O'Connor GregGREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): I'd like to speak to the Corrections Amendment Bill Part 1. Particularly I'll talk about the police jails but just before I do I've sat in the committee this afternoon and heard the Opposition doing the usual lazy Opposition thing—and I have to say it's not just down to that; Oppositions everywhere do this because what they do is go for the easy win and the easy win is always fear of crime. The easy win is always to stand in the Opposition and scare the hell out of the population and it doesn't just happen in New Zealand—CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): And now speak to Part 1 of this bill.GREG O'CONNOR: I was just providing some context but yes I will speak to—part of this I'd like to speak to is just particularly around the provision of police cells. I can remember visiting the Henderson Police Station at a time when the police station was full of remand prisoners. Now they weren't necessary dangerous remand prisoners; they were actually immigration they were people there on various regulatory offences. When I look at Part 1 and I see the provisions in there they become very important to ensure that where prisoners are in police cells there are proper provisions around them particularly around clause 7. Clause 7 is what allows the Minister to declare a police jail or part of a police jail as part of an established corrections prison.Now what is important there is that the prisoners that are put in there—and often they're not the most dangerous prisoners; often they are as I said immigration prisoners and they can be left aside because no one's really advocating for them. So it's very important that I look back at Part 1 and look at the provisions in there to ensure that there is some oversight and good oversight and to ensure that the running of the police stations in particular is not affected any more than it has to be by those prisoners. It is of course something that now we can look at in the cold light of day because it is not an issue at the moment because of the very good work done by this Minister of Corrections which has meant that the pressure has gone off the prison system without any accompanying rise in crime and that's what we want to achieve.When I look at the whole of Part 1 the whole thing is about providing to ensure that we can talk—and we can build fear as we've heard this afternoon but actually nothing we have done has worked. The Opposition can stand and scream from the rooftops all they like but nothing they—or I have to say any other Government really in the world—have done has worked. So when we look at Part 1 and we look at the provisions here what these are is the start of a slow turnaround. Nothing we will do by itself—there's no one pill we're going to take that's going to change things. It's a bit like the turning around of a tanker turning around of the Titanic if you like just making sure that as we turn—probably not a good analogy but the turning around of a major ship so that slowly we start to acknowledge that what we have been doing isn't working. In fact we'll go back to the Titanic—maybe it's not such a bad analogy because it certainly didn't work for that.So any provision we look at as we look at the whole way we deal with the justice system the prison system—that we look at what we're doing in context. It's not just taking it out because if you do that you'll end up with what Oppositions—and what this Opposition is doing; lazy Oppositions—do which is stand up and just scare the heck the bejesus out of anyone listening without any solution at all. Someone somewhere has got to start making some new changes because if we don't we end up going—it's 11000 it would've been 12000 there'd be super-prisons all over. You would get like Texas was where the biggest growth industry in Texas at one stage was geriatric prisons because of this absolute fear that nobody could change nobody could turn the ship around.So if we go back to Part 1 and look at this around the slow moving that hopefully whatever hue of Government it is Oppositions anywhere will not stand and talk and make speeches and advocate statutes advocate laws that will only end up filling our prisons even more and will do nothing—do nothing—for the safety of our society. So I go back again to Part 1 and I look at again at the police jails at the start of it. If we are going to have overflowing prisons where police jails are going to be required then it means that there has been a failure within the system. However if it does happen we now know that as a result of these provisions then it will actually be a little bit more workable.