Turei Metiria: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Turei Metiria: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:651;Page:556] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 In my contributions during the Committee stage of the debate one of the things I was interested in was the cost of the policy given the complete lack of information about its necessity and its effect. We have no information at all about whether the bill is needed or the impact it will have because the bill did not go through the select committee process. We have not had reports from officials and we have not had assessments from those at the coalface doing this work—those from the courts those involved with prisoner rehabilitation those involved with victims’ rights organisations those involved with the police corrections or with remand. No one who actually has to do the work that this bill will require and no one who will be affected whether it be the prisoners or the victims by this bill has had a chance to have any kind of say or make any analysis of the bill. That means we are passing legislation with a huge lacuna of information and that makes us highly irresponsible. The passage of this bill is fiscally and legislatively irresponsible and a disgrace. I am sure taxpayers around the country will be horrified to discover that this legislation will cost about $45 million a year to implement with no information no oversight and no scrutiny. 
The cost of this legislation is very interesting because it does beg the question of where the Minister and the ministry expect to get the money from. Earlier on the Prime Minister said very clearly that there would be no money for Ministers to spend. Where is the $45 million going to come from? It will have to come from somewhere within the ministry. That is what the Prime Minister has said that Ministers have to do. What else might that money be used for or where else might it be coming from? What we do know of course is that the most effective means of preventing reoffending is keeping people out of jail and providing them with rehabilitation services when they are in jail; and afterwards when they are out in the community community support and community transition from other kinds of sentences back out into the community. 
Those services are run by community organisations—by churches; by organisations and programmes like the Sycamore Tree Programme for example which does an exceptional job; by restorative justice organisations; and by the Prisoners Aid and Rehabilitation Society which is a fantastic organisation of people directly impacted. This community sector is absolutely desperate for funds to run the programmes for prisoners and their families for offenders and their families for offenders and victims to make sure that offenders do not reoffend and they are by and large very effective programmes. These are the community programmes that work. These are the community programmes that keep our communities safe because they deal with the actual issues that lead to reoffending such as drug and alcohol addiction and systemic lifelong physical psychological and sexual abuse. 
These community programmes provide education and find means for prisoners and their families—offenders and their families—to re-educate themselves so that they have skills that they can take out to the workforce. Support for offenders trying to get work support for victims to deal with the impacts of the crimes on their lives and to confront either their own offenders through a restorative justice programme or other offenders to understand what is going on is provided through programmes like the Sycamore Tree. They are desperate for funds. 
Where might the money to pay for this $45 million useless project come from? It may well come from the Ministry of Justice support that goes to those programmes. Why would that be? It is because this Government completely fails utterly and dismally to understand that to work to protect our communities to keep them safer we need to stop reoffending. That is where the resources need to go. This bail legislation will make no difference whatsoever to the safety of our communities. The National Government and the Minister need to take responsibility for that failure should there be any reoccurrence of the kinds of cases and the kinds of issues that have been described during the debate. 
The other question it raises for me is that if there is going to have to be an increase in remand beds then this policy begins to lay the groundwork for the privatisation of prisons and private sector engagement in the building and management of our prisons. We have had this fight in this Chamber before. My colleague Nandor Tanczos led the charge to oppose the privatisation of prisons and we were very pleased when Labour Government legislation was put forward that would prevent the privatisation of prisons. I was involved with Nandor Tanczos: we visited prisons to talk about remand issues. I went to Auckland Remand Prison a privately owned prison at the time. It was a lovely prison if there is such a thing. It was very flash. It had fabulous services and all these wonderful things. It was obviously a loss leader. There is absolutely no way that Australasian Correctional Management could possibly have provided those kinds of services for the money it was getting contracted to do it for. It was clearly a flagship institution to try to encourage people to think that private prisons were fantastic so that they could get more contracts and run the miserable violent terrible prisons that they are known for running around the world in Australia South America and other countries. 
These companies that run private prisons are known not only for the abuse that goes on within the prisons between inmates but also for the abuse between inmates and corrections staff and the abuse of staff by the institutions themselves. Their services are dismal; the rehabilitation is ridiculous and non-existent. These private prisons have an international record of the most appalling impacts and results. Yet at the time there was a huge outcry from the National Party about the elimination of private prisons because its whole ideology is around the increase in privatisation of public services. 
Not only are we concerned about the privatisation of prisons but also we are concerned about the practical implementation of having private companies making a profit off the imprisoning of our own people—and particularly the imprisonment of Maori for whom those rates are very high. The principle is that it is the role of the State to engage in that level of punishment and the role of the State to be part of that justice and legal process. For the community to then contract out those responsibilities to the private sector is a wholesale relegation of that social contact between the State and the community. So in principle it is absolutely appalling and in practice it causes huge discrimination huge abuse of offenders and actually of the staff as is known. 
Towards the end of my first reading speech I talked about the social impacts of legislation and about the comment that Simon Power had made that corrections policy is failed social policy. I reiterate that again because I think that was a very wise statement and it is absolutely true. Like Moana Mackey I too am terribly concerned about the social policy that the National Government is putting through in urgency. That includes the tax cuts for some with tax increases for the poor in order to pad out the wallets of the wealthy; the 90-day fire-at-will legislation which will mean that young people and vulnerable workers in particular will have a great deal of difficulty getting and keeping employment; and also the coming education legislation which the House will soon be debating. This not only contains an increase in truancy fines for the most vulnerable and poorest families who could not afford to pay the existing fines and certainly will not be able to afford to pay the $3000 worth of fines but also the move to league tables for primary schools which is a move towards the privatisation of the education system. 
This bail legislation like the other legislation that is going through under urgency signals the Government’s absolutely clear path towards the privatisation of public assets and public services. It is a disgrace. It will cause greater reoffending it will cause communities to be less safe than they would otherwise have been and it is a dismal disgraceful waste of taxpayers’ money. Thank you.