Hipkins Chris: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hipkins Chris: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8147. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 To recap what I was saying last night the Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill represents a purely ideological decision by the National Government to start to privatise the prisons. There is no evidence whatsoever to support what the Government is trying to do. There is no evidence that privatising the prisons will be cheaper. In fact the only example in the New Zealand context proved to be more expensive for remand prisoners than the public prisons. There is no evidence that it will lead to less recidivism and the international evidence suggests the opposite of that: recidivism rates from private prisons are higher than from public prisons. 
The best that the National-ACT Government could do was to put up Roger Douglas “Mr Self-help Help Yourself” to simply give us the same speech that he gives over and over again— 
Grant Robertson 
: 25 years. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: —he has given it for 25 years—about the fact that the State is bad everything the Government does is bad and everything should be left to the private sector. This is the same party of course that put up Mr Garrett whose best argument I think was articulated in his first reading speech. He said he thought private prisons would be cheaper than public prisons because they would go round all the dairies in South Auckland and buy all of the stale food that was past its use-by date and feed that to the prisoners. That was the best argument that the ACT Party could come up with to suggest that private prisons would be more efficient and cheaper for New Zealanders. 
In the last minute or so I say to the Maori Party that I agreed with a lot of the aims and objectives that Pita Sharples set out in what I thought was a quite thoughtful speech in terms of what the prison service should aim to do and aim to deliver for prisoners. I absolutely agreed with a lot of what he said but I do not see the connection between privatising the prisons and delivering on the aspirations that Dr Sharples set out. They are very worthy but we do not need to privatise the prisons in order to do that. The Public Service and all of our prisons should be delivering on the types of aspirations that Dr Sharples laid out. 
So that is the wrong debate for the House to have. The debate should really be about why we have such a high incarceration rate in New Zealand. It is one of the highest rates in the developed world. This debate should be about how we reduce the number of people who end up going back to prison after they have been released—how we can reduce the recidivism rate. It should not be about how we can cut corners and transfer money from hard-working taxpayers to overseas corporate owners of private prisons which is what this legislation will enable. This legislation will enable the transfer of money to the American owners of the prison contract if the National Government gets its way. There is no evidence to suggest that we will end up with a better-quality prison service as a result of that. The privatising of prisons is an ideological decision it does not make sense and the Labour Party will be opposing it at every step of the way.