Collins Judith: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCollins Judith: General Debate[Sitting date: 09 April 2014. Volume:697;Page:17054. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Justice):I am going to talk about the economy and justice today but I am going to start off with this and I hope you will indulge me. I grew up in the Labour Party. I grew up as a member of a family that was staunchly Labour and I can well remember nagging my mother in the early 1970s until she actually joined the Labour Party. That was pretty much the last time anyone should have joined the Labour Party and I now apologise to my dead mother for the fact that I nagged her until she did. But then again “Big Norm” was the leader of the Labour Party and apart from Helen Clark it has not had one since. I have to say that what I have been hearing from the Labour Party is nothing about the economy nothing about law and order nothing about health nothing about welfare and nothing about transport—pretty much nothing about anything that matters to the ordinary mums and dads the Kiwis who used to vote Labour and who are now wondering why they are giving David Cunliffe even 8 percent. I heard a rumour today that it was down to 6.5 percent. So that is what is going wrong with the Labour Party.Let us talk about the economy. Well for a start we will be in surplus this year—not a huge surplus but in surplus. When we came into office at the end of 2008 we were told that we would look forward to a decade of deficits—a decade of deficits—and that we would not be in surplus. We did not inherit a growing economy. We inherited an economy that unlike the rest of the Western World had been in recession for a year. We went into recession first. We were there before Australia and before the UK—before those other countries. Labour had taxed and had spent up large.Hon Annette King: They never went into recession.Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Annette King was one of the worst-performing—one of the worst—Ministers of Health ever seen. Then again she almost was here in the 1970s but no actually she came here in the early 1980s so let us give her her due. What we are now doing is seeing a Government that has worked together right across Cabinet and right across the backbench to make sure that we have been able to secure an economy for our people—for New Zealanders—instead of what Labour did which was tax and spend.Let us go to justice shall we. When I became the Minister of Police and the Minister of Corrections in 2008 I was given the happy news that we would have to have 12000 prison beds—12000 prison beds—in the next 10 years. We had 8300 prisoners I think at that time—I may not be strictly correct about that number—and Labour had left us with not enough beds and all the graphs showed the numbers going up like this. It was unbelievable that all Labour did in the 2000s was to imprison people and leave them there. It inherited 5000 people in the prisons; it left with 8500. What we had to do was double-bunk them. We had to bring in container cells and we had to actually bring in rehabilitation. Since then Anne Tolley as the new Minister of Corrections for the last 3 years has doubled all that and more so we now have the best crime statistics in 33 years—33 years. It is not 10 years; it is 33 years. That is before the statistics even started to be collected—33 years.Who can argue with that? Well the Labour Party members can argue with that. But why is it that they never ask Mrs Tolley any questions on law and order these days? Well we know why. We have brought down crime. We have actually legislated on alcohol the very thing that Labour talked about and never did. We have cracked down on welfare fraud. We have cracked down on inefficiencies in the health system. There is more elective surgery for New Zealanders; we are looking after people in the area that we need to. I can say that I am very proud to be a member of this Government and that I am so pleased I am no longer a Labour supporter.