SpeechBRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you Madam Chair. It's a pleasure to take a call on part of the Estimates. Vote Police is where I want to go. The member who just resumed her seat Clare Curran talked about mental health and how important it is and she talked about the justice sector. Well here we go: what has this Government done? Well the mental health nurses have been removed from the Counties Manukau watch-house under their watch. The mental health worker ride-alongs with police appear to be going nowhere fast under their watch. And New Zealand Police have just reported a sharp uptick in the number of incidents reported that involve mental health issues. So it appears that to this Government wellbeing is a slogan and not a delivery.But I want to mainly focus on Vote Police and the Budget appropriation for the firearms buy-back. The Government set aside under Vote Police $168 million and then ACC chipped in another $40 million to make a total of $208 million. Just before I talk about how we quizzed the commissioner and the Minister in Estimates hearings the breakdown of that is that $190 million of the full $208 million is on the buy-back and the $18 million remaining is for running the buy-back operations.I'll just make a note because there's been some recent commentary in the media: police are doing an outstanding job of running the operation itself. I get feedback that officers in the buy-back events are very courteous and very professional. It is worthy of note that they are conducting themselves well. There are many people turning up who don't necessarily want to be there but they are being treated properly.It is the buy-back scheme itself that is turning into a complete fiasco. It started prior to Estimates—but it certainly started at Estimates. We quizzed the Minister as to how they had arrived at the buy-back scheme they wish to fund to an extent of $190 million and particularly what advice they had received around that; extremely disappointing and this is the first opportunity to report this to the House. The Minister sought not to answer any questions about that detail at all. He sought to use the excuse that the KPMG report was a report between KPMG and the Police Commissioner not the Minister; seeking to hide behind section 16 of the Policing Act that says that politicians in Government don't get involved in operational police matters. Well here's the fact: the Estimates are Government appropriation—the Minister is responsible for those moneys what they are to be spent on and what they are supposed to achieve. He refused to give us the information that we deserved and we're entitled to receive at the Estimates hearing.By some good fortune—rather than good management—a few weeks ago we finally received a copy of that report and it wasn't redacted. We finally got the answers that the Minister could have and should have given us at the Estimates hearing. They confirmed what we suspected: that the Government had prioritised pinching pennies over public safety. The experts to KPMG clearly stated that if the buy-back scheme was a retail price with no discounting they would get greater compliance—admittedly at a higher cost but they'd get greater compliance. Of the three headline options that they talked about the Government chose the one that they said would have the least compliance and the lowest cost. They chose to save a few pennies in the Budget and they knew that would come at the expense of public safety because they had been told. On 2 April 2019 the police advised the Government how many now prohibited firearms they estimated there to be in the country. And just because of events today in question time in answer to a supplementary question on question No. 8 the recipients of that document include both the Minister of Police and the Minister of Justice.In that document it states that the police believe there could be 240000 of these firearms in circulation in New Zealand. So far there have been—just at the beginning of the week—a total of about 104 events and an average of 117 firearms handed over at each event. Now the math would say if there's not an enormous uptick that's fewer than 30000 firearms that will be collected under the buy-back that the Government has set aside $208 million for. Even if there is a great uptick—[Time expired]