Ryall Tony: General Debates 
Ryall Tony: General Debates 
[Volume:613;Page:9955] 
Hon TONY RYALL (National—Bay of Plenty) 
: 
 As the House meets this afternoon violence in this country remains at intolerably high levels. Drug-related gang violence is spreading across the country and young people are committing more and more serious crime. Under Labour crime is becoming more ruthless and more wanton yet this Prime Minister says New Zealand is a safer place. Just in the last few days we have seen how desperate this Government is to try to convince New Zealanders it is doing something about the rising tide of violence in this country and we have seen the absolute failure of this Government to give proper leadership to the Department of Corrections and the prison service in this country. 
I want to tell members about the most humiliating back-down by Government officials I have ever seen in my 13 years in Parliament. It occurred this morning when this Government’s officials admitted that they could supervise a paedophile 24 hours a day 7 days a week only if the offender agreed to that. At the Law and Order Committee this morning departmental officials lectured the select committee that Mr Goff’s “toughest law in the world” paedophile bill would allow them to personally supervise serious sex offenders 24 hours a day for up to 10 years. It was only when I came to this House got the bill and sat before them that the officials checked and admitted that they had got it wrong and that Mr Goff’s bill provides no such power whatsoever. Mr Goff’s bill is all about an electronic bracelet that monitors where an offender is not what he is doing and officials admitted in the select committee today that no one will be monitored for 10 years. Do members want to know what this great extended supervision from Mr Goff is? It will start with 2-weekly home visits from a probation officer and after 2 years it will be a 3-monthly home visit from a probation officer. Is this Minister really saying that a 3-monthly visit from a parole officer would have kept Barry Allan Ryder on the straight and narrow or stopped Lloyd Alexander McIntosh committing an assault in his own home? It would not have done so. The Goff “get tough” paedophile bill is nothing but a joke. 
There is another example of this Government’s underfunding of the police and of law and order problems in this country with the headline on the front page of our major newspaper today: “The 15-year-old killed running a drug house” in South Auckland. Here was a 15-year-old a young man whose life was snuffed out in a violent frenzied attack in a drug house he was running. The police knew that drug house was being run and what were they doing about it? Absolutely nothing! That was because they just do not have the resources in the Counties-Manukau Police District to go and investigate a crime that has been reported to them. This Government is not prepared to put its money where its rhetoric is and to support the New Zealand police in cracking down on the drug-dealing gangs in our community. There is a crisis in South Auckland where robberies are up by 13 percent non-cannabis drug offences are up by 30 percent and car conversions are up by 27 percent—and this Prime Minister says New Zealand is a safer place! Crime under Labour is more random and more violent than before and this Prime Minister says New Zealand is a safer place. 
In the  
Dominion Post  
yesterday we saw another example of the Government’s neglect of the methamphetamine crisis flooding across our country with the news that Wellington police have to take five cops off the street in order to fund a clandestine drug lab bust here in the capital city of New Zealand. That shows more neglect of crime by that hopeless Government.