O'Connor Damien: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
O'Connor Damien: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:632;Page:4350] 
Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Minister of Corrections) 
: 
 I welcome the opportunity to outline a few of the things that the Department of Corrections has ahead of it. I firstly acknowledge the good work of my colleague Paul Swain who is in the Chamber. I thank him for his incredible effort in getting from Dr Cullen—and it is not easy—a huge amount of money to build four brand new prisons that this country desperately needs. It is a sad indictment that we need them but none the less we are committed to a huge building programme. The programme initially started out at 1000 beds and has now ended up at 1600 beds—in fact we are moving to over 2100 new cells in this country. It is sad but it is necessary. This Government is absolutely committed to locking up dangerous and violent offenders for longer in order to keep society safe from those people. 
I welcome the new level of knowledge and awareness from the National Party because I have said as have my colleagues that there are a number of people currently in jail who we think may be better able to serve their sentence and repay society in other ways. In fact I read just today the statement: “It could be with some white-collar crimes that much more serious fines and the taking of people’s assets would be a more effective use of taxpayers’ money …”. That came from John Key. Well he may choose white collar criminals. I will not say whether people are white collar or blue collar but I accept there are people who could serve their sentence in perhaps more innovative ways. That is what the Department of Corrections is committed to do and that is what Barry Matthews is committed to do to help this Government to move forward. 
Since Labour came into Government in 1999 and after the Department of Corrections went through years of neglect and lack of investment by the previous National Government we have reduced by 80 percent the number of break-out escapes in our prison system. We have reduced by 90 percent the number of serious inmate assaults on staff. That is the true measure of how effective we are. Rather than listen to the garbage spoken by Simon Power about the department being ineffective and in chaos I say that the department does an outstanding job every day as do all the staff. But there are areas for improvement. I acknowledge the work that Chester Borrows has done in this area. I think he is doing a very good job to try to swing around a fairly narrow-minded National Party caucus—good on him; he should keep up that good work. Yes we do have insufficient numbers of drug treatment programme places and we are expanding them right now. 
Nick Smith as a former Minister of Corrections spent nothing and Labour has had to put in a huge amount of money to try to compensate. We are putting more money into drug and alcohol units. We are opening up one in the South Island we will have another one in the lower North Island and we are expanding the drug and alcohol units at Waikeria Prison. I acknowledge that there were cutbacks in employment opportunities within the prison system and that that has not been the best thing. We are turning that round and we are telling corrections inmate employment which is a part of the Department of Corrections to go out to work with industry and to work with regions to try to find employment opportunities related to those industries that are crying out for labour—because we have a very vibrant rural provincial economy because of this Government. 
We now have opportunities that were not there 5 or 6 years ago in regional and rural New Zealand and the prisons by virtue of their location are ideally placed to provide workers be it in horticulture agriculture forestry engineering or other areas where there is a desperate need for well-trained people. We cannot just turn prisoners from inmates into well-trained workers without rehabilitation without drug and alcohol treatment and without providing them with the opportunity to go through criminogenic programmes that identify the cause of their offending. We have evaluated one of the programmes Straight Thinking which was the mainstream programme. It was deemed not to be as effective as we need. The member Anne Tolley laughs. Well we are going to check all the money we spend and make sure it is being spent wisely. We have done so. We are re-evaluating the rehabilitation programmes so that they work better so that we get better outcomes and ultimately so that people come into prison once and go out and stay out. That is what we want to do. 
We do not want to keep building new prisons because more and more people are being thrown in prison. It is a difficult situation. In a wonderful country like ours where we know most people in our small communities—even Auckland is a small community by international comparisons—and know most of what is happening we lock up more people than we should. We do so at the second-highest rate in the Western World. I think we are embarrassed because people like Nick Smith did not put money into basic social services. He cut benefits in 1991—that is the kind of thing that severely impacts on the prison population over time. We are moving to address that. We are committed to more—and more effective—rehabilitation programmes more drug and alcohol treatment more effective criminogenic programmes and more work and skills training in prisons. 
We have a big task ahead of us—a wonderfully exciting challenge. I now welcome the new awareness of the problem and the change in attitude from the National Party in the latest statement by John Key. If there is still debate within the National Party caucus then I hope that sensible people like Chester Borrows and John Key obviously win the day and swing in behind us as we move through a process of shifting the prison system into one of proper rehabilitation and of reintegration back into society. We welcome the support from the National Party for that. We have had wonderful support from other parties to move in this direction but we still have a lot to do. 
Finally I again applaud the incredible efforts that all the staff from top to bottom of the Department of Corrections make. They work in very difficult situations with at times very difficult people. If we look at the cold hard facts we see the 80 percent reduction in escapes and the 90 percent reduction in serious assaults on prison officers. That has to indicate that the system is working but over time we have to reduce the number of people in this country whom we lock up and who are in prison for too long a period.