Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeEstimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5542. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Estimates DebateIn CommitteeDebate resumed from 28 July on the Appropriation (2015/16 Estimates) Bill.Health Sector (continued)The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): When we were last progressing the estimates debate we were debating the vote in the health sector—volume B.5 volume 6—Vote Health.Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health): It is not that long ago that we were in the middle of a health crisis in New Zealand. It seems hard to believe now but people listening at home will remember a time when you would turn up to North Shore Hospital—where the people of the Northcote electorate go to—and you would be greeted by a queue of ambulances in the car park lined up trying to get the patients into the emergency department. And then if you got through the car park past those ambulances you would go into the waiting room and you would find people waiting on trollies under harsh fluorescent lights who had been there for up to 24 hours.Meanwhile you would come into the Chamber here—I can remember it well. We were in Opposition. You would hear health Ministers blustering about the success of the Labour Government. But in actual fact the rhetoric just did not match what was happening out on the ground. While Annette King and Pete Hodgson were in here boasting of false achievements—achievements that never really happened that just did not take place—the public out there in New Zealand knew the reality because they were going to the airports and getting on the jet planes to fly to Australia for basic cancer treatment.There were 30000 people out there who were kicked off surgical waiting lists under the reign of Pete Hodgson and Annette King. That was the fact of it. People could not get the care they needed. There were so many people waiting on those surgical wait lists over 6 months that in the end Labour just canned the wait lists and told everybody to go home.Well help was on the way. In the 2008 election it arrived. Since then this National Government has had a consistent history of putting more money into the budget each year. There has been a record increase—a $15.9 billion vote and $4.1 billion has gone in over the last 7 years. But the most important thing has been the solid stewardship and the results that that has delivered.Labour was pouring money in but getting worse and worse results. Labour doubled the health budget but it delivered 5000 fewer appointments and 2000 fewer operations. It got so bad that in September 2005 as Mrs King’s reign was drawing to a close the Dominion Post wrote an editorial asking how you could pour so much money into a health system yet it still got worse. No one could understand it. It was just incompetent management.Since then what have we seen? Under National there are 5000 extra doctors and nurses in the system 50000 more appointments and 45000 more elective operations. No one is going to Australia for basic cancer care. We have set very clear targets and we are delivering on them. Under Labour they were not even counting which kids got immunised. Now we have started—off a percentage base in the mid-70s—to have nearly 95 percent of 8-month-olds fully immunised. Ninety-five percent of people are in and out of emergency departments within 6 hours. We have achieved the first cancer care target. We have now moved on to a new one: the gold standard 62-day pathway. We are determined we will make progress with that. We are recording smoking rates and cardiovascular data. It has all improved under National. We have actually delivered what the public really cares about.Just with this Budget there have been some great initiatives like another $98 million going into surgery over the next few years and $76 million into palliative care. A lot of that money is going into the community—so delivering nurse specialists; delivering care close to the home. These are the things that New Zealanders are telling us are important. But do you know what the ultimate prize has been? It has been the free health-care for under-13s—a policy that Labour could only ever talk about but it never delivered. So we have now got 750000 children in New Zealand under the age of 13 who are getting free GP visits. We know that is going to make a real difference to the health of those children so that is a signal achievement. This Government will put in $120 million over the next 4 years to deliver that.In the meantime all that Labour can do is to try to make up statistics and look for leaked papers. We have had no policy work from the Labour Party in health. We know that Labour is not ready for Government because we have not seen any work. Labour members do not go around the sector. What they do is go around trying to corrupt officials and steal papers and then make up figures.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member will resume his seat. I think the member knows that accusing people of acquiring things or asking people to steal them is not parliamentary. The member will withdraw.Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I withdraw. But the essential point is that Labour poured in more and more money but it did not run the system properly.Grant Robertson: Blow your cigar smoke all over people Jonathan.Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: And you can see what a raw nerve this is because Grant Robertson is losing it. Grant has completely lost it. National has won on health; Labour lost—Labour did.Grant Robertson: What a disgrace you are.Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: You can hear Grant Robertson yelling and raving here. He knows he has lost the debate.SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): I serve on the Health Committee and we were fortunate to hear at the estimates hearings a few weeks ago from that very competent Minister of Health Dr Coleman who of course brings to the portfolio not only his very good and capable administrative and political skills but also a track record of real medical professionalism having served with distinction as a GP himself. When we heard evidence from him at the select committee in the Vote Health estimates hearing I was delighted to hear that Vote Health is the second-largest vote in Budget 2015. It accounts for 17.8 percent of the total 2015-16 appropriations. That is a measure of the commitment of this Government to ensuring that New Zealanders have access—and easy access—to health services and provision for health services when and as they are needed.As the Minister just reminded the Committee it was during the last Labour administration that things were so woefully bad in health that people were literally being kept in hospital corridors under bright fluorescent lights at North Shore Hospital for days on end because there was no capacity to provide a service for them. Not only that but New Zealanders were being shipped—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to interrupt the member. I gave the Minister of Health some leniency in the debate to refer to periods outside this estimates period because I understand that he was responding to comments made by Annette King. That has now finished and the member will talk about the estimates thank you.SCOTT SIMPSON: Thank you Mr Chair. The simple matter is that in terms of what this Government has done in the health sector it is a remarkably good story. If ever there was an example of a plan that is working and working well it is in health and that became immediately obvious and apparent when the Minister presented evidence to the select committee during the estimates hearings.I represent the beautiful and much-admired environmental electorate of Coromandel. Coromandel is a seat that has not only a wonderful environment and natural aspect but also a population that is of a senior demographic. We are in terms of the demographic breakdown the second-most mature electorate in the country in that regard. So we have got an awful lot of people who are in the 65-plus age group.One of the areas that I was pleased to see the Minister speak about at the select committee was the improved funding and support that would go to people of senior years and those who have chronic diseases. One of the things that became very apparent when the Minister gave evidence to us was that as we all know New Zealand’s population is growing but it is also ageing and the proportion of New Zealanders aged 65 and over is predicted to increase from 14 percent in 2013 to 22 percent by 2033.So in electorates like mine that means that there will need to be greater levels of support and service for for instance palliative care and the Minister was able to assure the select committee that the investment of an extra $13 million a year from 1 July 2015 to help hospices expand their community palliative care services would be of great help and assistance to electorates like mine in the Coromandel. That means that services will be able to be provided to people who need support and care if they are terminally ill and much of that support and service can be provided at home in situ in an environment where the person who is receiving that care and support feels most comfortable. All the evidence shows that where that sort of service can be provided in a home situation then that is a good and excellent outcome not only for the patient concerned but of course for family members as well. As New Zealand’s population ages and grows the demand for palliative care is also going to grow. Hospices make a huge difference to the lives of people who are confronting a terminal illness at end of life.The Health Committee is currently about to embark on a fulsome inquiry into end-of-life choices. As a member of that committee I am looking forward to it.SUE MORONEY (Labour): Tēnā tātou e te Komiti ko Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori tēnei nō reira kia kaha tātou. Ki te kaupapa i tēnei wā.[Greetings to us the Committee this is Māori Language Week so we need to be energetic. And so to the matter at hand.]I want to address in the estimates debate on the health sector the issue of mental health. I note that the Minister of Health when he spoke before was very animated and in fact got a little desperate and started making some desperate accusations. But I want to address—again today it seems to be a day for this—an issue that is very close to my heart.The Minister announced just a few days ago a formal inspection of the mental health services at the Waikato District Health Board. I want to seek an assurance from the Minister that that formal inspection will be done in the context of a health system that we now know has $1.7 billion less funding than it should have had in order to keep up with the demands both the population increases and the inflation demands on the health budget. Even the Minister himself in question time yesterday accepted that the health budget has not kept up with inflation under this National Government. So I want to ensure that when this formal inspection of the mental health services happens at Waikato District Health Board if it is discovered that resources and funding are in fact one of the reasons why we have had problem after problem after problem in the mental health services there the Government will ensure that those issues are fixed and it will not use this as a whitewashing exercise.I listened very carefully to what the Minister said when he announced the formal inspection and he said it was necessary because people needed to be reassured about the mental health services and that sounds like the language of a whitewash to me. What I am interested in is knowing that the service is a quality service and that the most vulnerable people in our community are not put in harm’s way because of the underfunding of the mental health services and the health service in total that has happened under the estimates for the 2015-16 year.The thing that seemed to trigger this formal inspection was the discovery of a fraudulent psychiatrist being employed by the district health board but that is just the tip of the iceberg. I am now quoting from a letter that has been written by Dave Macpherson who is a local councillor in our area. He happens to be the father of a young man who lost his life when he was under the authority of the mental health services in Waikato. He has written to John Crawshaw who is going to do this formal inspection to ensure that he knows the full history.So not only have we had the fraudulent psychiatrist discovered in just recent days but in 2014 Mr Paul Fox was employed as a psychiatrist at the Henry Rongomau Bennett Centre. It was discovered that he had to hand back his licensing registration when he had worked in America because of an inappropriate sexual relationship between him and a patient. We have had Manilall Maharajh a psychiatrist employed by Waikato and Bay of Plenty district health boards who was found guilty of professional misconduct by the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal in 2013 after having sexual relations with a patient and paying her not to inform authorities about this. We have had Jason Luty a psychiatrist employed by the Waikato District Health Board in 2012 after leaving Essex in the UK under a public cloud after the publication of offensive pictures of his own children—and the list goes on.What I am suggesting here is that the Minister needs to make sure that this is a very thorough investigation because there is a range of issues that happened over a period of time. This though is the district health board after all that announced the formal appointment of the current chief executive officer just days before—in fact I think it might have even been only 24 hours before—a very damning report was published about that same person and the hospitals that he had been managing in Canada. So I can only ask that when the Government is doing this formal inspection of mental health services the inspection be more broad because the issue about employing people under dubious circumstances I think is more broad than the mental health services themselves. I want to implore the formal inspection to take seriously the issues that have been raised by Dave Macpherson.BARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): It is a pleasure to be taking a call this afternoon. I am really proud to be part of the Health Committee and it is really pleasing to note therecord $15.9 million budget. You know the key thing about this is that National believes that all New Zealanders and their families should have access to timely quality health-care no matter where they live. A really key feature of the estimates going forward is actually putting things into medical services that are much closer to home. It is important for people to be close to home. If we think back a few years ago we were having women with breast cancer going to Australia. That is a most stressful time for a woman and it is so important that now they are able to have that service in their country and in their community.I am really proud of some of the things that are happening to take the services closer to home. Even in the last few days we have seen some announcements that have come out around the estimates so not only are they estimates but they are actually falling into action. One that I am really pleased to be part of is the mobile surgical services contract which has been extended. That is a great bus that has gone around and to date approximately 20000 New Zealanders have been treated on this bus and received over 45000 hours of education. So not only is it actually treating the patients but it is going around and actually educating health professionals on the road. What it has done is it has reduced the waiting times for patients and improved the access to health for those people in rural and remote communities.It was really interesting because in renewing that contract there was a review prior to renewing it and the professional development training provided to health professionals has been described as relevant and engaging. The interactive digital video equipment enables collaboration with health professionals in other parts of the country and overseas. Not only are we training people on the spot but we are actually collaborating between various areas of the country and we have links overseas where people can share information and understand how to do it better. So I am really pleased that 24 rural towns are actually receiving this service and will continue under the proposed health estimates to receive this service in a 5-week cycle where more people can have access.It is also really important that an extra $846000 is now going into funding 20 more nurse practitioner trainees. Currently there are 145 nurse practitioners in the country. I know that we were doing some work looking at some legislation last week where we spoke about changing some of the legislation so that we could give wider roles to some of these nurse practitioners because up until now it has been the prerogative of the doctors to be able to do things that highly qualified nurse practitioners are able to do.There again we are working on this whole theme of it being closer to home having more people out in the community. It means that people do not actually have to always travel to the bigger hospitals and it also means that some of those people in the community can upskill themselves to become nurse practitioners which means that they do not necessarily always have to travel to certain points in big hospitals either.One of the future things for health is actually creating it closer to home for people and I think that is a really important thing. It is also about working on elective surgery. So far there is 37 percent more elective surgery. That means 44000 people up until now and we are going to continue to work on this in the future. It just means that those people do not have to sit around and wait for these operations. I am really pleased with that.The Minister of Health mentioned that we have under-13s being able to get to the doctor for free. That means that they will go sooner and they will get diagnosed sooner which means the chance of them being hospitalised when they do go is less. That actually means that they will end up being closer to home as well and will have more time with their parents.Also up until now in the tracking of full immunisation of children 94 percent of 8-month-olds are fully immunised. That means that we are on track for 95 percent and the Government is really really proud of that—very proud.LOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe te Māngai o te Komiti ngā mihi ki a koutou katoa te kaupapa te hauora o tō tātou iwi o Aotearoa.[Thank you Mr Chairperson and greetings to you all. The health of our New Zealand tribes is the matter at hand.]I am a proud member of the Health Committee and as a member of that select committee it is my responsibility with my colleague the Hon Annette King to hold the Government to account. In holding the Government to account what we have done is we have commissioned an Infometrics report that has revealed a $485 million funding shortfall in the health sector. That shortfall is actually not only incredibly relevant to the 40000 staff within the health and care sector but it has huge implications in respect of service cuts. I want to focus my contribution on what those service cuts may be.One of the worries or concerns I have is that school-based health services will be cut. The latest evaluation of those school-based health services has actually highlighted the benefits to the year 9 assessments and particularly to our young boys. Part of that assessment not only looks at their home life education issues what sort of activities they are engaged in drug and alcohol issues and sexuality issues but also focuses quite clearly on suicide and depression. As we know as a country suicide is a big issue particularly for our young people and particularly for young boys so I have a huge issue if part of the Government’s shortfall of $485 million is going to mean a reduction in school-based health services. I do want to contribute that the Minister of Health reassured us that there would be no cuts in this area but it is something that I am particularly interested in and will be keenly watching.The other area that I want to highlight is the provision of maternity services. Unfortunately in Aotearoa New Zealand we have over 660 children who die every year of perinatal mortality. These are babies who die before 28 days of age. In the Counties Manukau District Health Board area where I am from what that represents is 27 deaths that were avoidable—27 deaths of children. This is particularly relevant in my electorate where there are high concentrations of Māori high concentrations of Pacific people and high concentrations of Indian members of our community. Of particular relevance is that 34 percent of the babies who died had mothers who smoked. That is a really significant statistic as we know that smoking is also a cause of perinatal mortality. One of the other areas that I will be focusing on is whether or not the Government plans to cut—like it did in 2010—any smoking cessation programmes. What we know is that in 2010 there was a $12 million reduction in smoking cessation programmes and I hope that that was not a factor in terms of the fact that there were 126 babies in New Zealand who could have been saved from avoidable deaths.I also want to focus my contribution on hospice funding. The Government has been really really interesting because it has been crowing about this investment in hospice funding. Again I want to highlight one of the commitments that the Minister of Health made at the select committee. He committed to 70 percent of hospice funding coming from the Government. That is the social contract—I want to call it that—that the Government has with hospice providers and there are 29 hospice providers round Aotearoa.In the South Auckland area we have two hospice providers: we have Totara Hospice South Auckland and we have Franklin Hospice. Both of those hospice providers I believe are doing a fantastic job. Again it is my responsibility to hold this Government to account for the 70:30 funding split. One of the things that I know in engaging with my hospice providers is in fact that currently Totara Hospice receives only 49 percent funding from the Government. So the community of South Auckland is having to find 51 percent of its $8.4 million budget from a community that has high Māori high Pacific and high Indian populations and that has actually got socio-economic challenges. Our community is expected to provide 51 percent of the funding whereas in fact the Government says that that is not the case.I will be holding the Government accountable to that funding formula and to that social contract because it is something that it has committed to me in written questions. It is something that it has committed to me and my colleagues on the Health Committee in our select committee hearings. So if that is not going to be one of the commitments that this Government holds to then I am sure that I and my colleagues on the Health Committee will make this Government accountable to that issue as well.As a member of the Health Committee I too want to reiterate that some of the issues that we have been dealing with have actually been driven by the community. We saw some women come to us this week whose children through their birth circumstances have had to be tube-fed. One of the issues that we have in New Zealand is that we have a cohort of children who through no fault of their own—premature births—have been fed by tubes some for up to a year. When they leave hospital believe it or not there is no further intervention and engagement with not only the child but the parents. So we have children who are dependent on being fed by tubes with no specific support.In New Zealand we know that there are over 330 children in this circumstance and there is no response from the Government to meeting the needs of these parents and children. So children may leave at 1 year of age and one of the scenarios that was presented to us was children at 3½ or 4½ years of age still being—well not tube-fed but having—what did they call it Barbara?Barbara Kuriger: The Mic-Key button. The Mic-Key tube.LOUISA WALL: The Mic-Key tube. So this Mic-Key tube essentially means that these children are being tube-fed because they have had dependency. Because of the circumstances of their birth they are unable to eat and they are gagging and obviously there are communication issues there are psychological issues and there are behavioural issues. These children are dependent on being fed by a tube and what do we do to support these children and families? We do nothing. I think New Zealanders would be horrified to think that we just leave parents to their own devices.So what we are seeing more and more of within the Health Committee because we have got such an unresponsive system is communities mothers and people who are affected by a lack of support and a lack of care coming to the Health Committee and saying: “Please help us. Please hold the Ministry of Health accountable.” Unless they can get our support and unless we as a select committee hold the Ministry of Health to account it is actually not meeting the needs of our New Zealand citizens. I think as I have said we are seeing a growing number of our constituents and our citizens using the petition process to highlight deficiencies in the health system.I actually think it is a sad indictment on the health system because we should have a more responsive health system. We should not have to rely on citizens having to go through a democratic process. But in saying that I am incredibly grateful that I live in a democracy where citizens can directly engage and citizens can stand up and advocate. And in the instance of those three women it was not just for their children; it was for other New Zealand children who are yet to be born or who are living in the circumstances that they are living in. I think collectively we as a Health Committee were incredibly proud—or I was—of their advocacy their professionalism and the fact that they cared so much that they were so passionate and that they were prepared to make sure that our health system is responsive to the needs not only of their children today but of our children in the future.So I hope that we as a select committee are going to do all that we can to make sure that our best practice is about ensuring that children who have a premature birth and who are tube-fed actually then have the ability to fully participate in life. At the moment those children are not able to fully participate in life. Their parents are not able to fully participate in life. It is going to affect their education. It is going to affect a whole lot of things unless we get it right. And what I see at the moment is that we have got a system that actually just wants to tick all the boxes so we have you know the Better Public Services targets and we have—RIA BOND (NZ First): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. I am pleased to take this short call on behalf of New Zealand First. I specifically want to actually talk today about palliative care in the Vote Health estimates. It is easy for the Government to turn round and say “We’ve put $76.1 million into palliative health care services.” and yet in the same breath it says it would spread this out over a 4-year period.So what we are really dealing with here is the fact that we have 29 hospices from around New Zealand for palliative health care services and they receive only $19 million per year. We know from Hospice New Zealand that in 2014 it dealt with 16000 patients. It visited over 114000 homes of patients who actually have life-limiting conditions. This is actually for them an emotional roller-coaster time of their lives. It is generally in their last stages—about 10 days—when they can expect to live comfortably.So what I can see is that what that works out at is that we are dealing with $1187 per hospice patient. That is not enough. This is the most sensitive time. It is emotional for families it is gut-wrenching and it is really quite a traumatic time for families to go through. Any death in a family is not wanted by anybody but when you have a loved one who is dying of a terminal condition every emotion is wrenched and it is elongated. So what our palliative care specialists could provide and could be funded for is not just $1187 dollars per patient; it is now going to be spread out among our whānau members and within the means of our community.But of course we are not just dealing with the $1187 being the total cost of looking after our loved ones in a hospice or in palliative care because now as the previous speaker Louisa Wall mentioned we are looking at a 70:30 hospice-funding split. That represents 70 percent of the cost of looking after patients provided by the State but the hospices then have to go out past their district health board and reach into the goodwill of their community to help them fund-raise. We have seen this annually through bucket collections on street corners and through groups like Rotary supporting hospices by funding by holding annual events and by giving support by sitting at the bedside of patients in hospices as I know they do in Invercargill. I have also seen fund-raising occur outside the Warehouse with sausage sizzles. I have seen it outside Harvey Norman in order for the community to try to make up the shortfall of the 30 percent of funding that they need.Hospices along with community groups have hundreds of volunteers who have to help raise money for what is a vital part of our public health service at a time when the public health sector and our people need to know that these services will be met. This Government expects the community and many volunteers to cover the shortfall in funding and in 2014 it was to the sweet tune of $42 million. That $42 million of shortfall meant that communities had extra pressure along with hospices to go out there and find some money. In 2014 it cost $99 million to provide these essential health services for palliative care in hospices. I am grateful when I see the figures to speak about them and to understand that our volunteers contributed a million hours as part of their commitment to help with hospice funding.I look at the Mary Potter Hospice here in Wellington which does an amazing job for the citizens of Wellington. It is run by very special people. So I do not begrudge the fact that we probably feel that with a growing ageing population perhaps the Government is being a little bit mean. Of course this is not necessarily the fault of the Government but it is the fault of the Government’s leadership because some district health boards—and as we know from the estimates for Vote Health South Auckland’s Totara Hospice is named as one of those that is receiving 50 percent less than what it needs from the responsible district health board.Vote Health agreed to.Justice SectorThe CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): We now come to the justice sector—volume B.5 volume 7. The question is that Vote Attorney-General Vote Corrections Vote Courts Vote Justice Vote Parliamentary Counsel Vote Police and Vote Serious Fraud stand part of the schedules.JACQUI DEAN (Chairperson of the Justice and Electoral Committee): I am very proud to say that under this Government’s very tough and focused stand on law and order New Zealand’s recorded crime rate is almost without exception falling. It is at its lowest level since 1978. That is a record that this Government should be well proud of. But it is not just the Government of course that is delivering services in the justice sector. It is all of those—our police our Department of Corrections our Attorney-General—who run our courts system and all of those in the justice sector who are delivering on behalf of the people of New Zealand.One of the focuses for the National Government is getting the key justice sector agencies—that is the Ministry of Justice the police and the Department of Corrections—to further drive crime down. That is what they are doing because what we want to do is reduce the impact of crime on all New Zealanders and we are also focusing on the victims of crime. I know that my colleagues are keen to pick up that aspect of the justice sector.However several challenges do remain. When she came to our committee the Minister of Justice Amy Adams made a particular point of focusing on those issues. We know that the incidence and also the impact of crime is very unevenly spread. Research has found that 6 percent of adults experience 54 percent of all crime. That is not a figure to be proud of and that is a figure that this Government is focusing on.One area of concern is the overrepresentation of Māori in our criminal justice system both as offenders but also as victims of crime. Māori are imprisoned at a rate of six times the rate of non-Māori and there are other statistics that do not make for good reading. Whether or not they make for good reading is no reason not to focus on them and that is one of the focuses of the Minister and the Ministry of Justice.The other focus that I want to talk about in my contribution is family violence. The Minister acknowledged to the Justice and Electoral Committee that although crime is at a 63-year low the high incidence of family crime is unacceptable to her. It is unacceptable to us and so it should be. Reducing the incidence of family violence is the top priority for the Ministry of Justice. About half of all homicides in New Zealand are as a result of family violence. On average 14 women seven men and eight children are killed by a member of their family every year. These are shameful statistics. Around half of all violent offence charges before the courts relate to domestic violence and in 2013 there were 11700 prosecutions for domestic violence - related offences.So what are we doing about that? In July of last year the Government announced a new package of family violence reforms and I am going to go through those because they are significant and they are important. There is the review of the Domestic Violence Act to ensure that it keeps victims safe and also holds offenders to account. There is the trialling of mobile safety alarms for victims so that they can notify the police of an emergency and of their location. Just as a sidebar the police are now no longer necessarily sitting back at the station waiting for those alarms to go off. They are out in the community using new technologies out on the streets and being proactive in protecting victims of crime.This Government has established a Chief Victims Advisor and that adviser is to the Minister of Justice to advise on the needs and views of victims of crime including domestic violence victims. It is the views of the victims of crime that are so terribly important in putting victims at the centre of our justice system. We have heard through a number of bill considerations that it is the victims who need to have a voice. Whether it is through the victim impact statement or whether it is putting a voice to the impact on victims that is so necessary.Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I rise to take a call. I want to speak about both Vote Corrections and Vote Attorney-General. As my colleague Kelvin Davis has highlighted the terrible fiasco that is the Serco contract at the remand prison at Mt Eden is a disgrace. The performance of the Minister of Corrections has been abysmal so much so that he really is very aptly called the Minister of Corrections because I have never seen a Minister have to make so many corrections in the House after so many mistakes.One of the core responsibilities of the State is that if it incarcerates someone and takes away their liberty it should at least protect the person from harm. The fact is that this Minister of Corrections has so woefully overseen the Serco contract that we have seen through television assaults and people who have died as a consequence of their treatment in a corrections facility. It is a woeful indictment of the National Government’s conduct of this performance and it is a failure of its responsibilities to New Zealand. It is what was predicted would happen with Serco because the only way it can significantly save costs is to have lower levels of staff and therefore lower levels of supervision of prisoners. That results in the sorts of debacle that we have seen overseas where it has been severely criticised and in New Zealand.I want to talk briefly about Vote Attorney-General. Last Friday in the High Court Justice Heath delivered the first declaration ever under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. For the first time since that Act was passed 25 years ago this year there was a declaration that legislation pushed through this Parliament was in breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. That legislation arbitrarily stripped all prisoners of their right to vote. There is not much sympathy in society for prisoners but as we have seen in the Serco case they should have some rights.Why the High Court made this unprecedented declaration of non-compliance with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act is that it found that the National Government legislation which was opposed by the Labour Party and other Opposition parties in this Parliament including the Greens was arbitrary. Previously if you were in prison for more than 3 years you lost your right to vote. The legislation stripped the right from all prisoners and that was found to be arbitrary. Why? Well if you are someone who has decent home circumstances and can get home detention you can vote. But if you are someone from a difficult situation who has not got anywhere to go and therefore you do not get home detention and you are put in prison and you do not get the right to vote. That is arbitrary. What else? Well if you have a 2-yearprison sentence and it happens to fall between elections you get the right to vote but if your 2-yearprison sentencehappens to traverse a voting period you lose the right to vote.We sought then an urgent debate on the issue in Parliament—it is difficult to get these issues debated in Parliament because the Government is clearly or should be embarrassed about this terrible outcome—and we were refused. It is within the jurisdiction of the Speaker to refuse that but it highlights the need for a change to the arrangements in respect of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.As Andrew Little said in a recent speech referring to the Labour Party policy at the last election we think we should adopt the recommendation of the Constitutional Advisory Panel that says that when the courts find legislation to be in breach of fundamental rights—and this is one of the fundamental civil liberties of any democracy; choosing whom you are going to have to run the country—that sort of taking away of rights can change electoral outcomes. We saw that in Florida in the presidential election when they stripped so many people of their voting rights and changed the outcome of the world given that we had George W Bush who then invaded Iraq and it led to these terrible problems in part that we have got on the other side of the world.When these sorts of things are identified by the courts they should automatically come back to Parliament and be re-debated. It does not mean to say that Parliament should hand over to the courts the right to strike down primary legislation—I do not think we should do that—but I thought that the recommendation of the Constitutional Advisory Panel of this middle course should be followed. If a declaration of non-compliance with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act is made it should come back to Parliament be put on the Order Paper and the legislation concerned should be re-debated by this Parliament rather than the breach being ignored.Hon AMY ADAMS (Minister of Justice): I have been looking forward to taking a call in this appropriations debate in the justice sector area. There is a lot to cover and I want to take a double call which I will obviously call for in due course to cover off some of that. I think the starting place for me is to look at where we are sitting and then I want to talk a bit about where we want to go and the direction of travel that we have prioritised in this Budget.The headline really is that crime in this country is at a 35-year low. That really is a tremendous achievement and a huge amount of credit has to go to everyone who works in the sector. It is not just the Government—there are a lot of reasons why things are working well at the community level—but certainly the police and the justice sector agencies should really be commended I think for a tremendous deliverable for their work in that space.We have a Better Public Services target—target seven—that looks at crime in this country. We set a target of getting crime down by 20 percent by 2017. I can tell this Committee that we have already reduced total crime by 18 percent and we are well on track to reach our target long before the final target date. Violent crime is down by around 10 percent. That one is harder and slower to move as you would expect but none the less good progress has been made. In youth crime we set a target of a 25 percent reduction which we then increased to 30 percent because we have already exceeded it. Youth crimeis down 38 percent.I do just want to take a moment to commend the tremendous work of the Youth Court in New Zealand and the system that has been developed in New Zealand which is held in high regard internationallyfor the way we work with our young offenders. What we know is that our best chance to stop people becoming clients if you like of the justice sector is when they are young. Equally if they get on to a path of repeated offending as children then they are the ones who are most likely to become long-term offenders. If you take the 1970 population cohort and you look at all the crimecommitted by that particular cohort 80 percent of all crimecommitted by them is committed by people who had their first conviction before the age of 20. So working well with our young offenders is fundamentally important so as to not let them get into the cycle of a conviction and a sentence from which it is that much harder to come back and re-enter society. So in the youth crimespace tremendous work has been done.I also want to touch on one of the initiatives that I very well remember being passed when I was a member of the House when the Hon Simon Power was in my role and that is the offender levy. Legislation that was passed at that time imposed a levy of $50 on offenders to help contribute towards providing better services for victims. At the time one half of this House completely derided it and said that it would never work that it was a nonsense and that it was window dressing. One half of the House said it was a stupid and that they would get rid of it. Well that levy has exceeded all collection expectations. So far we have collected $16.5 million which has been entirely—entirely—set aside for victim support services. Because of that we have been able to provide services that were never previously available to victims. More than 40000 victims have had services funded by this Government thanks to that one piece of legislation which was completely derided and criticised by the Opposition. One of those services of course was the 24/7 support service offered to victims by Victim Support which is funded by us.Ms Dean the chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee talked about family violence in her speech on this section. I am pleased she did because as Ms Dean noted this is the area that I have made my No. 1 priority. I did that with some degree of trepidation because this is a hard area to make a dent in and if I was a more self-preserving Minister I probably would have picked things that were a little bit easier to deliver on. But like my colleague Hekia Parata I am here to make a difference on things that matter to New Zealand. We are not here to do the easy stuff and if this country really wants to get a grip on one of the most egregious horrific and embarrassing statistics in our society we have to deal with family violence.Let me just tell the Committee a couple of things that highlight how unacceptably high the incidence of family violence is. We have the highest rate in the OECD of reported violence against intimate partners. That is not what anyone in this House would accept for a country like New Zealand. We have more than 100000 notifications to the police of family violence incidents each year. That effectively is one every 5 minutes—every 5 minutes. So during my speech there will be at least two notifications to the police of family violence.What is really scary though is the statistic that tells us that on average a victim of family violence will experience 21 instances of family violence before she—it is generally she; not always of course—will pick the phone to the police. So we are getting one call to the police every 5 minutes and yet we know that behind that there is this enormous history of offending that has not even been registered into the system. Half of our homicides come from family violence so if we want to make a continued dent in that hard sticky area of serious violence it has to be through dealing with family violence.On average 14 women seven men and eight children are murdered in this country every year by someone they have a family relationship with and that cannot be allowed to continue. We had a remarkable statistic from my colleague the Hon Michael Woodhouse about police time. There was a discussion in the last speech around making better use of police time. Well 41 percent of all police response time is spent on responding to family violence. So if we want to have more police out on our streets keeping us safe and doing the things we would want them to do we have to deal with this issue. The statistics are just mind-numbingly horrific but what I am encouraged by is the fact that I have not found anyone in this Committee in the NGO sector or anywhere in New Zealand actually who is not committed and willing to help try to solve this problem and make things work better.I want to thank members of this Committee who have worked cooperatively collaboratively and across party lines with me to think about how we can do this better. I will say that I do not believe that this is an area that any Government of any political colour has really got on top of. Nor do I think it is one that any Government has not tried very hard to deal with. For years and years we have had countless reports and initiatives and experts and spending but the reality is that we are not getting cut-through. I cannot stand here and promise that we will solve that but I can absolutely stand here and promise this Committee that while I am the Minister of Justice this is going to be what I think about every single day and in this year’s Budget you have seen from us a commitment to ensure that this is right at the heart of our work programme.Just yesterday the Minister for Social Development and I released a stocktake of how the Government has worked in this area to date. What is interesting to me is that it is the first time that that degree of comprehensive all-of-Government assessment has been undertaken and it is certainly something that the sector has been calling for for a while. We as a Government—and I use that term not in the executive sense but in the Public Service sense—have to be better integrated in how we deliver our services. It is no good having different agencies looking at this lens through an entirely siloed vertical approach without giving thought to how other agencies are interacting in this space. It is inefficient it is expensive and actually quite frankly it can be damaging and counter-productive.So Minister Tolley and I undertook a comprehensive stocktake which revealed quite surprisingly that we are spending $1.4 billion a year on family violence—$1.4 billion—and yet very little of it is spent on prevention and screening. Almost all of it is spent on response. It is easy to look at this in the Budget round but actually trying to re-engineer that work programme is going to be quite a piece of work. Later in the coming weeks you will see more announcements from us about how we see that work programme continuing to develop and evolve and I can assure this Committee that as I say while I am in the role it is something I will continue to focus on.Let me just take the time I have left to touch on a couple of other initiatives one of which is the process to appoint a Chief Victims Advisor to ensure that the voice of victims remains absolutely at the heart of the development of Government policy. We saw what a tremendous advance it was to the quality of policy advice when we appointed for the first time ever a New Zealand Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor to really ensure that we had very good high-level scientific analysis at the heart of the Government. I want that same sort of rigour around ensuring that the victim’s perspective is represented at the heart of the policy process and that is why we are appointing that person.Finally the Harmful Digital Communications Act is a piece of legislation that I am incredibly proud of. It is being talked about now in a number of countries as a model on how to address this issue. There is still work to do to appoint the approved agencies that will have the core role in educating the community and user groups and working to resolve disputes but this is legislation that reflects that harm in the modern environment can be caused in a myriad of different ways. We have to be responsive and we have to be continually reviewing our harm frameworks to ensure we have those settings right. We know that harm in the online world is not only real and pervasive but incredibly damaging and the number of suicides and cases of serious harm that have occurred as a result are unacceptable. I am very proud of that legislation.DAVID CLENDON (Green): Could I just begin my comments by acknowledging that the Minister of Justice has just said a great deal that I can agree with. I do not agree with all of National’s programme clearly but I say that in a context of believing that if we are to reduce crime and to make some real inroads into offending and our management of offenders we need to endeavour to depoliticise some of the issues—to perhaps tone down some of the aggression shall we say between the various sides in this debate about how to deal with issues around justice.So with that point I would say that if one looks at the estimates for the whole suite of justice portfolios—corrections police courts and so on—it is very difficult to make an argument that we are underspending on justice. That collective I have mentioned—the spend would be something well north of $5 billion I think. It is a significant amount of money and it has increased over recent years. Corrections for example—in the early 2000s the spend on corrections I think was about $460 million. This year it is around $1.5 billion. That sort of increase is unsustainable. I think that the issue is not that we are spending too little but that we are not spending it as well as we might do and therefore we are not getting the outcomes that we might seek to achieve. “Justice reinvestment” is the phrase that is commonly used by advocates of taking some political risk—and there is political risk in it—but it is being willing to rethink and to reconsider where we focus the spend on justice where we put the majority of that money and what outcomes we will expect from that.Offending is trending down. The crime rate as the Minister noted is at a historic low. The peculiar anomaly with that of course is that imprisonment is at an all-time high. We need to investigate and analyse that peculiar disconnect. I think that in terms of the popular perception that crime is actually on the increase I think our friends in the fourth estate need to consider their dramatic over-reporting of crime which we see constantly across all of our media. I will not dwell on that but I do believe that is another matter that we need to pay some attention to.To state the obvious the best investment is that which prevents crime and that which reduces the numbers of victims. We will never eliminate crime and offending—that would be some sort of happy nirvana some utopia we are unlikely to ever achieve—but certainly we can reduce it. To give credit where it is due we have seen some very positive moves in terms of resourcing and practice. I think of the police particularly with the Prevention First strategy they have adopted and neighbourhood policing teams. These are all very positive moves that will help reduce crime.Progress reported.Report adopted.