Davis KelvinHon CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I'd just like to take a short call just to ask the Minister of Corrections given that when he came before the select committee a core part of the ongoing work of Corrections is based on a strategy which my colleague Meka Whaitiri touched on which is called Hōkai Rangi which underpins all of the work that Corrections is doing to work towards the rehabilitation of Māori prisoners in order that they don't return to prison. But how that actually works and the importance of that as being a deep piece of work that as I say underpins all of what Corrections is doing—it might be useful for the Minister to really talk about some of the actual instances where that is actually proving to demonstrate its worth and again because behind that sits a strategy to reduce the number of prisoners and to reduce reoffending.Hon KELVIN DAVIS (Minister of Corrections): Thank you Mr Chair. Look I'll try and address some of the issues raised by the last three speakers. First of all I'll start off with the Hōkai Rangi strategy. Hōkai Rangi was the result of there being no Māori strategy whatsoever for Corrections. So we started to write one and in the end we realised that the Māori strategy needs to become the whole strategy for Corrections and forms the basis for the work that we're doing to try to safely reduce the prison population.Now might I say that as of last week I think the prison population was 9263—that's some 1100 to 1200 down on what it was when I became the Minister when it was at 10400. The prison population continued to go up for the next five or six months and in March of 2018 it peaked at 10820. So what we've seen from 10400 when I became the Minister is a 12 percent reduction in the prison population and since it peaked in March of 2018 a 15 percent reduction in the prison population.Now that's really important when we look at the question around the modular build. So Decmil weren't completing the job to the standard and on time as we expected with the modular builds so that contract was ended. What would have happened is that regardless of who is in Government whether it was us or the previous Government those buildings would not have been completed. The prison projections from 2017 said at this very moment that the prison population is expected to be 12800. There's no way that the previous Government if they had allowed that prison population to continue on that trajectory would have been able to house prisoners. We're talking about not just double-bunking but triple- and maybe quadruple-bunking. Instead because we have safely reduced the prison population we don't have that pressure on the Government to actually get this done so we're able now to take the time to make sure that it is done and it is done properly.In the next two quarters we're expecting a modular build of 244 and in the next quarter a modular build of 122 beds to come online. We hope that that's going to happen but of course as you know in any sort of project there are delays. We've actually got the prison population to the stage where there is enough capacity for us to close down some units and do maintenance on them. We've reduced the number of movements around the prison network because there isn't the pressure to find spaces for prisoners. What we've done is actually saved the Government considerable amounts of money.In terms of the question around gangs we do have a gang strategy—it's a five-year strategy aligned to the whole-of-Government action plan on gangs. The aim is to contain the negative influence of gang members in the custodial environment to disrupt the efforts and capabilities of gang members under our management to organise and commit crime from within prisons and in the community and to reduce the reoffending rates of gang members and the harm caused by gangs in prisons and the community.Hōkai Rangi—also alongside of it is our Māori Pathways and we know many Māori gang members happen to be Māori and the work that we're doing in the Māori Pathways working alongside prisoners their whānau hapū and communities as well as bringing in folk from Whānau Ora to work alongside—all of that is in time going to continue to reduce the prison population safely. Thank you Mr Chair.