Cosgrove Clayton: Policing (Constable’s Oaths Validation) Amendment Bill — Procedure First Reading Second Reading Third ReadingText is subject to correctionCosgrove Clayton: Policing (Constable’s Oaths Validation) Amendment Bill — Procedure First Reading Second Reading Third Reading[Sitting date: 24 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:14299. Text is subject to correction.]Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour): The previous speaker Mike Sabin is right. There has been a bit of verbal ping-pong across the House. I am glad he maintains unlike some of his other colleagues a good sense of humour. I do want to address just for the record a bit of political bile dished out by Mr Mitchell around police funding and cars.Grant Robertson: Felicity Ferret.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: Felicity Ferret my colleague says. I am not quite up to speed—Grant Robertson: Gossip columnist.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: A gossip columnist—ah I get you. Mr Mitchell made a lot of comments about—[Interruption] Oh that has fired them up. There are a few columns coming out as we speak I think. That has fired them up. They are awake now.Mr Mitchell made a number of sort of derogatory comments about police funding and Helen Clark throwing the police under the bus and not supporting the police. He talked about police vehicles which is very very interesting because I was reminded bythe former Minister of Police Mrs King—and this might be a bit of a lesson for Mr Mitchell if he is paying attention—that when Labour came into Government in 1999 some of the police vehicles were 4 or 5 years old. These were not the commissioner’s car or the plain clothes jobs; these were the front-line eye car police vehicles. It was the Hon George Hawkins—Mark Mitchell: At least Andrew thinks about what he’s going to say.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: I know that you do not like it. I know that he does not like it but he is going to have to hear it. For the record it was the Hon George Hawkins who as Minister of Police introduced the 3-year renewal programme for police vehicles. There were so many olddungers in the police fleet—I am not calling those membersdungers; I am talking about police cars—that it took 6 years to renew the entire fleet so that the police could get in a car that could actually go over 80 kilometres an hour to chase the burglar down the road.We got rid of things like cardboard cut-out police that you were supposed to stick on the side of the road or a street corner and somehow the burglar would take flight at the cardboard cut-out. Mr Mitchell or Mr Sabin may have been serving at the time.Grant Robertson: He may have been one of them.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: He may have starred as one of the cut-outs my colleague says—who knows?Mike Sabin: Not enough cardboard for this cut-out.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: Mr Sabin says there is not enough cardboard for his cut-out. I would not go there. But I just say to Mr Mitchell that I challenge that member to actually if he wants to in a dispassionate way go and talk to the Parliamentary Library and do the research about who backed the police the mess we had to clean up the equipment—you see history repeats itself because of course under Minister Collins the cars were cut back. We were told that there would be no cutbacks in front-line cars and yet in the area that I look after one community policeperson in Rangiora was forced to chase after criminals in the local police van. Because it is a big van the burglar goes down the road doing 120 kilometres an hour in the Holden V6 and there is the local community cop chugging along in the old paddy wagon with a bit of smoke coming out the back trying to do his or her duty. But they simply cannot do it because the old paddy wagon will not keep up. So I challenge any member over there as they sit there and try to rewrite history—rewrite history—to challenge our record in terms of resourcing the police.Putting that aside we will support this Policing (Constable’s Oaths Validation) Amendment Bill. We are supporting this bill retrospective though it is. It is a serious issue in respect of this bill. Like other members have said there are 63 constables out there who may indeed—well technically they have actually—acted outside the law not out of any intention on their part but because a technical issue has occurred in the authorisation of those who administered the oath.There is talk of politics and stuff and operational matters and all that but I just come back and say again as I said in my previous speech that it is always very convenient for Ministers to quote operational matters—and that may be technically correct—but the question then is what you do as a Minister to ensure that those operational matters are corrected and to ensure that those mistakes do not occur again. One thing you can do is that in our constitutional arrangements no one can stop a Minister from demanding information asking questions demanding evidence and verification from their departments monitoring asking the right questions and ensuring that officials have done what they have said they would do or administering certain operational processes effectively.No one is going to shoot a Minister. No one in the community is going to have a crack at a Minister for actually asking questions and asking for verification—was it Ronald Reagan who said “Trust but verify.”—and asking officials to verify that what they are doing is correct especially when there is a precedent of a mistake that has occurred previously especially when it was a high-profile mistake that occurred previously.You would think that as a Minister Minister Collins or Minister Tolley—whom I note in her speech in the third reading never got up and answered any questions. She said she was responsible in an interjection to me but never offered any explanation as to whether she asked questions about this of her department or the commissioner or whether she had it in the weekly monthly or 3-monthly brief and said: “Now look I just want to be assured that there are no problems here.” She never offered any of those explanations because in truth I suspect that she never bothered to ask. She never had it on the weekly monthly or 3-monthly brief. She just let it all happen.But to be fair to her she inherited a regime administered by the previous Minister of Police Judith Collins who has not taken a call either of course. Judith Collins is known in this place for demanding the highest possible standards from everybody else as are various Ministers on that side apart from when it comes to themselves or some of their ministerial colleagues—Mr Banks and Mr Dunne and others of course—but they demand accountability from everybody else. They demand accountability from beneficiaries. Fair enough. OK that is cool. But they do not demand accountability—they crow about it in this House—when it comes to themselves.I say to Ministers opposite that there is an old-fashioned but still valid Westminster tradition that means that as a Minister on a quarter of a million bucks a year with the big car the warrant the flash office and a myriad of expert staff when a department messes up you do not sit there in a—I cannot use the word—less than professional fashion shall we say and blame the department. You stand up and say: “I am the Minister. I take the hit and by the way if the bullet hits me when I get back to the department it is going to bounce off me and ricochet round the department.” You ensure that people who have made these mistakes are held accountable and that it is fixed. It is not about vengeance; it is about fixing the problem.These folks across here can dance around it all they like and commend Ministers for bringing these things to the House. What I would like to say to members on the backbench is that when they have a coffee or a beverage with the Minister after the House rises it would be really interesting especially the two former professional police officers who have served our community well if they call her aside and say: “Minister Tolley how are you going to ensure that we do not have three strikes? What are you going to do?”. Is there any advice that Mr Mitchell or Mr Sabin having been police officers themselves could give Minister Tolley on ensuring that processes are put in place and that this issue is fixed? Those members will not respond but I will make this observation. I suspect that for the 63 sworn staff who have had this hanging over their heads it would not be pleasant. Because you always lie awake at night and go “Hang on a minute. If I have done something and it is unlawful technically am I going to end up in the cart?”. That is a natural human reaction. You always sit there and just wonder “Well it will not be the bosses who get it in the neck because I was the person who”—for instance—“effected the arrest.” If that arrest as effected is now deemed to be unlawful it is not the commissioner or certainly the Minister or any of the people on that side who would end up in the dock; it is the sworn policeperson who has acted with the best intentions.So the question is where the buck stops. I say to Miss Tolley and Miss Collins that the buck stops with them. All we seek in this House—Hon Anne Tolley: Yeah it stops with me. I’m the Minister.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: And Miss Tolley says that yes the buck stops with her. Well if that is the case Miss Tolley it would have been helpful during the debate to give us some reassurance to tell us what monitoring procedures you put in place and to tell us what questions you did ask of the commissioner. How this—Hon Anne Tolley: You should’ve listened to me.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: Well there was not much to listen to I have got to tell you. That is all that this Parliament and the 63 police require. So although we support this bill we do hope that we are not here in another year or two or in 3 months helping this Government fix up its mistakes and that this is yet another one that piles on to a steamy pile of political mistakes that fester away and ferment away in this place as this Government sort of withers and lurches to the next crisis and the next inward-looking internal problem.