Bindra Mahesh: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBindra Mahesh: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 02 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4185. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MAHESH BINDRA (NZ First):I am pleased to take this call with my colleague who spoke earlier Ria Bond. However it is not very pleasant to speak about the Budget because there is nothing pleasant about this Budget.Just last week we had a visit to Rimutaka Prison. We were hosted by the prison manager Chris Burns and his great team. Chris Burns and his team are doing a great job there. They have a very dedicated rehabilitation team and their officers know what they are doing. They are doing a great job in keeping those prisoners within the wire. They are keeping them safe. They are also implementing programmes and courses that help prisoners to rehabilitate. We also visited the drug treatment unit which is one of a kind in the country and although small that unit is doing a great job. We do not think there is any need to privatise the hard work that Chris Burns and his colleagues are putting in. This is not about cost cutting; it is about the rehabilitation of New Zealanders—New Zealanders who have gone off the track. Chris Burns and his team are doing a good job to bring them back into mainstream society. However privatisation of their work does not help the prisoners nor does it help the corrections system in our country.The visit was very educational and that enforces the danger of assumptions. This Government has assumed that outsourcing is a viable way ahead for our prison system. We believe it is not. It is wrong on many levels. Our call is to invest in the likes of Chris Burns and his team and not in Serco. Serco is a large corporate and it is all about profits. It is a matter of public record that prisoners were removed from prisons like Rimutaka and certain other units such as Tongariro/Rangipō and Manawatū and those units were closed to create the business case for the $400 million Serco-run corrections facility in Wiri a South Auckland corrections facility.Given the housing issues in Auckland we wonder how many houses could have been built there on that 17-hectare site that is accommodating the Serco-run corrections facility. This according to us is an opportunity lost for us. There was no need at all for that prison and there was no need to close down the units which were working perfectly fine with dedicated officers and rehabilitation case managers there.Serco is a foreign corporate managing Wiri. Serco also runs the UK’s Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre. I recommend that members google the Channel 4 investigation as Serco has run that facility since 2007. Just last Saturday we were told that a violent offender escaped from a Serco-managed facility in the UK. He just walked out just testing the system. He claimed that he was just testing the system and Serco in this test has failed miserably to keep those prisoners inside the wire.This is the nub of the issue for us. Serco may appear to be a great operator this year and even next year but Yarl’s Wood revealed true abuse 8 years in and that is not the only problem that Serco has given it has written off over £1 billion worth of contracts in its latest financial year. Then again given the approach of this Government with the holiday tax it would not surprise us to see it also sell the Customs Service to Serco next. We keep wondering what is going to happen next. Is it going to privatise the police? It is going to privatise the whole judicial system? Where will it stop?Barbara Stewart: Mental health system.MAHESH BINDRA: And the mental health system as my colleague here says. This Government has a strong desire to shed itself of the core responsibility of governance. Corrections is a core responsibility for any Government. It is what the taxpayer expects from our justice system. They do not want overseas-owned publicly listed corporates to make margins off their taxes while Kiwis get laid off.New Zealand First is also puzzled about how an ice cream top-up in Budget 2015 will do anything to stop offending. It is very easy for the so-called financial wizards to calculate but there were 8303 prisoners in our system last week. The additional $6.5 million that was allocated for rehabilitation in the Budget—it calculates down to $2.02 per prisoner per day. That is the cost of a scoop of ice cream. We do not expect people to change their behaviour for the sake of a scoop of ice cream. We can do better than that I think. But no this Government just believes in giving ice creams to Kiwis and millions to Serco. That is what it is.We do not believe that prisons should be sold off to the highest bidder when that bidder has less than a savoury reputation as Serco regretfully does. Just $2.02 a day extra for each of the 8803 prisoners will make a scant impact unless the plan is managed—the decline of our prisons that Serco will magically fix. I do not believe in conspiracies but there is a plan to sell off our prisons. This goes against the claims of the Minister of Corrections Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga that rehabilitation is a key focus of the National Government. How could it add $2.02 a day extra—how can we fix the system with $2.02 a day? This goes against the claims that the Minister has made. Unlike England’s Moeen Ali who I hoped would drop Trent Boult in the first test the other day this Minister has dropped the ball on corrections big time as has this Government.Coming back to the cost-cutting in prisons we demand that the likes of our own people our own corrections staff and rehabilitation set-up get more funding and not Serco. Thank you.