Dalziel Lianne: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dalziel Lianne: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8129. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 The quality of the debate justifying the passage of this Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill has been very poor. Essentially Government members have taken every mention of the failure of the private sector internationally as a reflection being cast on the quality of our own judiciary and our own Public Prisons Service when in fact the opposite is true. Our position on this side of the House supports the integrity of our prison service and the independence and integrity of our judiciary. We have argued a philosophical view and it is quite clear that there is an ideological divide across the House. Our view is that the deprivation of liberty is one of those core State functions that should not be contracted out. 
I believe that international jurisprudence is coming in behind to support the view that we would present. I know that it is not popular with members of the Government because essentially they do not believe that any human rights arguments are available to be debated on this subject but that is not the case internationally. I have warned the Government of the implications of the Supreme Court of Israel’s decision to overturn the privatisation measures that had been undertaken there. But these warnings have been ignored by the Government. I want to remind members of what they say because I think it is worth writing it into the record. 
Essentially the argument was that the Supreme Court of Israel would not normally intervene in economic policies but in this case the President of the Supreme Court held that the legislation harmed basic constitutional rights. Israel’s basic legal principles hold that the right to use force in general and the right to enforce criminal law by putting people behind bars in particular is one of the most fundamental and most invasive powers in the State’s jurisdiction. Thus when the power to incarcerate is transferred to a private corporation whose purpose is making money the act of depriving a person of his liberty loses much of its legitimacy. Because of this loss of legitimacy the violation of the prisoner’s right to liberty goes beyond the violation entailed in the incarceration itself. Efficiency she wrote is not a supreme value when the most basic and important human rights for which the State is responsible are at stake. I know that members opposite do not like listening to the learned words of a Supreme Court judge but the point I was making was simply to warn the Government that this is a movement that is happening internationally and we cannot be impervious to those views that are being expressed because they will matter to New Zealand as well. 
The Government has said there is no core function of the State; it has said there is no such thing. There is nowhere that it would draw the line; anything is up for privatisation or competitive management. We were told by the Minister of Corrections that the only question we need to ask is “What works?”. That is the only question. Anything goes but it has to work. I make no apology for holding the views that I do but it would be a mistake for anyone in this House to argue that they conflict with the mantra “What works?”. I am actually a great believer in what works. It has been the driver behind the Opposition’s offer to the Government to work collaboratively on early intervention so that we can reduce our prison population. 
I was invited to a meeting with the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Maori Affairs on early intervention and I was really impressed with the quality of that meeting. I went back to the Labour caucus and told it that we had to offer up something that we had to work with the Government on that issue. Early intervention is where we all agree the most good can be done if we are genuinely to do something about our prison population. What has the Government’s response been to that general offer? Nothing. We are still waiting. I have had a letter asking that we work together on Sale of Liquor Act issues knowing full well that it is a conscience issue but there we go. A genuine offer was put on the table to work with the Government collaboratively on something that really would work. 
The Prime Minister of New Zealand has hired a scientist to sit at his right hand to guide the Government on an evidence-based pathway. Yet the approach that the Government is adopting here is not evidence-based at all. I really support the hiring of a scientist to sit at the right-hand side of the Government’s highest decision-maker; I just think it is really important that he is listened to. He is saying that an evidence-based pathway is the way forward. We have heard the Government tout the UK system when the league table shows that 10 of the 11 private prisons in the UK fit within the bottom 25 percent of all the prisons in the UK. The facts speak for themselves. This is not a seriously good argument that National members are proposing. 
The ACT Party blew the cobwebs off arguments that I thought had been buried in the crypt alongside its founding member but even he could not help himself. He had to get to his feet to argue that competition and profit were the only way that we could get value for money the only way we could get results. Competition is great for consumers. It is fantastic for consumers. As a former Minister of Commerce I am well aware of the anti-competitive measures that many in the private sector take particularly in order to take public sector contracts and milk them for all they are worth as we have seen in the newspapers in the last few days. They want the benefits to accrue to themselves because they are profit-making businesses and they would rather not see the benefit go to the consumers. That is what competition was designed to preserve—benefit for the consumers. 
It is a question of whether the profit motive is the driver we want in a service that benefits from keeping its business full of people. It is absolutely counter-intuitive that we would want the profit motive driving our prison service of all things. That has been the problem overseas. The incentives have been utterly and completely perverse: keeping people in for longer punishing them for minor infractions while they are in jail keeping them there for longer and longer ensuring that the prisons have their fodder that the prisoners keep coming back because of the revolving-door syndrome. Private prisons need to keep seeing them return because that is where the profit lies. 
I do not feel that way about the not-for-profit sector. There is an enormous difference and I disagree entirely with the Minister of Maori Affairs on this issue. I see the real role for the so-called non-public in the not-for-profit sector where a lot of Maori organisations work where a lot of Pasifika agencies work and where agencies like the Salisbury Street Foundation have made a huge difference in terms of really turning round the lives of people and ensuring that habilitation and rehabilitation take place. I think this is where the Maori Party tragically was sold a pup by National. It offered it a slice of the action when in fact Maori could have a much more important role in reducing the prison population and reducing reoffending rates. The Salisbury Street Foundation as I have mentioned stands testament to the value that the not-for-profit sector adds to the justice system. 
This bill is not about that. It is actually about carving off a profit centre in the shape of people who have offended against the laws of the State and allowing not only the cost of their incarceration to be passed on to the taxpayer but the provision of profit to the private sector to be passed on to the taxpayer as well. That is what I object to. The Minister did not once answer the question on cost. We know that the private prison experiment that we had in this country once before was more costly than the public sector alternative. It was more costly and there is no question about that. Overseas the costs have been higher the rates of suicide have been higher the rates of escape have been higher and the damage done to prison guards has been higher. The price we pay those prison guards has been lower and the price the taxpayer pays has been higher. This bill is on a hiding to nothing. It is not something that we stand for and the Labour Party will be opposing it vigorously.