Bennett David; Mallard TrevorHon DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East): Thank you Mr Speaker. This is a very serious week for this Parliament because we have some serious issues to deal with and yesterday we had a ministerial statement that kicked off the parliamentary session and talked about the letters that had come from the inmate that had been involved in the terrible tragedy in Christchurch. Our thoughts are with the families and communities that are down there that had to suffer through that terrible tragedy.There was a responsibility from that point on on the Minister of Corrections. From that moment on he was the one that had to uphold the Prime Minister's wishes in regard to the announcement of the name of that offender. He is the one that had the responsibility to make sure that that offender was in the prison system in a manner which the public would have expected and not in a manner which we have seen as actually being the reality. There is no excuse for that prisoner to have been writing letters to members of the international community let alone outside of his family or his legal representation. The law is very simple and enables corrections to stop that.Now we asked the Minister today what his response has been and he said that he had asked corrections to monitor that and that he had had updates. Now if he had received those updates then he obviously did not do so in a manner to stop the activity happening. He had the responsibility and today he blames his department once again and says that his department failed him. His department didn't fail him; he failed his department in setting the wrong aspirations for that department and then not doing his work and his job to make sure they lived up to their responsibilities.His initial response was that there was a system failure that there needed to be a law change and that there needed to be something other than him taking responsibility for his failure to dictate to his department the structures that should be in place. That is that Minister's failure and it shows his incompetence at dealing with this major issue that is not only of national significance but also of international significance. It puts the Prime Minister in a bad light and it puts the New Zealand corrections system in a bad light and that Minister should not be able to get away with that. When he says he has apologised to the victims the best thing he can do is to make sure that this does not happen again.We know that there are some issues out there that are yet to be resolved. There are at least four other letters that have gone out to other people and the Minister doesn't know where they've gone. That inmate has phone calls every week and the Minister doesn't know where they've gone. Those phone calls could be recorded. That information could be circulating around the world.That is the deficiency that this Minister has created and he created that through the culture he has built up in corrections because this will not be the first example where corrections fails under this Minister. There will be continuous examples because what he's done is he's made the prisoner the first point of call in corrections. It's not like my colleague said about protecting our public and creating safe environments for our communities—that's not his vision of corrections. His vision of corrections is that nobody should be in prison and we see that through his reliance on wanting to give prisoners the vote. We see that in his wanting to give prisoners incentives not to take on prison officers. We see that in the recent strategy which enables more communication and more accessibility for prisoners and enables gangs to come into prisons—the new strategy enables gangs to come into prisons.Darroch Ball: Nonsense.Hon DAVID BENNETT: It's what it does. Read the strategy—read that point of the strategy. It says that gangs can come into prisons. That's what it does. If you don't believe me look at the strategy. It's in here. It's in the document.This is a case where the Minister has let down his department and he has—SPEAKER: The member's time has expired.