Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): I am pleased to take a call on the Justice Sector part of this debate. We have heard from two members of the Opposition about some of the stressors some of the failures of the justice system currently. I agree with Mr Ball that the youth justice area is under considerable stress and is broken. He and I might disagree about some of the solutions but we certainly agree that we need to do something a great deal better.Similarly Mr Davis highlighted some of the problems with Corrections Again Opposition MPs are often told that we identify things as problems and then insist on more money being thrown at them. Actually I am not convinced that we need to spend more money on the justice sector collectively but we need to spend it very differently. I would offer one obvious example in Corrections. The annual budget for Corrections this year is something between $1.6 billion and $1.7 billion. Sixty-six percent of that—66c out of every dollar—will be spent simply locking people away. Fourteen cents out of every dollar will be spent on rehabilitation reintegration education programmes and all the positive solutions and a little bit remaining is given over to supervising community sentences. If we just shifted that ratio that balance of spend just a little bit each year for the next 10 years I think we would get remarkably different outcomes quite quickly.We are so focused at the moment on spending enormous amounts of money in ways that simply perpetuate the problem that we are missing the opportunities to spend that money in ways that actually offer real solutions. I see considerable opportunity for a cross-party consensus. If we can simply agree that our system is broken that we are not getting the outcomes that we all collectively want then I think we can simply start looking at that spend and start shifting it in other ways.As I have said I believe the justice system is in bad shape. It is under considerable stress. An example of that is just simply getting access to justice. For many people that is a step too far—for example for many people needing to get into the Family Court using legal aid. That has become so oversubscribed and under-resourced that many people are simply giving up. In recent times I have spoken to a number of family lawyers—people who do work in the Family Courts—who are simply stepping away from legal aid work because they simply cannot afford to continue doing it. That is true particularly of smaller practices but equally some of the larger concerns. They are simply saying that they cannot afford to keep taking the loss because that very critical part of the system is simply under-resourced. We need to do a great deal better there.The specialist courts the alcohol and drug treatment court for one are succeeding in ways that other practices have not. I sat in on one of those courts for a day about 2 weeks ago. We heard from one man who had had 15 drink-driving convictions and numerous prison sentences. Nothing much changed in his life until he went through the alcohol and drug treatment court and its programme. It took him 2 years. He came out the other side a changed man—straight and sober working involved with his family and back in touch with his kids. That programme worked where other programmes simply had not and yet we are continuing frankly to meddle about with the pilot and not really resource it sufficiently despite the proven success of that programme.I think that is one way we could spend a lot more money much more productively—on other forms of specialist courts homeless courts and those sorts of initiatives which to be fair the system is starting to experiment with. We need to actually mainstream a lot of those. We need to make them adapt and adopt best practice that we have seen overseas and start looking for real solutions because they do exist and we know what they look like.The Greens have supported the increase in the Police budget to enable the Police to put more front-line officers out there and to have more support staff around them. We did see an absolute deficit in that. The evidence was compelling for at least 2 years before the Government did eventually agree with everybody else that the Police needed more resource. That is a necessary step to give the Police more officers so that they can do their job better and to take the load off individual officers and stations. But it is not sufficient. We need more than that. Part of the reason the police are stretched and have been considerably stretched is an increase in offending around people who have mental health challenges and are having substance addiction—those sorts of difficulties that are emerging.We need as well to be investing more in giving the police the tools to fulfil for example their Prevention First strategy to build their neighbourhood policing teams and to enable them to do the preventative work that they want to do. Again Mr Ball made a comment that you cannot arrest your way out of a crisis or a problem. I think 99.9 percent of police would absolutely agree with that. They do not want to be constantly arresting and re-arresting people. They want to break that cycle. The police cannot do it on their own. They need to have the community-based drug and alcohol support the mental health system—which again is in disarray. Until we get rid of some of the waiting lists—for example a person with an addiction problem a substance abuse problem is currently likely to wait for a minimum of 3 or 4 weeks. I know for sure that not so long ago in Auckland anybody either self-referring or being referred by the courts for treatment for P addiction or abuse was looking at about a 3-month delay. That is utterly ridiculous. That is a lifetime for a person with an addiction. Three months is ample time for them to offend reoffend and you are back putting up the load on the justice system rather than spending it constructively in health treatment and addiction abuse treatment.Corrections is something of a pet issue of mine and I share in that with the new deputy leader of the Labour Party Kelvin Davis who is doing a lot of good work there. This Government has committed to spend $1 billion on increasing capacity in our prisons essentially to build more cells—one new prison around Waikeria. Additionally it is talking about another $763 million over 4 years again simply to build more cells to keep more people locked up for longer. That is such an incredibly wasteful application of public money that there ought to be an inquiry and I am sort of almost serious in that. I see the support services the programmes that can actually deal with people's cycle of offending and reoffending almost going under for want of $20000 or $30000. I see the community law sector which enables people to get access to the Justice Sector in ways that can make their lives better and easier and often in the long run can also reduce reoffending absolutely running on empty. I see it looking for all sorts of creative and innovative ways to generate other income streams and I see people burning out because they know that no matter how hard they work how many hours they do or how thinly they stretch every dollar they are still not meeting need. That is a classic recipe for burnout and we are seeing it in community law.But in the prisons we are spending as I say enormous amounts of money on simply keeping people locked away. That is amazingly wasteful. We need to get real both about community-based programmes and indeed the programmes available within the prisons. We do see that there have been some improvements just in the last 2 or 3 years. There are now programmes existing that do deal with drug and alcohol problems recognising as people enter prison for the first time they do get a psychological assessment—an assessment of their needs. But none of this is being properly resourced.The mental health assessments being done are being done in good faith by committed people but they are not specialists and nor do they have sufficient time to really drill into these people who are often people with quite deep-seated and complex mental problems. It is simply unreasonable to expect a registered nurse a general nurse—a competent person certainly but it is unreasonable to expect the level of investigation of a person's mental state in a 20-minute interview using basically what is a tick-box tool. It simply is unreasonable to expect any positive outcomes from that.We need to shift the mind-set. We need to shift the culture of Corrections away from containment and punishment and move it towards genuine innovation—thinking: why are these people landing up in jail again and again and again? How do we break that cycle? How do we put in place and move the resource away from this wasteful spending and move it into something that will deliver positive outcomes for us?I believe that that will be a 10-year project. I think it will take us 10 years. There are some legislative changes we need to make. The Parole Act the Bail Act the Sentencing Act—we do need to address those. But ultimately we need a culture change. We need to reallocate resources to get good outcomes. Thank you.