Davis Kelvin: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDavis Kelvin: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5595. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): I would like to start off by talking about the police as well. I noticed that Jono Naylor the speaker who has just finished said that the National Government is putting more emphasis on victims. Let me tell you now that the resolution rates for high-volume crimes such as burglary and car theft are below 10 percent. If the National Government were really serious about the needs of victims the first thing it would do would be to address those low resolution rates. You cannot tell me that any criminal or burglar would be put off from committing those crimes if they knew they had a greater than 90 percent chance of getting away with it successfully.One of the reasons though that these resolution rates are so low is that the police are being continually asked to do more with less. There is a $15 million cut to the police budget this year. I know that the Minister of Police denied that but the first thing in the Attorney-General’s report in the Finance and Expenditure Committee was to confirm that there was a $15 million decrease in the police budget and in real terms over the last 4 or 5 years there has been about a $300 million decrease in the police budget. So continually the police are being asked to do more with less.I believe there is a police wage round going on. General duties constables have had an increase in their salaries over maybe the last 4 or 5 years of about $5000 while at the same time in the period since I think 2009 to 2013 the Commissioner of Police has had a $100000 rise in his salary. I would like to think that the men and women on the ground who are doing the hard work and who are putting themselves in the front line there and in harm’s way would get a wage increase relative to what the police commissioner gets. But that said if they were to get a substantial salary increase which I believe they deserve then that would mean there would be further cuts in other areas such as police cars or maybe some of the technology that is being rolled out. There has been an 18 percent drop in the number of general duties constables over the last little while as well.Sexual assaults and violent assaults are areas on the rise. In fact the statistics say that only 5 percent of sexual assaults are reported and of that 5 percent only 1 percent will ever see a conviction and that is just simply unacceptable. We need to have a greater emphasis on the investigation of sexual assaults. We need to take it a lot more seriously and violent assaults as well.The policing budget has an emphasis on revenue-gathering policing such as intersection behaviour and lane-changing compliance the use of mobile phones and warrants and certificates of fitness. We can understand that there is some emphasis on that and that people can be killed and are killed by vehicle violations but the reality is that we also need to have an equal emphasis on those high-volume crimes such as burglary sexual assaults and violent assaults as well.I would just like to also talk about the speeding up of court processes which the previous member spoke about. It is a nice segue into the corrections debacle. One of the things that we are hearing about the botch-ups at Serco with all the lockdowns that are going on is that lawyers are having difficulty getting access to their clients. In fact instead of being able to spend 2 or 3 days preparing cases with their clients lawyers are having to spend 2 or 3 days just trying to track down where their clients have been transferred to. There is a lack of communication. So when lawyers finally get in touch with their clients they have a very short time to actually prepare a case and that is basically causing a logjam in the courts. So the whole corrections episode with Serco shows that the Government’s privatisation agenda is a complete and utter failure.One of the main issues around Serco is the fact that it is a business and it wants to make a profit. So it cuts corners and one of the main corners that it is cutting is staffing. So in terms of the lack of staffing in the contract Serco does not actually have to have a ratio of prisoners to corrections officers which is outrageous. The general rule of thumb is that there should be one corrections officer for every 20 inmates. If it is higher security then it should be one to about 15. There are stories emerging from Serco that at times there is one corrections officer looking after up to 55 inmates. You can understand how those Serco guards would be hesitant to get out into the general population. If there were some sort of fracas that broke out their lives would be in danger and they would not have their colleagues there to help them get out of it.I have also been told that most of the contraband that comes into Serco is via guards who because there are not enough guards to check other guards coming in are able to bring in contraband. If you go to Department of Corrections - run prisons anybody who goes through is searched. The other day I was down at Otago Corrections Facility and we were led around by the head of the facility himself. When he came out to greet us and he had to go back in he had to remove his belt his keys his watch his shoes and everything. Apparently in Serco there is just not enough staff to be able to monitor other staff coming in. When you are as poorly paid as the Serco guards it is quite tempting to bring in contraband and to actually get paid for it. So what actually happens is that the inmates have access to cellphones as we all know because they have been taking videos of themselves in the fight clubs. They are also able to ring outside and make arrangements for payments to guards who have brought in contraband.I spoke to a Serco guard who did not want to be named obviously because his life would be in jeopardy if he was named and he was telling me this outrageous figure. In fact it was so outrageous I did not believe him. I said: “Well how much can a guard get? What’s in it for him if he brought in a packet of cigarettes?”. He said: “If a guard brings in a packet of cigarettes from the outside he can get $1000.” I actually did not believe him but the very next day I met with an inmate who had been released the day before and I said to him: “Look I’ve heard this outrageous story about the value of a packet of cigarettes. You tell me because I just want to confirm this.” He said: “Actually for a 50-gram pack of tobacco a guard can get $800.”—for 50 grams’ worth of tobacco. If you are a guard and you can get $1000 for bringing in one packet of cigarettes you may as well bring in 10 packets of cigarettes and get $10000. It sounds outrageous but that is the black market value within prisons for this type of contraband.A cellphone is valued at over $1000 and those cellphones are not only being used to organise a meth ring from the inside as we know but also being used to intimidate families. There was an inmate whose mother got a phone call saying: “If you don’t put money into a certain bank account well then your son will get the bash.”The review of Serco to me is going to be a whitewash because it is Serco reviewing itself and the Department of Corrections reviewing Serco and there is the Ombudsman floating around somewhere. Because we know Serco is such a mess it is interesting that the Minister of Corrections has got Serco to review itself. But when we come down to Tony Robertson we know that the Department of Corrections actually did a good job in monitoring him while he was on release. But it is interesting that the Minister has gone and got an independent person to review it knowing that the review will come out well because the Department of Corrections Chief Probation Officer Darius Fagan actually did a review a couple of weeks back and said that it did a very good job of it.So I ask the question: why is there an independent review of one aspect of the Department of Corrections when it already knows that it has done well and yet when it is looking at Serco Serco gets to review itself and the Department of Corrections gets to review Serco? The first term of reference around Robertson is the management of Robertson prior to and following his release. Well that has already been done by Darius Fagan. Then the second term of reference is the way the Government—