Little AndrewDEBATE ON PRIME MINISTER'S STATEMENTDebate resumed from 20 February. Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): I am very proud to stand here as a member of the Jacinda Ardern - led Government a Government that is at long last facing up to the longstanding serious challenges that this country has had facing it. That makes this Government a Government of tomorrow. Tomorrow happens to be March 4th which is what this Government is doing—marching this country forward to the sunlit uplands of a bright new future. But the reality is of course we are also a Government of today and right now this country like every country in the world is facing one of the most significant serious challenges with the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. I want to acknowledge for a moment the leadership of my colleague the Minister of Health the Hon Dr David Clark and the work he is doing in leading his ministry and the health sector to respond effectively to that insidious disease. It is one of the biggest challenges facing us because of the impact not only on people and their health and on their going about their daily lives but also on small-business owners and big-business owners and the impact on them and the ability of people to travel. The reality is that the measures taken by this Government in the last five weeks have been effective they have been responsible they've been measured they've been proportionate and they are achieving what is intended which is to do the best to shut down the possibility of the disease coming here and an outbreak in New Zealand. We should be very pleased with the measures that are being taken. It is causing inconvenience to many sectors not the least of which is the education sector and many overseas students and we are reliant in many respects on those students coming here. It is causing the institutions inconvenience and the students inconvenience it's causing many businesses inconvenience and there is no question that this little economy will take a hit. But the reality is it's the work of this Government in the last two years to steadfastly stick with fundamental orthodox economics that has put this economy and has put this country in the right place to weather this very important event. There is another challenge that we need to rise to too and it's the challenge for us as elected representatives because we will hear many—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Order! I'm sorry to interrupt the member on his feet but there is a lot of noise from his own colleagues making it difficult. Hon ANDREW LITTLE: I'm obliged Madam Speaker. If my colleagues could just listen to me for a moment and resume their conversations when the members opposite are speaking I think they'll find it much more educational. I just did want to acknowledge that as elected representatives like representatives of all sorts we will be getting the expressions of anxiety and concern and sometimes panic from members of the public and it is important that we do our job to make sure that we are getting the messages out there that there are measures in place they are responsible and they are based on science and medicine. Not everybody who falls sick at the moment will be a victim of the COVID-19 virus. Not everybody who is unwell will need the same level of attention. The health professionals have to assess the person's full background and not just the symptoms they're exhibiting and have to ask whether they have been in close contact with travellers from those areas where the disease is most concentrated or whether they haven't because if they haven't then they are unlikely to be affected. But I take my hat off to the work that the health professionals are doing. They're doing a great job and of course once again I want to acknowledge my colleague the Minister of Health. I want to talk about some of the very important developments and changes and improvements that this Government is making across the board not only in the economic sphere but in the social sphere as well. It's relevant to my job as the Minister of Justice and I'm going to come to that very shortly. This is a Government that has not only committed itself to sound economic management—the economic management that has delivered a total of $13 billion in surpluses over the last two years alone and that is also allowing us to do the important social infrastructure of restoring our hospitals and the health system restoring our schools and the rest of the education system and making sure that we're dealing with those rundown social services—but it also means that we can start to seriously address some of the challenging social issues as well not the least of which is family violence and sexual violence. I know that members across the House take that issue very seriously and they have been supportive of the measures that have been taken. I want to particularly acknowledge my colleague the Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Minister of Justice Jan Logie and the work that she is doing in that area and I want to come back to that as well. But this is a Government that is dealing with those issues like climate change which is exercising whole generations of New Zealanders and people around the world. We're dealing with child poverty because we know that that creates for the people and families who suffer that the most insidious of starts. We're dealing as I say with what's happening under the health services. We're picking up and restoring a rundown police force—you know this is the stunning thing for members opposite who pose questions about what is happening to the police force. Now that was the Government that ran down our police force. It went from a ratio of one police officer to 500 in the population to nearly one to 525. That is a serious deterioration of our police force and this is a Government committed to restoring the front line of our police and of course the housing crisis hard as that may be—and maybe we underestimated just the difficulty of that task. But we've started restoring confidence for those who have been homeless for far too long to make sure that they can get their own home. The rebuild has begun. The restoration has begun. These were challenging issues that we were facing but we made a start and it's been a good one. Let's have a look: higher incomes. Last year average income growth was 3.6 percent—never heard of for the last 20 years and yet we've seen that. The minimum wage is up. A massive investment in infrastructure: $12 billion committed at the end of last year. Roads and rail but also hospitals and importantly in schools as well—$12 billion. We are restoring quality health and seriously addressing mental health and addiction because that's an insidious factor in our communities as well and we saw in the last election just how responsive the community were. They were saying We need help. This is an important problem and we need help." and they are getting it. We're building more homes. We are seeing great things in education—fantastic work by my colleague the Minister of Education the Hon Chris Hipkins—not just in the schools but in vocational education as well because that was run down. If you really want to build a strong future economy you actually need to have good vocational education. People are going into the apprenticeships. People are going to polytechs that they know are going to financially survive and they know that they're going to be there in three years' time to continue to deliver their courses and of course I totally welcome and support the learning support coordinators that are now being rolled out through our schools. It is absolutely vital that we pick up those kids who have learning difficulties and who have problems that are getting in the way of their learning because if they're not starting to learn and be comfortable in school in those first couple or three years that's going to have serious implications further down the track if they drop out and they cause other problems. I want to come and reserve my concluding remarks to the issue of justice because what we are seeing in that sector now calls for long-term thinking and a very positive start. But the starting point isn't just what we do in our prisons—and I acknowledge the work that the Hon Kelvin Davis is doing there—and not just what we're doing with the police and the work that my colleague the Hon Stuart Nash is doing and indeed what we're doing with courts. It actually starts with those foundation things like making sure that people have a stable warm dry home to live in because people who are constantly changing houses and taking their kids out of one school and putting them in another—they are giving those kids a rough start and they are the kids that fall out of school. If we're not investing in our education system and things like the learning support coordinators the kids with problems don't get picked up and they become a problem further down the track. If we're not dealing with mental health and addiction then we are creating problems further down the track. Let's just accept once and for all the huge proportion of our prison population and offender population who have been victims of poor housing policy and a failure of housing policy for the last nine years: people who have fallen through the cracks in our education system because they can't learn because they don't get picked up; people who've had serious mental health and addiction issues that never get picked up until they are in the criminal justice system. If we want to improve the performance of our criminal justice system we'd do a lot more by investing in property and housing and education and health particularly mental health and addiction. Then there are the things we do in the system itself. That's why we've committed to making Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Courts a permanent feature of our justice system not the continual recycling and rolling out of pilots year after year after year but actually making them permanent and starting to expand them as well. The same thing we're doing with the specialist courts that we're setting up as well: the Matariki Court and the New Beginning Court—even the Sexual Violence Pilot Court that's in pilot stage and under review at the moment. These courts are making a difference and they're helping people get off the offending track and live decent fulfilling lives and making sure we have far fewer victims in our community. But the most important thing is that the biggest deterrent to criminal offending is of course the probability you're going to be caught. That's where the work we're doing with our police force is so vital: adding more front-line police creating a special gang unit that is there to address that very insidious problem. That problem started years ago and it started because members opposite when they were in Government totally failed to deal with the massive rise in deportations from Australia and those people coming from a gang background there. The difference between this side of the House and that side of the House is they are very good at puffing their chest out and beating their chest when it suits them on law and order but they are all talk. They did nothing. They have no new ideas. They're a disgrace."