Clendon David: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 21 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18242. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. There is an old saying that no good deed goes unpunished and I suspect that that phrase would resonate with the New Zealand police force at the moment which has performed in an exemplary manner in recent times in the last several years. The reward is to see its budget cut yet again. For the fourth or fifth year in a row our police force is being asked to do more with less. It seems a perverse reward for an organisation that has done everything this Government has asked of it. It has done a great deal of what the New Zealand population has asked of it. It continues to be forward-looking and to be creative in its use of resources and the reward is to suffer a budget cut. I cannot understand the logic or the reasoning behind that.We understand that Minister Tolley is only one Minister in Cabinet. I believe that that Minister has done some good things in her portfolios of policing and corrections but nevertheless in the police force and in fact across the justice sector collectively there has been a significant cut in the available resources. That is a very strange decision made by this Government.I give credit and I acknowledge recently retired Commissioner Marshall whom I believe did an excellent job of changing the culture of the police force. He was an admirable officer. He did an extremely good job of changing the culture of the New Zealand Police and that is an extremely brave ambition. It is an extremely ambitious objective—to change the culture of an organisation to which change does not come easily or naturally.I believe that initiatives like Prevention First and the neighbourhood policing units are strategies and techniques that resonate with New Zealanders. To some extent that is back to the future. Crime prevention is the best way to deal with crime and to avoid it happening. We know that. The Prevention First strategy has been very effective. We have seen a reduction in some offending. We cannot entirely take credit for that; it is aninternational phenomenon some of it related to demographics to science to hard security around premises and so on.But the fact is that the police have actually risen to the occasion. They have changed their strategy. They have changed their tactics. They have changed their way of operating in ways that have been beneficial and that have served to make our society and community safer. The reward is that this Budget has taken money away from them and insisted that yet again they must look to take cuts. You can cut fat. You can cut flesh. The police are now being asked to cut to the bone. That is perverse and it is going to have very unfortunate outcomes.The president of the Police Association who is not a fellow given to extreme language or rhetoric has said that there is an increasing risk of operational failures and that fear of crime will quickly return when the police cannot respond or do not get a response right. The police have demonstrated that they can make New Zealanders feel safer and that they can contribute to reducing crime.The peculiar logic that I am endeavouring to understand from this Government is to say that because they have succeeded we will take money away from them. What it is overlooking is the fact that the Prevention First strategy and the neighbourhood policing units are people-intensive strategies. Yes we know that the police are using new technologies and they are using them very well. They are using electronics they are using cellphones they are using GPS systems and they are usingiPads to reduce the amount of time that officers spend bent over word processors at police stations rather than being out there providing a face-to-face service to New Zealanders.These are very people-intensive strategies. We know that the task of the neighbourhood police unit for example is to create units of officers— a sergeant and a number of constables—who will know who the troubled people are in their community. They will know where the hot spots are in their community. That takes time and commitment and it requires good morale.We heard and I recall very well Commissioner Marshall talking about the extent to which a generation ago or even a decade ago young police officers in particular built their morale from the excitement and the thrill of the chase—charging around in cars catching people chasing offenders down a road and arresting them. That is how they built their morale. Modern policing the sort of policing that our police force now aspires to do is a hard grind. It lacks some of that adrenalin-fuelled interest and excitement because the police are seeking to prevent crime and you do that by building relationships within a community by talking to the youth and by understanding where the pressure points are in a community. That is people-intensive. It demands a great deal of time. That is where these Budget cuts are going to show most badly.I recall having conversations with district commanders with senior police officers and with officers on the beat who all agreed that good police morale is critical to the success of the Prevention First strategy and of the forward-looking—shall I say—modern policing approach rather than simply putting men and women in cars to go out and chase burglars and offenders of other sorts. They need to actually engage with the community. As I said it is a back to the future approach where we actually treat police officers as pillars of our community and respect them as such. That respect comes through because they engage with the community with the troubled people with those who are damaged with the youths and with the offenders.To the extent that their budget is being cut what sort of a message is that sending to those very hard-working men and women? For those men and women with a significant commitment to a safe community to limiting harm done on the roads and to limiting offending the message is very clearly that actually this Government does not value those people or the enormous commitment and the very difficult and demanding tasksthat they undertake on a daily basis. The cuts to their budget are saying: “Look you’ve done really well and we expect you to do more with a great deal less.” That is a very perverse message to send.I look forward to a time personally when we can cut the police budgets. I certainly look forward to a time when we can cut the corrections budgets because we will have less offending. That time is not now. This Government’s budgeting is the Budget of parsimony. It is cost cutting. It is penny-pinching in the service of this illusory surplus which the Government would have New Zealanders believe it has generated.This is a very very dangerous and foolish place to cut costs—the front-line people who are out there on a daily basis keeping our communities safe reducing offending and looking to provide service on the roads. The people who serve our communities in a very difficult and dangerous way are getting the message that actually their work is not respected and it is not valued because the dollars are not being provided for them to do that job. The reason they have succeeded is that they have found efficiencies. For at least 5 years and even longer than that the police have learnt to do more with less. They have used technology in a very intelligent way. They have sought to maximise the amount of good work that every individual officer can do in their 8-hour shift their 10-hour shift or their 12-hour shift. And their perverse reward is to be told: “Well actually we respect and value you so much we’re going to make you do even more with even less.”This is not the time to be parsimonious. This is not the time to cut costs or cut corners in terms of policing. Nor is it the time to be reducing the funding available to the justice sector more generally. There has been a very good analysis done byJustSpeak and I recommend Government members read it through.JustSpeak is the youth arm of Rethinking Crime and Punishment—young people with a commitment to peaceful and safe communities and to natural justice being done.JustSpeak has highlighted very well that we have seen over the last several years a chipping away at the funding available. A justice system can work only if it is properly resourced.We have seen the debacle of the endeavour to put the courts in a more efficient place. TheeBench has failed badly. The management of that project has fallen over. That is unfortunate because we know that our courts are overstretched. Justice delayed is justice denied and we are not seeing the efficiency and the streamlining in the court system that this Government promised. It stood up and said it would make the courts work better and it has failed to do that.We have seen ongoing cuts to legal aid. The most vulnerable the least well-off and the people most likely to offend and most likely to be offended against are the people who are going to continue to suffer because of short-term penny-pinching and as I have said because of very misguided perverse decisions that are made that because some parts of the justice sector are succeeding we will therefore reduce their funding. We will therefore take money away from them and make it even harder for them to achieve the outcomes that we all aspire for them to achieve.I give thanks and I do offer our respects to the police force and those hard-working people in the justice sector. We look forward to a time when their activities will be properly rewarded and resourced. Kia ora.Debate interrupted.