Power Simon: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Power Simon: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:632;Page:4171] 
SIMON POWER (National—Rangitikei) 
: 
 Just slightly out of context I congratulate Phil Goff on his rather comprehensive coverage of the defence portfolio. More particularly it signals to those on the other side of the Chamber that he is no longer waiting in his caravan and is actively pursuing the job he has always been after. We will look and see how that comes about. I also take this opportunity—because I probably will not get another—to wish Jim Sutton well and to extend to him my personal thanks for the work he did after the floods in Rangitikei in 2004. I wish him well. 
On the issue of Vote Police I acknowledged at the time of the Budget—and have done so on numerous occasions since then—that the extra money the Government has put into the police is to be welcomed. It would be churlish to say otherwise and the Minister gets a bouquet for that particular estimate appropriation. 
I raise a couple of points around recruitment. I want to talk about it not in the context that members may expect but in a slightly more abstract way. I am interested in the Minister Annette King’s views on this issue. I cannot understand how a Minister who is used to dealing in hard detailed and tricky policy areas like health managed to stitch the Government into a deal with New Zealand First prior to the Budget to deliver 1000 new police plus 250 others without any real or detailed policy work to back up that decision. All the documents I have seen relating to this decision in Vote Corrections Vote Courts and in fact Vote Justice show that no real work has been done on the downstream effects of more police. Clearly if we have more police—and whether we get to the 1000 is another debate that we will have shortly—presumably unless they are all on traffic duty there will be more arrests. If there are more arrests there will presumably be more convictions. I want to know what work has been done with Damien O’Connor who has been wandering around the country complaining about the number of people in our prisons. I also want to know what is to be done with Mr Barker and his view that it is all a bit too hard when we fine people and do not have the ability to get them to do community service in any meaningful way. 
The first answer as far as I can tell to the number problem—not the policy problem—was to recruit from the UK. That was fair enough except that the attrition rate is up around the 30 percent mark. The attrition rate from the police is not a concern per se because as the Minister rightly points out that fluctuates between 4 and 6 percent on a reasonably regular basis—I have to say to the Minister that the rate is creeping quietly towards the 5 percent mark. The problem is the age and experience of those people who are leaving the police and I would be interested in her views on that. 
Then the Government together with New Zealand First decided that the way to solve this recruitment problem was to reduce the entry standards into the police. What I found fascinating about this argument—which we could have seen coming over the horizon from about 6 years ago once Ron Mark started talking about it—was that it was not the Minister who fronted this particular announcement it was Ron Mark. I know Annette King well enough to know that she is a pretty canny politician. She knows a good story and she knows a good thing when she is on to it. Why has Ron Mark been pushed out to front this reduction in standards for recruitment while Annette King remains strangely silent throughout the process? I bet any member of this Committee that had the news been good the canny Annette King would have been all over the announcement of the reduction in standards. A police recruit now has to leap a four-foot wall rather than a six-foot wall—even Lindsay Tisch I imagine could hurdle that on his hands and knees. 
What has happened is that the Police Association has said that it needs somewhere between 2250 and 2500 police to meet the target. Thirteen days into the big recruitment drive the human resources manager from the police stated in the  
New Zealand Herald  
that they did not get the full numbers 
for 
the first intake to the Police College but that there was no need to worry because they would make up for it by wandering around schools and recruiting school leavers to the police to make up the numbers. The problem is that with the number of well-trained experienced officers leaving the force someone has to train the new recruits. 
In the policy context—going back to where I started from—I worry that this work has not been done properly. The Government’s crime reduction strategy which Treasury had a flick at in December 2005 makes it clear that at that point the work had not been done on the downstream fiscal costs and other costs for the corrections and courts systems. I do not believe that that work has to this day been completed. I have not yet seen a document that has explained in any meaningful way what the proposed increase will do to the courts and corrections systems. We cannot on the one hand have Damien O’Connor running around the country and continually reminding us of how embarrassed he is about our prison numbers and on the other hand have recruitment standards for new recruits to the police dropping through the floor while the canny Annette King remains quiet and Ron Mark is pushed into the forefront to make the announcement. I have a funny feeling that Annette King’s heart is not in this project. I do not think that she as an experienced and senior member of the Government’s Cabinet believes that real work has been done in a way that has tied up this deal properly in order to take into account those downstream effects. I will be very interested in her comments on that matter. 
There are many other areas that we could explore in Vote Police but we have many many question times ahead of us this year and I will be using those occasions to explore those other matters.