O'Connor GregGREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): Thank you Mr Chair. I want to start by acknowledging my two ex-colleagues here the Hon Mark Mitchell and Matt King. It's interesting listening to them and gentlemen I do share your concerns around the way that the crime rate has gone and where we are now. But I can assure you that you did join the police many years ago—I'm sorry Mr Chair; the honourable gentlemen did join the police many years ago. I will ask you to remember that when you did join those who went before you said You're not as good as we were." That tends to be a generational refrain. I suspect that when those two gentlemen joined police officers had to be 5 foot 8 and couldn't wear glasses and there were about 2 percent female in the job. So to those gentlemen I can absolutely reassure them that times have changed and they will continue to change—in the same way that the types of activities that the police carry out also need to change.Also one of the speakers previously mentioned Better Public Services and how applied they were some sort of panacea—that the whole Government service was going to be a better place; cure everything perhaps from the common cold to the latest disease to come out of the Third World. However those Better Public Services actually became cheaper public services.Just to give an example of how they did fail in choosing Better Public Services and very specific targets often—and I found it in the police—it's about a five-year lead in. You can get a strategy in place and things are working well and often when you change strategies when you change emphasis it's about five years before you really start to see the results of those changes.A very good example of that is methamphetamine in gangs. Through the period of about 2008 to 2011 at a time when all the emphasis was going on to areas where the surveys were showing the public were most concerned what wasn't coming up was gangs and methamphetamine. Now the police officers in those situations whether it be the district commanders right down to the police on the ground knew that they had a major burgeoning problem with gangs and methamphetamine. There was a methamphetamine strategy introduced which did have some effect in the early days but ultimately—and as I in my previous position went around the countryside I was being regaled being lobbied hard by district commanders and area commanders saying "We've got to get the right to police our gangs because if we don't they are going to grow out of control." But again because those gangs weren't showing up as a problem in the surveys the work wasn't being done. In fact I can tell you now that there were people being told they weren't to police they weren't to do search warrants on methamphetamine; they were to leave the gangs alone. The emphases were in other areas and we are now paying the price for that.As we sat through the Government departments—and I have to say that as a new member it was pleasing to see the emphasis and the examination we can put our Government departments through—I think anyone who's worried about where their taxpayers' money goes should see the hard work that's done by these organisations particularly emphasising or focusing on the area of corrections and on police. It was summed up I think as we spoke to the Department of Corrections who talked about and I can quote: "Prisoners with gang connections are nearly twice as likely to reoffend as those without gang affiliations. In 2016-17 gang-affiliated prisoners made up about one third of the prison population but were responsible for two thirds of the prison assaults. Gang levels in prison have nearly doubled in the last decade. Corrections strategy is spreading the gang population around the prison so no clusters occur."So there's a clear problem of gangs in prisons. Also when we talked to the New Zealand Police the commissioner pointed out the very clear problem that gangs—current home grown—are exacerbated by the returning prisoners from Australia. We now have a situation where over half the people in prisons are either gang or gang associates."