Radhakrishnan PriyancaPRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour): Kia orana e Maine Vaa Tuatua. It is indeed a pleasure to rise and take a call to speak to the Appropriation (2018/19 Estimates) Bill in its committee stage looking at the votes that sit within the ambit of the justice sector. Now we just heard from the Minister of Police who said that we need to do something different and that was actually a running theme that we heard from Ministers who spoke to the Justice Committee as well. In fact there's a quote that's been attributed to I think Albert Einstein that basically says that Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of madness" And that's what we have seen. For too long we have seen a previous Government that has pursued justice policies and shaped public discourse around the idea that we should just be locking up more and more people and giving them tougher longer sentences.We have heard from previous speakers on this side of the House this evening that that doesn't work. That has resulted in what our Ministers of this coalition Government have inherited—so basically increasing violent criminal offending the fact that our reoffending rate has pretty much stayed at about 60 percent and the fact that our prison population is ballooning. So basically we've got a criminal justice system that has failed and we need to do something different. And that's what this coalition Government is committed to and that's what we heard from successive Ministers who spoke at the select committee: that we want meaningful sustainable change within the criminal justice system. We want to reduce reoffending reduce offending and also ensure that we have fewer victims of crime. We need a criminal justice system that holds offenders accountable but that also looks at how we can provide better rehabilitation and reintegration so that when these people are outside of the prison system they're actually able to reintegrate better into our communities. We also need to support victims better and that's what we've seen in terms of Budget 2018 allocations as well.We've heard from the justice Minister that there will be a package of reforms that will be shaped by the criminal justice summit. This will basically be a much better public discourse. It'll be a national conversation that will bring together victims of crime victim advocates those who have worked at the front lines from different backgrounds people who have experience in the criminal justice sector and experts in the field to then come up with reform proposals—what are we going to do what are some of the possible solutions informed by evidence rather than led by some arbitrary targets that the previous Government set half of which weren't even met. We've also heard from the Minister that there was a Safer Ethnic Communities Ministerial Forum that aimed to also better that conversation and ensure that various aspects of our diverse communities understand what the priorities are that this Government has and also have the opportunity to feed into some of those possible solutions and put forth their experiences of the criminal justice sector as well.So what did we hear from Ministers in terms of holding offenders to account? We've actually just heard from the police Minister about the commitment to increase the number of new police officers in New Zealand. We've also heard from the member Darroch Ball that actually the previous Government cut the number of police officers that we've had. So this goal of increasing police numbers by 1800 is ambitious. The Minister acknowledged that at the select committee process as well. He explained that it would enable the deployment of 1100 police on the streets 700 to combat organised crime and would be supported by 485 non-sworn staff as well. Budget 2018 takes the first step towards that. All our Ministers who spoke at the select committee acknowledged that one Budget will not fix the mess that's been inherited—the mess that was created largely over the last decade. But this Budget takes the first step towards that and that's important to note.We also heard an assurance from the Minister that the quality of police—[Time expired]"