Webb DuncanHon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Kia ora Mr Chair. I thank the Minister the Hon Mark Mitchell for his wide-ranging introductory remarks and I'll just observe before I get into some detail that the Justice Committee which considered this bill the Corrections Amendment Bill has also been engaged with the Ombudsman on the corrections system. The Ombudsman said more in sadness than in anger that he had seen no real change in the corrections system despite repeated reports where the Department of Corrections said Yes we agree with all of your criticisms about prisoner safety and rehabilitation and lack of resources" but ultimately did nothing. And this bill as presented to the House by Kelvin Davis was something that did something.I want to go through and ask the Minister some specific questions particularly around the differences between the bill as introduced and the bill now. And I want to go through it in a very methodical manner starting on page 6 of the bill which deals with interpretations. I observe that the innovation of having accused prisoners being able to access some rehabilitation is a really good thing because people come to prison—they may be innocent—but they may still have things in their lives that can be improved. So I commend Corrections and the Minister for progressing that. But the first thing is this change: the deletion of "cultural activities". The bill before the committee now removes the definition of cultural activities and that definition simply said "cultural activities means activities that are integral to establishing and maintaining a person's connection with their culture".Now Willow-Jean Prime has just touched on some Treaty issues but this is not actually a Treaty issue at all. This is just recognising that we have a diverse range of people that come into prison who if they are going to be treated firstly humanely and secondly put back into the community in a better place than they arrived they need to understand their own cultural context whether that be a Sikh a person from China a Māori person a person from the Pacific—whatever. I'm just really perplexed as to why reference to cultural activities would be removed particularly in light of page 7 where the legislation talks about "non-offence-based programme" and it actually refers to programmes which relate to te ao Māori or cultural educational employment religion-based or reintegrative programmes. So on the one hand we are getting rid of reference to cultural activities but actually in the very next breath the bill refers to cultural religion-based te ao Māori activities which fundamentally are cultural activities. So that's the first thing; what's going on there?And I am going to go through essentially line by line and I'm going to start on my next one which is quite distinct and that is the definition of "remote access facility". Obviously the use of remote access facilities for things like visiting or even some hearings is important and we've got a definition of audio link and audiovisual link. And obviously an audio link is not as useful as an audiovisual link in terms of looking at people and seeing what's going on but then we've got "visual link" and I'm a bit perplexed as to what the purpose of a visual link is—because it's got no audio and it's hard to communicate with no audio. So is there a suggestion that we're going to have some kind of remote visits for example or some form of important communication where it's simply visual link alone because that would really be deeply problematic? We're looking at audiovisual links visual links and audio links in other contexts such as court hearings and I think we need to be really cautious here. So in terms of the insertion in that definition—this is a new insertion—of "visual link" I'm very interested to hear what's going on there.So I've asked two questions one about cultural activities and this disjunct between that and the "non-offence-based programme" definition and one about visual links and what exactly that means."