O'Connor GregGREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): I find the general debate a great opportunity to see exactly what's happening in this House. We propose; they oppose—is how I would really sum it up—and look to be fair it's their job. The only way they're going to get back into the Treasury seats is by pulling down everything we on this side of the House do—to be completely negative—and look that's fine. There's some very able people there and they do it very well.However what I'd like to speak about today—I'd just like to appeal to those members on the Opposition benches to think about the effect of what they're actually doing in one particular area and that's in law and order in crime and fear of crime. Now traditionally around the world Oppositions home in on the easy wins. They home in on those things that they can directly translate to speaking to the public scaring the public making sure that they'll come back and build up a picture of a country of a city or wherever it is actually in peril. The problem with that is that in building that up it's an easy win it's a damaging win and it hasn't actually got anyone anywhere.I stand here speaking as an ex - police officer with 41 years' experience who's still very much involved in those who are in the crime scene. I'm speaking about someone who I'm trying to assist through a gang experience at the moment who has just had a horrific beating and through that I've gained a reminder of just what we're dealing with there.Now if we and the Opposition and as a country become totally focused on the fear of crime totally focused on scaring the heck out of the public then what we will do is we risk missing some very obvious fixes here. Just throwing gang members into jail by itself without any regard to anything else could actually cause the problems they have in Los Angeles at the moment. Essentially the jail gangs run the crime scene in Los Angeles. How they do it is because they're there for ever. They're never getting out so they control it—the authorities have no ability to control them—and how they control it is that anyone who's going to start committing crime anywhere else in Los Angeles knows eventually they're going to probably get caught and go to jail and they'll come under the influence of those gang members. So I'm certainly not standing here saying Don't use jail as a tool to help control our gangs."; I'm just saying let's use it smartly. What I fear is that if we just focus simply on actually irrational fear where we're building a fear that nothing is happening and that every time particularly the worried well in some of our safer suburbs still believe that if they step outside they're going to be beaten that there's going to be sexual crimes committed on their street—which is not reality because actually crime generally is stable around the world. In fact crime has come down generally from its highs but if I could just focus you on one place where it did work. Something that worked that didn't work anywhere else was in New York. I think anyone with any understanding of how crime and how policing methods have changed over the years will focus on what happened in New York in the 1990s. Now what happened there was that crime came down considerably. There was an influx of police—just the sort of influx that this Government is now contemplating and putting on the street—but it wasn't just that that worked. It was how they used them—it was how they used them. They actually concentrated on reducing the fear of crime. So the people of New York unlike the people of Chicago and unlike the people in the other cities that had equal drops in crime actually believed their cities were safer. That is where we've got to concentrate our efforts. If we are going to use the leverage of fear of crime I would ask those members opposite now—I'm starting to run out of time but I'd ask those members opposite to do one thing. When you're sitting doing your strategy around your board around your room around your caucus just be aware that by grabbing the easy win of fear of crime—grabbing the easy win of grabbing headlines and getting out there and convincing New Zealanders that we're going to hell in a handcart as a country because crime is rampant on the street—you will not allow the Department of Corrections and even you yourselves to make sure that we're part of fixing this. So I'm not saying that we don't use jails; I'm not saying that we don't need jails. I'm just saying let's use them smartly and let's not basically disqualify ourselves from doing that by just simply taking the easy win of scaring the hell out of the New Zealand public. Thank you Mr Speaker."