Barker Rick: General Debate 
Barker Rick: General Debate 
[Volume:647;Page:16687] 
Hon RICK BARKER (Minister for Courts) 
: 
 As a start I will pick up on a point made by Gerry Brownlee and talk about the boot camps he referred to. This House and the public deserve the very best that we can provide in debate. They deserve analysis and they deserve strong arguments backed up by facts sense and logic. I want to start with boot camps. I think that the Opposition in the form of its policy on boot camps falls well well short. 
Phil Goff mentioned earlier that when he looked at the research and analysis on boot camps he found that instead of being the great panacea they are held up to be by the National Party they had the highest reoffending rate of all—95 percent. If the members opposite shake their heads at that I want those who are old enough to remember to go back and think about borstals. We had borstals in this country and borstals were found to be simply training schools for young people to go on in the university of crime. At the time we had compulsory military training. I asked some friends who were in the police force and they said they were very pleased that CMT had been finished because when the bad people went away they came back not changed in personality but certainly changed in their physical strength and discipline. CMT made the criminals harder tougher faster and vastly more difficult for the police to deal with. 
The National Party seems to have the grandiose idea as one or two other people do that because people who are in the military are generally good people—well organised disciplined and admirable citizens—we just have to put people into the army and that will happen to them too. Well I say there is a fault in that logic. It does not automatically follow that that is the case. 
The second thing I say about this debate is that people have been misquoted such as when referring to Judge Becroft. I have here a report that mentions Judge Becroft. As Principal Youth Court Judge Judge Becroft said in 2008 that the literature notes that all interventions that focus on getting tough with offenders almost always fail. That is what Judge Becroft said. Those are his words. Members of Parliament come into this House and claim he said something different. Well they do no service to this Parliament by saying things that are not true and they do a great disservice to the judiciary by saying that things a judge says are not true. The National Party’s record on this debate is very poor to say the least. 
The other point I would like to pick up on is the point made by Phil Goff. Phil Goff said the National Party talks tough now but he asked what its record is. The record of the National Party is that it cut money to the police and it cut police numbers. That is the truth of it. In the 9 years the National Government was in office did it do anything to toughen sentences? No it did not. Did it do anything to look after victims of crime? No it did not. Did it do anything about parole? No it did not. On each of those things Labour took action. Let us look at the facts. The facts are that under Labour an offender will get a minimum of 17 years for a crime he or she would have got 10 years for under a National regime 
. 
 That is the truth of it. 
Can we believe the National members’ comments today about any of their policies? Their leader is slippery on almost every subject. The public should have no more confidence in John Key’s promises in this area than they should have in his words on Iraq for example. Did he say we would go to Iraq? Yes he did. What happened when it became unpopular? He was opposed to it. He saw climate change as a hoax then suddenly he became a climate change believer. On every subject one can name—the Springbok Tour or whatever—John Key changes. He is slippery. He has been identified as being as slippery as a snake in wet grass. 
Not only does National have slippery policy statements but it also has policies that have no foundation at all. If National members think it would be an advancement for New Zealand if they brought in a policy that will ensure that 95 percent of all those who go through it will reoffend I say they are mistaken and the public would be mistaken to believe them. Under the National Party the clearance rates for crime very rarely got anywhere near 40 percent. Under Labour which has increased the number of police—approximately 2000 extra police have been put on the beat by Labour rather than cut as was the case with National—the clearance rates have risen to well over 40 percent. As Kate Wilkinson knows this means there has been a huge increase in the amount of information and the number of prosecutions being laid before our courts. Labour is tough on crime. It does more than use tough words.