Ryall Tony: Corrections Bill — First Reading 
Ryall Tony: Corrections Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:607;Page:4689] 
Hon TONY RYALL (NZ National—Bay of Plenty) 
: 
 The National Party in Opposition strongly opposes the Corrections Bill. We describe it as “Labour ideology meets bureaucratic envy”. The ideology leg of the double is Margaret Wilson and the other spa-pool liberals in Cabinet who do not believe that private enterprise should be involved in managing prisons; the bureaucratic-envy leg of the double is that the Government does not want private prisons showing up the inadequacies of the public prison service. The fact is the public prisons are failing in every benchmark that we would expect of a sensible prison service; and when the Parliament finds out about certain matters happening in Hawke’s Bay in the last 24 hours that will be even more evidence of a prison system that is in complete failure. 
The worst feature of this bill is that the Government plans to cancel the private management of prisons in New Zealand and it simply does not make sense. The Auckland Central Remand Prison the only private prison we have in New Zealand is better than the public service on price quality assessment violence and cultural grounds. I would like to go through those issues to highlight to the Parliament why it is just not common sense to support the abolition of private prisons in New Zealand. 
Right now the private prison in Auckland has 300 inmates and that costs an average of $43000 a year per inmate at that prison. 
Jill Pettis 
: How much? 
Hon TONY RYALL 
: It is $43000. This compares with equivalent prisoners in the public sector at a cost of $72000 per prisoner. So it is $43000 in the private prison and $72000 in the public prison. The cost of the average prisoner in the public service is $54000 a year on average. So it is cheaper in the private prison. The private prison requires only about 70 corrections staff for the 300 prisoners. The union code that this Government has negotiated would require 150 prison officers for an equivalent prison population. 
On Radio New Zealand last month the Minister of Corrections misled the country when she said these costing comparisons were invalid because the private prison dealt only with prisoners of low security. That was not true. We believe that the Minister has been advised that that was not true. The remand prison deals with some of the most dangerous prisoners that the prison service deals with. In fact it is high-security prisoners who dominate in the remand prison sentence and what we are saying is it is $43000 in the private prison and $72000 in the public prison. It does not make sense on price. 
Let us look at the issue of quality. What we know is that there is a huge requirement on the private prison service to meet a whole lot of benchmarks. Every quarter they must file with the Department of Corrections a benchmark report a couple of inches thick of comparative figures on the performance of the prison. What we know is that the private prisons perform better when it comes to assessing an inmate on arrival. They provide higher-quality psychological services. We know that more education and rehabilitation is being delivered per hour per prisoner in the private prisons. We know that Maori are much happier with the performance of the private prison than they are with the public prison service and I think the Government will be hearing a lot from Maori on this bill. We know there are fewer incidents of self-harm in the private prison and less violence. 
So on all the benchmarks that we would expect of a prison the private prison service is better than the public prison service not only on price but also on quality violence assessment and cultural grounds. In fact the public prison service and its leadership are so regarded by the public prisons that the Government has been trying to recruit the chief executive of the private prison in Auckland to be on the Ngawha prison project management team. It then said that once that prison is built it wants those staff to mentor the manager of the Ngawha prison then move on to be on the project team of the next public prison. 
The Government is trying to poach the people who run the private prison system to run its own system. The private prison system is so bad that the Government wants the guy who runs the private prison to run some of the public prisons! It is just ideology meets bureaucratic envy. The Government does not want private enterprise involved. It talks about public-private partnerships on the roads. Internationally public-private partnerships have worked most effectively on the roads and in the prison system. The Government says that it wants those public-private partnerships on the roads but it is not prepared to have them when it comes to the prison service. 
What is more there is bureaucratic envy. The Department of Corrections fails in comparison with the Australian-run private prison time and time again. That prison the Auckland Central Remand Prison is run by a Maori guy with a strong history in the prison service. He brings a different corporate culture a different style of running the prison. The public service admires him so much that the Government has been trying to poach him to go and work in the public prison service. 
The National Party says this bill is wrong because it stops the opportunity to expand the use of private prisons in New Zealand. National appeals to the other parties to realise that it is just not common sense to do away with what is working when in fact the Government wants to do away with it only because of ideology and because the failing Department of Corrections is embarrassed by what is going on. 
We simply do not believe that the Department of Corrections should be subject to new legislation at this stage. We believe that the Department of Corrections should be subject to an independent commission of inquiry into its own performance. It is a department that paroles killers to live next door to the sisters of their victims. It is a department that failed to advise a young woman who was sexually molested by a member of her family that that molester was actually being paroled to the community in which she lives. It is a department that fails to enforce the sentences that the courts hand down. It is a department that has lost control of its staff. It is a department that is being completely mismanaged. The Department of Corrections is a department that can take a $40 million prison-building project and turn it into a $132 million prison-building project. So the National Party is strongly opposed to the Corrections Bill. We will be waging a strong campaign up and down the country because it simply does not make sense to pursue ideology in this way. 
In the other areas of this bill which my colleagues the Hon Nick Smith and Judith Collins will talk about it is clear that this bill is overly prescriptive and overly bureaucratic. We oppose the extension of prisoners’ rights. We think they are privileges that should not become litigious in terms of being enshrined by Parliament. We oppose the inclusion of the integrated offender management system in legislation. We think that that will lead to further litigation and cost by prisoners and we are most strongly opposed to the ideologically driven bureaucratic envy that is halting the use of private prisons in New Zealand. If public-private partnerships are good enough for our nation’s roads they are good enough for our nation’s prisons. 
We know that that Auckland prison has—[ 
Interruption 
] When Mr Robson was the Minister of Corrections he went to the private prisons and praised them for what they were doing. He told them they were doing great. If they are doing great why does the Government want to stop the private prisons? It is only to do with ideology. The National Party is strongly opposed to this bill.