Barker Rick: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Barker Rick: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8113. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon RICK BARKER (Labour) 
: 
 I come back to the contribution made by Melissa Lee and I will talk about numbers. Let us come back to the numbers that the Hon Lianne Dalziel put forward. I just repeat them for Ms Lee because she heard them when they were given to the Law and Order Committee by the Department of Corrections which is responsible to the Minister of Corrections. These are the numbers that are given by the department. The department says that the Auckland Central Remand Prison under private management had operating costs of $35700 which inclusive of other costs were $57280 which was higher than for remand prisoners held in public prisons. The cost was $35700 compared with $32000 in public prisons and $57000 was the cost inclusive of related property costs in the private sector whereas it was $50000 for the public sector. So the public sector was cheaper. These are figures from advisers to the Government; those people can count. These are audited figures. This is solid evidence. This is not rhetoric. The member says she can count and she supports numbers but they are the same sort. 
This is the same attitude from National that it had when Treasury said that the emissions trading scheme was going to cost New Zealand $110 billion. Nick Smith said no it will not. Well who are we to believe: Nick Smith who counts on his fingers and his toes or Treasury filled with highly skilled highly trained people who can count and can do numbers. The Department of Corrections’ own numbers show that the Auckland Central Remand Prison run under the private sector was dearer than it was under the public sector. Every piece of evidence whether we look at it from Australia from Canada or from Britain shows that privately run prisons are poorer. 
There is another part—members should trust me and I will come to Part 2 here which will surprise the Minister—that shows some concerns. If members have a look at clause 7(2) they will read: “the contractor and the chief executive in the name and on behalf of the Crown may make any arrangements that they consider necessary or desirable to determine the respective liabilities of the Crown and the contractor in relation to any matter …”. A private cosy deal will be done between the chief executive and the contractor. 
Then we can go to section 199B of the Corrections Act substituted by clause 5 of the bill: “(1) The Crown is entitled to be indemnified by a contractor—”. It does not say “shall” or “must be”; it says “entitled to be”. That is permissive. So we can have a cosy deal by the chief executive and the contractor. Who will carry the cost of that? It will be the taxpayer. The point about that is that we have to rely—according to the Minister and the Government’s legislation—on the chief executive’s responsibility and integrity about that. I have no doubt about the responsibility and integrity of the chief executive. But I want to have oversight by an external audit carried out by an external agency and that is why I want the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General to be in the legislation. I want it to be compulsory that those things are done. This is by trust. 
When the member Melissa Lee says that Labour members are talking about ideology I say to her that we are not talking about ideology from our perspective; we are talking about ideology from the National Party’s perspective. This provision is simply an article of faith: National members believe that private contractors will do better when all of the evidence points in the opposite direction. Even when the Minister’s own department says that it is more expensive for a prison to be run by private enterprise than it is to be run by the department she is still going to go ahead and proceed with this legislation. When Treasury says it is going to cost $110 billion for the emissions trading scheme and Nick Smith says “That is not correct. We have got other figures.” whom do we believe Treasury or Nick Smith? In this particular case whom do we believe the Department of Corrections or the Minister of Corrections? I say that the department is correct. A private contract was more expensive before so there is no justification for it. 
The next point I come back to in this debate is that the Minister got up earlier and said how wonderful the Auckland Central Remand Prison was before because it introduced programmes for Maori. It was innovative—the first prison in the country to do that. Well I tell the Minister that that is not correct. That is simply not correct. The programme was started in Hawke’s Bay in Mangaroa Prison and all of the other prisons followed that. So we have now a fallacious argument being put forward to justify an innovation of a private sector prison. It was not a private sector prison that introduced that innovation; the facts show that to be the case.