Brownlee Gerry: General Debate 
Brownlee Gerry: General Debate 
[Volume:637;Page:7981] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam) 
: 
 The interesting thing this afternoon is that Labour speakers have chosen not to speak a single word about their own policy. They have chosen not to offer a single defence of their current governance of this country. Rather they have concentrated entirely on non-existent issues as far as they are concerned in Opposition parties. They have loudly proclaimed that everybody else has a problem but that they are OK. Well we know that when a political party is in trouble the last thing its members want to do is talk about themselves. 
The issues causing a problem for the Labour Government at the present time are ones that New Zealanders will be most unforgiving of. The first issue is the debacle in the Department of Corrections and the failure of the Parole Board and the terrible tragedies that resulted from that in the case of the release of Graeme Burton. It was awful to see Government members today and a little bit yesterday trying to be very righteous about all of this and trying to say how terribly remorseful they are about the losses those families suffered when in fact we know that it has taken them almost 2 months to get to this position. Up to this point they have not offered a single apology to the public of New Zealand and they have never offered a single hope that they might really be looking at these issues with a view towards fixing them. They have simply gone back in their burrows and decided that they are going to protect the incompetent Damien O’Connor that they are not going to put on to the front line the Minister responsible for justice in this country Mark Burton and that they are somehow going to try to tough it out by letting the Prime Minister get involved backed up by Michael Cullen. 
Well it will not work because the sad facts of this case are starting to come out. Graeme Burton was nothing but trouble in prison. He assaulted several other inmates. He tried to organise paid hits on guards. Given the current state of the Department of Corrections we cannot help wondering whether it really wanted to get him out of there because it was too dangerous to keep him. Graeme Burton went before the Parole Board—a bunch of people who are supposed to represent the community’s views about whether someone should be released from prison—and board members were made aware of all those facts. They got a psychological assessment which said they should not release the guy because he was mad and would reoffend. They did not receive that report just once twice or three times; they received that report five times. But still they said they would let him out. 
Then the people who should have been keeping an eye on him—the people in the probation service who should have made sure that he conformed with his parole requirements—failed miserably in their duty. They failed so miserably that we have heard over and over today that when there was an armed offenders alert around Graeme Burton it all petered out. The probation officer said Graeme Burton might not be at the address he was supposed to be at but if on looking in the fridge any food was found there that was good enough—the probation service would be prepared to accept he was living there. That would be OK. Where was Graeme Burton? He was out making mayhem in the community which ultimately led to the death of an innocent young father. 
For Government members to say as Michael Cullen did yesterday that the only person to blame was Graeme Burton himself because he pulled the trigger is unacceptable because society had said it wanted him put away. But the people who represent society on the Parole Board despite all the evidence—the extraordinary evidence—said that they would let him out. So the question simply is that if Damien O’Connor is not to blame and the Prime Minister is not to blame why is the Parole Board still in office?