Borrows Chester: Policing Bill — In Committee 
Borrows Chester: Policing Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:649;Page:17912] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 I rise to speak in respect of Part 4 which contains the provisions relating mainly to police as employees. We have to accept that over time the police service has moved to alter the way in which it has responded to sworn police officers as employees. At the time of the writing of the Police Act in 1958 and as the Act currently is the police service was seen very much as a paramilitary organisation very much run along the lines of the other services. So police officers were required to move at the drop of a hat to other stations to take up transfers as ordered and as I said the police service was run very much along the lines of a military organisation. But over time those rigid provisions have been rolled back and now more and more police officers are treated as any other employees. 
That does not sit particularly well I think with the public because the public and especially older members of the community who have long memories tend to think that the New Zealand Police can operate as a military organisation within our communities. We have seen through recent years that the police service is no longer for instance able to move a police officer from one station to another to fill a gap. The service is no longer able to order police to undertake certain duties because there is a need in a given area and that has altered the whole way in which police have been recruited and employed to meet the need. 
One of the biggest changes probably in the New Zealand Police over the last 25 years has concerned the way in which when most young graduates left the police college they went to a bigger area and learnt the trade. A lot of us went to Auckland straight from police college and learnt through the volume of crime how to deal with it how to record it and how to investigate it. Then later we filtered down to smaller communities around the country in provincial areas. Now we have the reverse situation in that the hard-to-fill stations are small stations scattered around provincial areas and people are recruited into those areas and do their learning in smaller stations. That is a much harder role and I have to say that the tenure seems to be much shorter among those who are prepared to work under those conditions. 
We have also seen restrictions in the way police officers can be treated in respect of their training and in the way they are dealt with as recruits at the Royal New Zealand Police College. The expectations in respect of physical capabilities and the ability for instance of a grumpy old police training instructor to bark at some recruit to get his back-end regions up to the top of the hill in the shortest possible time are no longer able to be put quite as bluntly and tersely as they used to be. People are asked or requested to take part in various parts of police training and I do not believe for a moment that that is exactly what the public expect. Nevertheless that is the way that employment laws are implemented and tend to impact on the way police officers maintain their employment within the New Zealand Police in the modern era. 
This legislation confers on police officers a number of new conditions. Part 4 also concerns the application of the Privacy Act in the way it impacts in relation to assessment and suitability for employment. In other areas of employment and engagement in this country there is the ability of people to be able to stand apart from certain parts of their backgrounds that may not engender themselves towards employment in the New Zealand Police so the police are exempt from this in their inquiries into the background of suitable officers. We have to query—possibly—the applicability of other parts of the Privacy Act as they relate to the actions of police especially for instance in respect of the news over the weekend about a police officer who did a number of inquiries on the National Intelligence Application system and then through breaches of the Privacy Act made a number of approaches to and harassments of callers calling into the Police Communications Centres Service Centre. Yet the police’s ability to be able to deal with those apart from through the conditions and terms of employment have ceased now that he has resigned. 
So maybe there is scope to look further at offences under the Policing Act—as this legislation will be when it is passed—as they impact upon current officers and their ability to access private information and use it for their own ends. We have the ridiculous situation as exposed on the weekend where as soon as somebody resigns from a position within the police no further action can be taken because as the officer was an employee the real offender turns out to be the police service itself for failing to maintain the security of the private information. So there is scope for huge change under this legislation; nevertheless National will be supporting it.