister was a new MP she went to a powhiri—a Department of Corrections powhiri if I remember correctly—and she had a big “waa” because she had to sit in the second row of the powhiri instead of in the front row. She stormed out of the powhiri and made a huge big row about it all through the country. She walked out in a huff possibly with tears streaming down her face because she had to sit in the second row and not in the front. And here she is now supposedly crowing about how private prisons—international corporations—will be able to make a wonderful profit from the imprisonment of those Maori whose powhiri she might have been part of. She is really pleased that international corporations will make money out of the imprisonment of Maori. Her own behaviour has clearly demonstrated her absolute failure to respect Maori and Maori process yet she stands here and tries to say contract management is a good thing for Maori people. It is a terrible day to hear the Minister talk about that in this context. 
My colleague Nandor Tanczos and I went to visit a number of prisons including the Auckland Central Remand Prison when it was being run by GEO Group—by Wackenhut—and he and I talked with Dom Karauria who was there at the time and with the iwi involved with the management and running of that prison. It was very innovative. The prison was a wonderful building built with public money and designed for that purpose and the management was very engaged with trying to find ways to involve Maori. But that came down to the fact that Dom Karauria was in charge. It had nothing to do with the ownership of the prison. It was about this one guy who had had experience in Australia of working for other prison organisations that did not have respect for indigenous people and he himself had made a commitment to do so. Nandor and I were both very pleased to have worked with him and to have talked with him about his commitment and we celebrated that. But that was the commitment of just one person. It had nothing to do with whether the prison was privately run or publicly run. It was because of the commitment of individuals: the people that Dom Karauria built around him to support Maori. 
It surprises me a great deal that the Maori Party in particular supports the Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill and does not recognise that that was the case—that it does not recognise the special skills of Dom Karauria and instead buys into the misleading information and misleading rhetoric about private prisons being essentially good for indigenous people. We know that is not the case. We can look at the experience of the private prisons in Australia and at the significant abuse and damage that is done to indigenous Australians to Aboriginal people in those prisons. 
Carmel Sepuloni 
: Absolutely. 
METIRIA TUREI 
: That is right. We can look at the example of the prisons that GEO/Wackenhut has operated in America and my colleague Carmel Sepuloni has described some of those things. Again a huge proportion of the prison population are black people Mexicans Hispanics and the indigenous people of that country as well. In those countries we can see that there has been an ongoing exploitation of indigenous communities by these companies which make a profit from the systemic racism inherent in their legal systems. That systemic bias that systemic racism exists in this country as well and the Maori Party knows that. The Maori Party knows that that is the case. 
I hope that Tariana Turia is doing all right. She was reported a few months ago in the  
Wanganui Chronicle 
—it should be Whanganui with an “h” I have to say—talking about this issue. She stated: “Our people continue to go to prison and many of them have spent a long time not functioning well in society. They need the opportunity to have their mauri ora and mana restored. No one is going to do that in a public prison.” She stated: “Absolutely we are not in this to make money. I am a firm believer in redemption.” She went on to state: “Our people have been deeply affected by the inequalities of the system and the current system does not address the reasons that people go to prison.” She said the Maori Party support was about not just rehabilitation but also habilitation and Maori could be part of their own solutions to these issues. 
I agree with Tariana Turia about that; Maori can be part of the solutions to imprisonment issues. The fact that more than 50 percent of the prison population is Maori is a disgrace and more needs to be done about that. But there is nothing to prove that privately owned prisons will make any difference to that situation. In fact if we look at the overseas evidence we see there is ample evidence to prove that privately owned prisons will do more damage to indigenous communities. They will do significantly more damage than public prisons do to the Maori population because of the use of that population as a cash cow with which to make money. That is the basis behind the thinking around privately owned prisons. There is money in it. 
The prison staff who came to talk to the Law and Order Committee talked about that. They showed us that in great detail putting themselves at risk by doing so because one or two of these guys had worked in the private prison and they will not get a job there now even though they knew this legislation would be passed. They came and talked to us about the financial incentives for the managers the owners of the private prison to avoid their obligations in order to protect their financial bottom line. They talked about incentives not to find drugs about staff being not disciplined but encouraged to resign in order to avoid the reporting of those problems and about inadequate drug-testing. The only way to describe it is I guess as the company actively hiding information in order to appear to be complying with its contract so it will retain the performance bonus. Those are the kinds of things that the Minister in the chair the Hon Judith Collins was talking about when she said privately run prisons were a good thing. The Minister said those things were good about private prisons because they would have financial incentives to behave better. 
Privately run prisons have financial incentives to hide information. That is one reason why the Green Party will be supporting the amendment to provide for the Auditor-General to have a great deal more oversight over private prisons. There needs to be a means by which the public can investigate the financial incentives the financial issues behind these companies and their operations. If we do not do that there is no means by which that can happen through the contact. The owners and managers of the private prison can hide their financial information by using commercial sensitivity as a barrier. The only way to find out whether they are incentivised to hide information and whether they are actively preventing their staff from doing drug testing from finding drugs and from being involved in all of the issues that those staff brought to us will be by making the Auditor-General able to investigate those matters. That will provide the best possible level of scrutiny over those issues. 
It still remains a mystery to me as to why the Maori Party supports this bill and why the Associate Minister of Corrections Dr Pita Sharples instead of supporting private prisons was not able to negotiate with the National Government for Maori to be able to be involved in the running of public prisons. That could be done just as easily. In fact if private prisons will comprise only 10 percent of the prison management in this country then 90 percent of the Maori prison population will still be in the public sector. If there is no reform of the public sector then how can we possibly expect that anything will be made better or that anything will be done to resolve the issues around the Maori prison population? There has been no effort to deal with the public sector. What the Maori Party has done and what the Minister has allowed to be done is the diversion of attention again from the issues around the Maori prison population. The real need that should be met in the public sector is to be diverted to the private sector as some kind of panacea or some kind of magic bullet solution because that is what it is meant to be in the end. 
Contract management is meant to be a magic bullet solution to the issues around dealing with the Maori prison population. It will not work for the vast majority of those Maori who are in jails. We know that jails increase recidivism and that jails cause enormous costs to whanau to family and to children. None of that will be resolved through the private prisons. None of that will be resolved by the Maori Party’s support for this legislation. Private prisons cost more than those in the public sector. That argument is based on evidence not on the fallacies put out by the National Government. The private sector will profit from the systemic racism in the system.