Jones Dail: Urgent Debates — Police 111 System—Review 
Jones Dail: Urgent Debates — Police 111 System—Review 
[Volume:625;Page:20461] 
DAIL JONES (NZ First) 
: 
 For the benefit of anyone who is still taking any interest in this debate I point out that that was the Labour Government’s Minister of Police. It is hard to believe but that was the Labour Government’s Minister of Police. He ended his speech by saying that he would listen to this and listen to that. All that the people of New Zealand are saying is: “Would you listen to the 111 calls?”. That is all that the people of New Zealand have been asking for a long time and that Minister is not prepared to listen to the concerns over the 111 calls or even to the speeches being made in reply to his. That is a disgraceful act. He is not willing to stay in the House and listen to some responses to what he said. 
New Zealand First wholeheartedly supports the New Zealand Police. Without the police force we would not have the type of democracy we have today. Our police force is not corrupt unlike some of the police forces nearby as we have seen recently in relation to airport matters and drug smuggling. We have a police force that until this term of the Labour Government was held in the highest regard by all New Zealanders. But now because of the inactions and the type of response we have had from this Minister unfortunately the New Zealand police force is experiencing problems in its relationship with the public. 
Who would have expected that the New Zealand police force would be subjected to a review by someone from New South Wales? When would we have ever expected a New Zealand police force to be reviewed by anybody from Australia of all places? We know about the problems the Australians have had with their police forces. But we have had a review conducted by the chief superintendent of the New South Wales police. We have had the Toronto police looking at us. The North Wales police have also come over here and in this report that was put together and in which PricewaterhouseCoopers was involved as well have told us how we should be running our police force 
This is a disgraceful day for this Labour Government’s Minister of Police. We do not expect him to resign because he not capable of taking responsibility for anything at all. That is a measure of the quality of this Labour Government. No one takes responsibility whether it is the Minister of Education when education is falling apart the Minister of Immigration when immigration is falling apart or of course the Minister of Police. Unfortunately the police have been falling apart for a long long time. 
This is a damning report on the Minister of Police and I think on the higher echelons of the police force. It is not damning of the men and women on the beat—they are being let down badly by the top echelons of the New Zealand police force. 
What is New Zealand First going to do about it? Well New Zealand First will deal with three fundamental issues in order to restore the safe society we expect in New Zealand. The first issue is the need to restore public confidence which has been shattered by the Labour Government’s failure to have any policies at all. The second is the need to dramatically increase police numbers to allow officers to do their duty more effectively—not just to take 111 calls but also to get out and service them; not to have ghost 111 groups but to have real live ones. We have more than a ghost as far as the Minister of Police is concerned. But he is less than a shadow of a ghost when it comes to doing anything in this House. He would feature well as a ghost in  
Macbeth 
—that is about how adequate he is for the people of New Zealand. 
The third thing New Zealand First will do in relation to the prioritisation of the police force is to demerge traffic officers from the police force. These are the three things we intend to do: restore public confidence increase police numbers and demerge traffic officers from the police force. 
It is New Zealand First’s intention to double the size of the police force over the next 5 years. I am sure that as we look at having more police in the police force we will make extra savings by not needing the number of prisons we seem to have these days. The problem of the increase in prisons is because people are not being caught when they are young because they are allowed to become more and more hardened criminals and because when they finally get to court and are facing 175 charges of burglary—and that is the only time they get sent to jail—they are hardened by the time they get there. They stay in prison longer so we need more prisons. We have to catch those people early and deal with them early. If necessary we need to lock them up for a short time early on. The only way we can do that is by having enough police to do it with. 
The only people we catch today are those who finally make a mistake after they have committed many hundreds of offences. That is the failure of the present system and it is one that New Zealand First will resolve. I believe that as we increase the number of police we will see a reduction in the number of prisoners and we will get to the stage where we probably will not even have to double the police force—it will be unnecessary to do that because we will have caught everybody. We will make savings in the prison service. 
I have seen in over 30 years as a lawyer that if offenders are not caught early they are history. They come back into the system and are locked up for 7 or 10 years. Do members know how much it costs to keep a prisoner in jail? It costs about $100000 a year. [ 
Interruption 
] Yes that member is embarrassing. It costs about $100000 depending upon who is being dealt with. That is an utter waste of money. It is the equivalent of a good police officer of high rank. How many prisoners do we have today? About 6000 or 7000 prisoners all costing $100000 each per year. My God! How many police could we have if we could catch those people early and make sure that we did not have to lock them up? That is the way things need to be done. 
We need to better resource the police and to make sure that the 111 system works because it is clear from this report which is a disgraceful comment on the Minister of Police on Mr Goff and on the other members of the Labour Government that our police force is falling apart. But New Zealand First is here. We will make sure that that does not happen under a New Zealand First Government. 
We in this Parliament should never have come to the stage where we have to debate the police in this way. We are debating this only because of a failure of the Labour Government. That is what it boils down to. It is a failure of the higher echelons of the police. An active appropriate and hard-working Minister of Police would enforce his or her personality on the commissioner and make sure that the public’s requests and demands were being met. 
It is an utter disgrace that the Minister of Police has said that he is not increasing the number of police in Wellington because the Commissioner of Police has not asked him to when everyone in Wellington knows that there should be more police in the city. Both men are just not doing their jobs. If the people of Wellington and the police officers of Wellington know that there should be more police in Wellington and if the Minister and commissioner take no notice of that then we will have a problem in Wellington. One wonders what the Labour and United Future members for Wellington are doing about this. What pressure are they putting on the Minister to get something done? They are obviously doing nothing whatsoever because the situation in Wellington Auckland and elsewhere remains unresolved. We have ended up with the New Zealand police force being subjected to review by an Australian police officer. I cannot believe that such a day has ever come. 
Of course it is not as though this report has just a couple of recommendations. It has 61 recommendations arising out of the 111 service only—based only on the 111 service. Can members imagine if the report had looked at the entire New Zealand police force how many recommendations there would be? Any self-respecting Minister of Police would never have let this happen. But at the same time any self-respecting Minister of Police who allowed it to happen would go—absolutely go. But not in the Labour administration where nobody takes any responsibility whatsoever. 
There were 61 recommendations—we needed only three. Those are the recommendations that are contained in the New Zealand First policy: bring back confidence in the police—that is what has to be done—dramatically increase police numbers and demerge traffic officers from the police. We want the police to be catching criminals; we do not want them to be handing out traffic tickets. That is the biggest thing this Labour Government has achieved with regard to the police force—police officers are now out issuing more traffic tickets. I could be getting burgled around the corner but the priority of the commissioner and the Minister is to issue traffic tickets. That is an absolute scandal. We want police officers to be doing the job of police officers with everyone knowing that they are police officers. Traffic officers are a separate matter as far as New Zealand First is concerned. They can have a different uniform and can do a traffic officer’s job. 
The way that the safety service for the public is run is an absolute scandal. Police officers are being made to issue hundreds of millions of dollars worth of traffic tickets in order to earn money. The priority of police officers during a bus strike in Auckland is to catch people driving in bus lanes. I know of any number of cases in which tickets were issued during a bus strike to people driving in bus lanes. What a disgrace. What a scandal that is.