Mark Ron: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Mark Ron: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:624;Page:19489] 
RON MARK (NZ First) 
: 
 It is such a shame that the Committee sees fit to allocate only 5 minutes of debate per speaker to this issue because never before in the history of this country can we look to a time when the law enforcement officers the men and women of our police force have been under such intense pressure. Why is that? The answers are all here in this report. It is an unprecedented report—and this is a committee report not an Opposition report—because it highlights the failings of the police under the administration of this Minister. 
Let us remind ourselves of who this Minister of Police is. This Minister the Hon George Hawkins is the man who stood up and criticised people like John Banks when he was the Minister of Police. This Minister criticised Jack Elder when he was the Minister of Police.He promised the nation for 9 years that under his stewardship things would be better. With Mike Moore he promised a national crime commission yet this month he categorically ruled out any such commission. Why? Because he knows that this Government will not commit the resources that the police need. Right now the great tragedy is that law enforcement officers up and down this country are being tarred with Labour’s brush. 
Labour’s policy of not resourcing the police commensurate with the levels of real crime—not recorded crime but real crime—is now going to be legendary. Labour has failed to commit and its assurances to the public that never before have the police had more resources and more men fall on deaf ears when sane thinking common-sense New Zealanders point out the following facts to this Minister. Never before have we had a greater population. Never before have we had a greater influx of immigrants who bring with them their own peculiarities in terms of language barriers which the police have to deal with and never before have we seen such a historic focus on revenue-gathering by concentrating on roads and on the quota ticketing of nanas trying to go to church on High Street Rangiora on a Sunday morning. But of course it is this Minister’s focus to ticket High Street Rangiora because there are lots of recidivist boy racers on that street—not! What it is all about is money. 
The real problem lies in the fact that when reports such as this—the report from the Commissioner of Police to the Minister of Police on issues relating to policing in the Auckland area dated 21 November 2002—tell this Minister that the 111 system is about to fall over and tell this Minister that 100 extra police are needed at the coalface to respond to 111 calls and tell this Minister that it is all going to fail he does nothing—or does he? Is not the real unspoken story here that this Minister does talk to his Prime Minister. Is not the real unspoken story here that this Minister does talk to his Prime Minister and does talk to the Deputy Prime Minister—but is not part of that other little clique of Labour the Cosgrove-Tamihere clique that the sisterhood does not listen to? 
Dr Richard Worth 
: And Dover. 
RON MARK 
: And Dover Samuels. Now he is smiling because he knows I have hit the real point. The sisterhood does not listen to him and that explains a comment that he made at a meeting in Auckland to a group of people. I will not quote what he said but he made it very clear to that group of his very close friends that his own Prime Minister does not listen to him that the sisterhood closes ranks and that when he goes forward to ask for resources he gets kicked into touch because he is not one of the favoured few. Well the downstream consequences of that—[ 
Interruption 
]; I tell Mr Darren what’s-his-name that young fellow from somewhere—are that the public are paying for the price of this Minister’s inability to get the resources needed and highlighted in this report. 
Darren Hughes 
: He got a million dollars. 
RON MARK 
: I tell Mr Darren Hughes that he should not talk to the public; he should talk to Iraena Asher’s parents. We know we have hit a sore point when the junior Government whip has to chip in and rebut. He knows—and he will hear about it on the hustings during the coming election—that in this report and even in the second report the Commissioner of Police and the deputy commissioner both say in their own language—not in the language of New Zealand First or the National Party—that they are under-resourced understaffed and underfunded. This Government is responsible personally for the Iraena Asher disaster. This Government is responsible personally for the failure of the 111 system because it was told in 2001 that the system would fall over—and it has.