Dalziel Lianne: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dalziel Lianne: Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8110. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I am very grateful to the Leader of the House and our chief whip for negotiating the opportunity to have a debate such as this. Everyone has said it and it is true: there is a huge philosophical divide between the two sides of the House on this matter. The National Government seems to have it fixed in its mind that if it is public it is bad; if it is private it is good. The Labour Party on the other hand takes a different view. We say that if it is public it is good; and if it is private it is good in its place. 
Sandra Goudie 
: You don’t like privatisation. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: I actually do not think that anyone on the other side heard what I said. I said that on this side of the House we tend to believe that when it is public it is good; when it is private it is good in its place. We are not debating the efficiency of business generally. That is not what this debate is about from the philosophical point of view. Those who claim that members on this side of the House do not understand business are not picking up on the essential point that we are making. We are challenging the very use of private business to undertake the nature of this work. That is what we are challenging and that is a fundamental difference. 
But I will get on to the efficiency of this business anyway because it does not stack up even on that ground. In terms of dealing with the philosophical divide we have here we have heard members opposite absolutely mock the concept of the State. We have heard the ACT Party come to the fore as usual and say that the State really has no core function at all and that anything the State does can be contracted out. Government members simply do not accept that there are certain core functions that should never be contracted out from the State. They are absolutely clear-cut about their view. We had a lecture from David Garrett. It was interesting to be lectured by someone who touted the fact that he completed his law degree some time after I did at Canterbury University. He mocked the landmark ruling of the Supreme Court of Israel by pointing out that it does not appear in our hierarchy of courts. Well hello! He obviously was at law school because to know that takes exceptional intellect. 
The point I was trying to make—and I think the one he deliberately ignored—was the potential impact of that decision across jurisprudence internationally. I think that it has an incredible capacity for making a significant change. In fact the article I was quoting from said that the ruling would be studied not only in Israel but that it will also doubtless generate a conceptual revolution worldwide. I think that is absolutely true. I think it is unfortunate that we have not had any debate about this in the House in the context of what we are talking about here. 
The petition that started this particular case argued two things. It argued that transferring prison powers to private hands would violate the prisoners’ fundamental human rights to liberty and dignity and second that a private organisation would always aim to maximise profit—and yes that is what private organisations are designed to do—and would therefore seek to cut costs by for instance skimping on prison facilities and paying its guards poorly thus further undermining the prisoners’ rights. I think these are serious issues that the court was required to address. 
When considering this particular matter the president of the court stated that normally the court would not intervene in economic policies decided upon by Cabinet and the Parliament in Israel in that particular case and that is certainly the case here. But in this case the president wrote that the legislation harms basic constitutional rights thus the amendment’s economic aspect was not a decisive factor that the court must weigh in exercising its power of judicial review. I think that the fundamental issue that the court has raised in this particular case is that by transferring the power to incarcerate to a private corporation whose purpose is making money the act of depriving a person of his or her liberty loses much of its legitimacy. I think that will be the basis of the many cases that I believe will be taken around the world. It is not just in New Zealand that this is an ongoing debate. This is being challenged all around the world and indeed at the heart of prison privatisation the United States of America we are seeing these things being challenged all the time. 
We have listened to National Party MPs talking about feeding people and housing people. We have heard all sorts of different things as being fundamental so therefore why does the State not do all of those? Again the Government completely misses the point which is that some things are the core functions of the State and they cannot be contracted out. Maybe National members think a private police force would be a good idea Actually the Minister in the chair Judith Collins is also the Minister of Police. I ask the Minister whether that is a line across which we would go. Is that thin blue line going to get a little thinner as the price of those who provide protection for our communities is dropped by the private sector? This is never mentioned. 
The courts could be privatised completely. The military—the defence forces—could all be completely privatised and of course we could get that for much better value. A few mercenaries could take up that role in defence of the realm. That I think is what we are not having a debate about. We are ignoring the fact that there are some fundamental issues in respect of human rights where we cannot ignore the obligation of the State and the fact that these things should not be contracted out. 
Jonathan Young brought to the House the example of the United Kingdom. He quoted the number of private prisons that had been developed in the UK. I do not think he mentioned the fact that 10 of the 11 private prisons in the UK rank in the bottom quarter of all the prisons in the UK. So the UK example is not a very smart argument to be raising because in fact private prisons do exponentially worse than most others. In fact 75 percent of the prisons do better. The members opposite love league tables. I tell members that that is a league table that the private sector does not look very good on at all. 
The Minister also failed to respond to the point that I have raised in this House more than once now and that is the cost differential in the provision of per prisoner management of the Auckland Central Remand Prison which was under private management from 1 July 2004 to 30 June 2005. We had the comparative cost which was $35700 per prisoner when it was under private management. The comparable figure for remand prisoners in public prisons at that time was $32000 per prison. The comparable price with the remand prison when it came back under public management—a year later so the price should have gone up—was lower than the private management cost of $33900 per prisoner. 
Why is nobody stating the obvious? Is the emperor genuinely wearing some clothes here? It seems to me that what has been overlooked is that the one actual example that we have of private sector prison management in New Zealand shows that it is more costly to run prisons within the private sector than it is within the public sector. All the international evidence points to detriment to those who are being imprisoned and detriment for the prison officers who are usually paid less and are at greater risk of attacks and other things happening to them. Of course there is the whole question of the cost to the taxpayer. In actual fact a lot of that is hidden additional costs. It blatantly cost more for the private sector to run the Auckland Central Remand Prison in the one instance of private management that we had. That is why as a Government coming in we had no problems overturning that contract and saying that we were not going back there. It simply was not even cost-effective. On every level this fails.