Swain Paul: Estimates Debate — In Committee Procedure 
Swain Paul: Estimates Debate — In Committee Procedure 
[Volume:618;Page:14427] 
Hon PAUL SWAIN (Minister of Corrections) 
: 
 There were a couple of contributions: one that was worthy of reply and one that was not. I want to begin with Rodney Hide’s contribution. I felt that it was a typical leadership bid and I say to Rodney Hide that he should stop undermining Richard Prebble and should come out and be honest and open about his leadership ambitions. 
Darren Hughes 
: Hang on! He is the leader. 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: I am sorry; yes he is the leader of the ACT party. I forgot that. Members will remember that Rodney Hide was going to be a statesman. He said that he would stop doing all the muckraking and would be a leader. He said he would talk about the vision thing and particularly things in the future and he would get away from corrections. He said he did not want to talk about corrections any more. That lasted about 2 months because ACT went from 2 percent in the polls down to 1 percent. So now Rodney Hide is back to undermining the ACT spokesperson on corrections and no one really knows whom that is at this stage. The point is that it is hardly worth even talking about the ACT contribution. 
I will spend some time making a quick contribution on Marc Alexander’s points. Marc Alexander gets a bit obsessive about a couple of things but by and large he makes a reasonable contribution in this Chamber. He said a number of things and I just wanted to cover a couple of them. He said that there was no tendering for prison construction and that it was all done on an incremental basis. That is true and that started under National in 1997. That was the basis of the policy. 
Dr Paul Hutchison 
: Good government. 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: It is funny to hear that it is good government because now we have Paul Hutchison whose leader wants to build more prisons. But Paul Swain opposed a prison! National members of Parliament oppose prisons being built in their electorates but support Don Brash for wanting to build the 10 new prisons that would be needed under the new parole provisions of the National Party policy. I come back to Marc Alexander’s point and say the incremental policy was started under National on the basis that the then National Government decided it would not be able to give a whole pile of money to the Department of Corrections. It said the department should go away and do the site selection first and then come back and ask for more funding. National said that after the department had done a bit of building it could come back and ask for more funds. That is what has happened. That policy started under National and the funding has been increased as a result of that. 
Mr Alexander also talked about double-bunking. The member knows that probably about 1000 of the 6000 or so cells are double-bunked. But what the member does not understand is that going to prison is not like picking up a flatmate and deciding to live in Mount Victoria. One has to be very careful about who goes in with whom in a prison as the fact is that a lot of the people in there are violent. They stand over people and if the member thinks that simply double-bunking and putting violent people in with other violent people is the way to solve the problem of the prison population he does not have any understanding of prisons. If he talked to a few of the corrections officers they would tell him that double-bunking is enormously difficult. It makes prisons hard to manage and it leads to a higher incidence of potential riots and chaos within the prison system. I invite the member because I know he does visit prisons to ask prison officers whether they think double-bunking is a good idea. They will tell him that one needs to be very careful. 
Marc Alexander 
: Rubbish! 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: It is not rubbish; it is what the corrections officers will tell the member. Of course one of the problems is that if there is contraband—drugs or something—in a cell double-bunking makes the problem of isolating who is at fault much more difficult. The member needs to talk to corrections officers. Here is the deal: if he goes and talks to corrections officers and comes back and tells me that they all support double-bunking I will rethink the policy. That is a fair deal. 
Then Marc Alexander asked about expansion—expanding existing sites. The problem is that we need to get consent to do that and people like him would probably oppose it every time consent is sought. We do try to expand on existing sites where we can like the Rimutaka Prison but there is a limit to how much it can expand. Marc Alexander would also be told by staff that the bigger a prison is the harder it is to manage. The National Party actually started the regional prisons policy which was not a bad policy. It stated that if an offender went to prison and wanted to be reintegrated back into the community he or she should go to prison somewhere close to the family and whanau. That is not a bad policy. The problem with the National Party is that every time we try to build a regional prison it opposes it. 
Darren Hughes 
: What did Tony Ryall say? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: There was the possibility of some suggestion a long time ago that there would be a prison in the Bay of Plenty. Who was the first to oppose it? Tony Ryall. Who is the strongest supporter of Don Brash’s policy of building prisons? Tony Ryall. It is a kind of voodoo economics. The National members cannot promise to build prisons on the one hand as a result of getting rid of parole and on the other hand oppose every prison that will be built ever. There will have to be a prison in Nelson and I call upon Nick Smith to say whether he supports a prison being built in Nelson. I want to know whether Nick Smith supports that. And what about Bill English? Would he support a prison being built in Southland? What about Lockwood Smith in the case of Kaipara? Or what about building a prison on the North Shore? Paul Hutchison is another example of National’s opposition to regional prisons. There is a big prison to be built at Spring Hill in Paul Hutchison’s electorate. Instead of that member supporting the prison he came out and opposed it. So we can see that it is all voodoo economics and that it will not work. 
In terms of private prisons they were a clear point of distinction between the Labour-Progressive Government and National ACT and United Future. We consider that keeping people in custody is a role of the State and we are very proud of that. 
Mr Alexander then asked about the integrated offender management system policy. In fact that is such a good policy now that a lot of the prison systems in Australia are following it. I think the member should know that. He should get out more. He should get on a plane go overseas and look at what is happening instead of being stuck in a narrow little isolated view in New Zealand. The Australian prison system now is modelling much of how it runs its prisons on the integrated offender management system because the Australians consider it to be a good system. I tell that member to go out and look around the prisons before coming to the Chamber with those views. 
The Government is now really keen to put three things together. Those are early intervention—making sure people do not get to prison in the first place—and if people do get to prison building some programmes to make sure that when they come out they do not reoffend. But the most important thing that I am putting my effort into this financial year under these estimates is reintegration—making sure that when prisoners come out of prison they do not go back. Members may be interested to know that one in four prisoners return to prison within the first 12 months after their release. If we could reduce that to one prisoner in five in the first 12 months we would not have to build a new prison. It is as simple as that; the maths are pretty compelling. We know it is very very important to get the resettlement process going better so that we can have people going back into the community and getting a job and a house and going back to their whanau—all that sort of thing. It is very important that we do that properly. In these estimates we have been able to get some funding to do that. 
We will be piloting reintegration into the community first in the Wellington region by making sure that no one comes out of prison without a proper programme—potentially a job somewhere to live and some support around the person. We know that it works. It is simple; we know it works. In the past we have not done it as well as we should have and we have acknowledged that. We have acknowledged that we need to do it better and now the officials are working away with some of the funding that I was able to extract from the very generous Minister of Finance for reintegration. We will be piloting reintegration into the community. In the future I am sure we will see that as it becomes successful it will be rolled out in other areas. A number of colleagues have come to me to ask whether they could have a reintegration person who is responsible for taking that up at each prison. I am sure that will come. We need to do it for our youth offenders and our women offenders because they are in different categories and have different needs. 
We need to make sure that people who come out of prison come out with opportunity. We know that building prisons is part of the answer but a good Labour-led Government worries about the other two things which are early intervention—stopping people from going to prison in the first place—and then making sure that when people get out of prison they do not go back. That is what a Labour-Progressive coalition Government does. That is the way to tackle the law and order problem in New Zealand. 
Vote agreed to.