Flavell Te Ururoa: Debate on Budget Policy Statement 
Flavell Te Ururoa: Debate on Budget Policy Statement 
[Volume:661;Page:9556] 
TE URUROA FLAVELL (Maori Party—Waiariki) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Deputy Speaker. Kia ora tatou katoa. The Maori Party welcomes the opportunity to focus on solutions that will lead to economic recovery and improved economic performance. This debate is pretty timely as we reflect on the residual effects of the worst of the recession and concentrate on six key areas that the Government proposes to promote in order to prompt growth in the economy. The No. 1 area that is being promoted is an investment in productive infrastructure which includes an ultra-fast broadband network new roads and transport initiatives school buildings and over $300 million to be spent on one prison—$300 million on one prison. I want to focus on that for just a short time. 
In order to convey a sense of the value that a new prison will add to our economy I tell members that it just so happened that last week I was up at Spring Hill Corrections Facility at Te Kauwhata at the prison itself. If we base our assumption on the fact that the average sentence cost per inmate is approximately $52000 rising to $71000 for a maximum-security prisoner and if we take into account current projections that by 2016 our inmate population is projected to hit 10700 we are certainly talking about a multimillion-dollar investment in what some may say is based on the industry of misery. A better description is probably “negative spending”. Why do we have to continue to pour money down the gurgler in such a negative way? The House has been saturated with pieces of legislation that add to the investment in the prison infrastructure including the use of container cells to meet the excessive volume of prisoner numbers that is planned for. 
Yet when I looked around me at Spring Hill I saw that it was not an investment that I for one feel very proud of in terms of leading our nation forward. This is an industry in which Maori are grossly overrepresented an industry in which the average length of sentence imposed has increased and an industry that is characterised by a high rate of re-imprisonment particularly for Maori. The Maori Party believes that we should change this paradigm. We surely have to question an economic framework in which we measure our wealth through the growth of criminal activity. The $71000 that it takes to keep an inmate in maximum security for a year exceeds the average teacher’s salary by $20000. If we were to add up the amount spent on courts probation officers police and the judiciary then one really has to question the economic value to the nation of the true costs of crime. 
That leads me logically to another of the six key areas that are proposed as a foundation for economic growth and that is the area of lifting skills. During the adjournment recently I also chose to visit two schools: Lytton High School in Gisborne and Wairoa College in the Ikaroa-Rawhiti electorate at Wairoa obviously. During my visit to these schools I got a firsthand view of the Kotahitanga programme in action and I was really really impressed. I found all the teachers involved in the programme to be absolutely committed to the change process we so urgently require in our schools. 
I go back to the issue of criminal activity and criminal justice I remember what we were told when Judge Becroft reported to the Education and Science Committee back in 2007. He told us that almost all the young people seen in the Youth Court are not actively engaged in education. He spoke of them drifting having been excluded or exempted from school. They awaited placement in another school in alternative education in a training course or in employment—anything. He also advised us that since the early 1990s young Maori have made up almost half of both police apprehensions and youth justice cases. He concluded that getting young people back into education was the king-hit that we should be looking at in the youth justice area. 
I come back to the Kotahitanga programme. At one of the schools a teacher had been involved in the programme for just 4 weeks. One of the breakthrough comments that came out of a discussion with that teacher was that the Kotahitanga programme allowed a cohort of teachers to teach the same class together. It allowed them to sit together and talk about the students they taught. This is not rocket science but there was an amazing sense of similarity across the discussion about the students that those teachers taught. Together they shared strategies about how they could make schooling a more meaningful experience for those young students working through ideas that could lead to changing the way that they each responded to those individuals and in doing so they were working in a way that would support aspirations and ambitions rather than focus on discipline and control. The programme provided them with the opportunity to talk and change the paradigm. Another approach was as simple as the basic respect accorded in the way that teachers greeted their students. They said “Kia ora.”; it was as simple as that. That was all about changing the paradigm. 
Another part of the Budget Policy Statement focus on lifting skills was the national standards. As a former teacher myself I know that introducing national standards by themselves is the type of life-scale change we need in order to improve the education experience of what is commonly known as the 20 percent who underperform or underachieve. It will be a gauge for us to be able to address the longstanding issues that have impacted on poor rates of numeracy and literacy or have led to consistent patterns in the truancy suspension and exclusion statistics. We have to do more here. Maybe Te Kotahitanga could be rolled out nationwide. 
Another key area in the Budget Policy Statement is the commitment to improve services in the public sector. This is certainly an interesting time to respond to this objective when today’s breaking news is that nearly 1500 jobs have been cut from the Public Service in the past year. The Maori Party’s policy position has been that we want to see more community services and less Government bureaucracy for the outcome of whanau restoration. 
I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I do not mind a few comments being interjected about the speech but a lot of the discussion is not about the speech itself; it is actually coming from across the House. I would appreciate it if that could be dealt with. Thank you very much. 
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: That is a fair comment. Interjections should be rare and reasonable and should not be interchanges that have nothing to do with what is being said. 
TE URUROA FLAVELL 
: As I said the Maori Party policy position has been that we want to see more community services and less Government bureaucracy for the outcome of whanau restoration so we welcome another of the six key areas of economic growth which is to remove red tape and improve regulation. 
Many of the Maori providers whom we have spoken to or who have spoken to us about our Whanau Ora approach have raised their concerns about the practices of the Government by which the compliance and transaction costs that emerge from multiple contracts with multiple funders have serious disadvantages for providers and often restrict their capability to be more responsive to whanau. I have heard reports from some providers that they are reporting to or completing auditing and monitoring accounts for the Government every third day. There are other stories of providers being hamstrung by the compliance costs of different reporting schedules and the administrative overload of meeting contract outputs. 
We in the Maori Party want to see far greater investment in what counts—that is in outcomes. We do not want to know how many posters were pinned on the wall or how many phone calls were made and pamphlets distributed. We want to be able to measure the true wealth that can be achieved through improvements in whanau capacity to undertake the functions necessary for healthy living and to contribute to the collective well-being of the whanau. 
Whanau Ora we would suggest will also fall into the framework of another one of the Budget policy pillars—that is the supporting of business innovation and trade. My colleague Tariana Turia has spoken frequently of Whanau Ora as being the most transformative concept that we could ever invest in. It is about investing in aspirations in innovation and in initiatives of whanau to become more self-managing and to take responsibility for their own social economic and cultural development. Although developing whanau capacity will be the primary outcome I believe that we should also expect to see considerable improvements in the business of the Government as part of the success of this policy. Instead of being trapped by output-based tick-box contracts we would hope to see better smarter services that will focus on real results for whanau. 
Finally we come to the last pillar of the six policy planks in Budget 2010—that is the concept of strengthening tax. This too is a key area that I took on the road in the last couple of weeks in order to gauge the view of people on the proposed changes. While I was hearing first-hand the fears of people about the projected rise in GST several reports that have come out recently from the Christian Council of Social Services suggest that our most vulnerable citizens are feeling the impact of the recession despite what the Budget Policy Statement tells us when it says the worst of the recession has passed. There is more to be done.