Barker Rick: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Barker Rick: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8097. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon RICK BARKER (Labour) 
: 
 I will pick up on a number of points. Firstly I will come back to the point made by David Garrett as to why private profit is not always the best thing to have in situations like this. I will do that by picking up on the points made by Sandra Goudie and the Minister the Hon Judith Collins which basically seem to say we should do this just to have a try at it—we should give it a go and see what happens. It seems to me to be a cavalier approach to making public policy. Give it a go! This a laudable Kiwi attitude. It has done us well in the bush on the sports field and in those sorts of things but I would suggest that it is not a good principle for developing public policy. 
Public policy has for a long time understood the importance of separating the powers. This Parliament does not make decisions about individual court cases for very good reason. There are a whole range of things where we separate the powers. Parliament has separated its power from the executive for very good reasons. Parliament should not try to run things. We separate the powers of the Minister and the chief executive for very good reasons. There are accountability reasons. 
One of the important points about this is that in having the State itself run the prisons there is no opportunity whatsoever for private interests to get into play with the operations of a prison. I will give a very good example and that was in the United States where recently a judge had thousands of decisions overturned because the judge was making decisions about where prisoners were being sent and for how long and they were going to a prison in which he had private interests. His private interests overlapped with his public policy duty. If we have private prisons we put that principle at risk. 
David Garrett 
: How many corrupt judges are there? 
Hon RICK BARKER 
: The member can interject as much as he likes but by ensuring— 
Chris Hipkins 
: And he will. 
Hon RICK BARKER 
: —which my good colleague here Chris Hipkins has said—that the incarceration of prisoners is done by the State there can be no private interests and there can be no profit motive in it. When we have contracted out we have allowed people who have private interests whilst carrying out public duties to have an overlap of interests and these are not always good things. 
Secondly— 
David Garrett 
: Chubb does that doesn’t it? 
Hon RICK BARKER 
: Well let me just deal with Chubb. Chubb runs a few buses and trucks around the place. It does not carry all the prisoners. It was there long before the Labour Government was in place and it is not responsible for the prisoners. Chubb is effectively a specialist taxi service. A prison has control of the prisoners 24 hours per day 7 days per week. It has absolute control of them. It picks a person up and takes him or her to another place where he or she is then placed in the control of the police who have absolute control of them. 
The point I will come back to is about the role of Parliament and the Auditor-General in ensuring that these things are done properly. This is a fundamental weakness. What the Minister is saying to us is that the chief executive and the monitors and auditors whom the chief executive appoints should offer this Parliament sufficient assurance. I say to the Minister that the interests of the chief executive can overlap with the interests of the particular prison. No chief executive will allow a contract to be arranged where one will say after a short period of time that this is a failure this is wrong and it has gone terribly bad because it reflects badly on him or her. The chief executive will be very tolerant of any private contractors because their success will reflect on him or her personally—a contractor’s failure will reflect on the chief executive badly. 
As we heard in evidence before the select committee the private prison that we have tried in New Zealand was massaging its figures. There is no doubt that it was massaging its figures with the— 
David Garrett 
: There were allegations. We did not hear evidence. Get one of the lawyers to explain the difference between allegations and evidence. 
Hon RICK BARKER 
: We heard directly from the people who turned up at a risk to themselves and they told the select committee. I have no reason to disbelieve them. There were a number of them and they said that they were massaging the figures. They massaged the figures because that was in the interests of their profit-driven employer. The interests of the chief executive and the contractor do overlap. The interests overlap in that they do both have a commitment to ensuring that they can show a success on paper. That is why this Parliament should have an independent oversight of that through its auditor our Parliament’s auditor the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General.