Hipkins Chris: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hipkins Chris: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8143. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 That was another speech from a National member attacking the Opposition. Those members attack the people rather than the arguments because the arguments on our side of the House are quite defensible. But Government members can produce no evidence and no facts or figures. All they can do is to attack the people on this side of the House who are raising arguments that those members do not agree with. 
Melissa Lee said that privatisation is a new idea. It is a new idea to Melissa Lee. Well it dates back many centuries in fact. Let us go back to the 19th century practice of prison labour leasing. I am referring to a document put forward by the Howard League for Penal Reform. It is very useful. Basically it talks about the prison labour leasing that began in America in the 19th century. For a state fee prisoners were housed clothed and fed by private contractors in return for their labour. A history of injustice neglect brutality and high morbidity rates for the mainly black prison population was recorded and by the early 20th century those leases were gradually phased out as the privately contracted work was returned to the control of the state. The idea is hardly new. It is not new. This debate goes back centuries yet National members are saying that somehow they have had a grand new idea. Well if winding back the clock a couple of hundred years is a grand new idea for National I would hate to think what is coming next. 
I will talk about who may end up running these private prisons and what some of the risks involved in privatisation are because significant risks are involved. Private prison operators are encouraged to cut costs endanger the safety of their staff and endanger the safety of the public. There is no incentive for them to reduce recidivism. I will talk particularly about the GEO Group. For example my colleague Carmel Sepuloni raised earlier in the debate a case where the GEO Group placed a woman in a cell block with male inmates who raped her and beat her and she later took her own life. State authorities removed 125 inmates from a prison run by GEO Group—the people whom National wants to run New Zealand’s prisons—because of inadequate staff training and inadequate health care. Those running the prison were found to have served rotten food. They knowingly made false and misleading statements to state officials. They failed to complete criminal record checks on at least 100 prison guards. I repeat: they failed to do criminal record checks for 100 prison guards. They violated domestic and international laws on due process and humane treatment. These are the people whom the National Government holds up as the bright hope for improving our prison service. Well with a track record like that members on this side of the House do not want a bar of it. If that is what the Government thinks the future of our prison service in New Zealand is I think that is disgraceful. 
This is the wrong debate for us to be having in this House. I have sat here all night since we began this debate and not once have I heard anybody from any party on the other side of the House talk about anything that would reduce the number of people who end up in prison in the first place. Surely with New Zealand having the second-highest incarceration rate in the developed world that is something that the Government would want to talk about. Rather than talking about how it can make a profit from locking up more and more people perhaps it should talk about how to reduce the number of people who end up in prison in the first place. We have had nothing not a jot from the ACT Party or National on any of that. 
Fundamentally this matter is an ideological debate for those members. It is all about how they can make a profit out of the activities of the State. National is absolutely ideologically wedded to the idea of privatisation. The ACT Party the “Self-help Help Yourself Party” is completely and utterly off the planet when it comes to this type of thing. If those members can make a dollar out of it they are into it. If they can make a buck out of it then they are absolutely into it. But there is no evidence to suggest that privatisation will work. All the evidence goes the other way. All the academic research goes the other way. That is why we have heard none of it from Government members tonight. They simply cannot find any evidence. 
I am sure that one of the reasons they blocked the Law and Order Committee from having access to the Ministry of Justice officials is that those officials probably would have told the committee that there is no evidence to support what the Government wants to do. We know that the officials told the Minister of Corrections that there is no evidence to support what she was trying to do and that the evidence suggested in fact that it would probably have the opposite impact to what she was hoping. The select committee was not given the opportunity to hear that evidence. Melissa Lee boldly told us that that is called having a majority. She said that having a majority means that one blocks free speech and blocks the ability to look at the evidence to consider what may or may not work. That is what is being in Government is all about for National. It is all about ignoring the evidence. It is all about doing whatever the bumper sticker slogan says and doing whatever National’s private corporate mates want it to do without fronting up and producing a single shred of evidence that it will work. 
The Labour Party’s opposition to this bill is based primarily on two grounds. The first is philosophical: we do not believe that it is the role of the private sector to incarcerate people and to take away their liberty. We believe that if that is to happen then it is the role of the State. The second objection is simply based on the operation of this measure—how it will work. It will not work. It will not reduce recidivism. It will not save any money because we know that private prisons are more expensive than public prisons. The one example that we have had in New Zealand of a private prison was more expensive to run than a public prison. The National Government has produced no evidence to suggest that privatisation will work. Our objection to this bill is not based simply on principle; it is based on principle but that is not the only objection. 
Debate interrupted.