Pugh MaureenMAUREEN PUGH (National): It is my pleasure to stand today and speak on the Appropriations (2017/18 Estimates) Bill in its Committee stage. We are focused here on the justice sector. I will follow up on the comments made by the Hon Anne Tolley earlier on who did say to us that New Zealand is the fourth-safest country in the world. That is not our rating; that is international ratings. So we are actually doing quite well but we certainly want to be No. 1 and that is why we are heavily investing in new money for this sector. As mentioned we have got close to $2 billion worth of new money going into the justice sector and out of that $1.2 billion is actually new funding for the operating expenditure of the justice sector and over $700 million is going into capital expenditure. One of my favourite things that I was involved in as part of the Justice and Electoral Committee was a visit that we made to the drug and alcohol treatment courts which is a pilot programme initially run for 5 years out of Auckland. Two courts are operating up there and so successful have they been and so intrinsic in terms of the rehabilitation of the people whom they are dealing with that this Budget actually sees those being extended for a further 2 years. That will give us some extremely good data on which to base further decision-making. Those courts one by one are wrapping services around an individual. It is a very intense programme and a very expensive programme but that investment front on in the front line of those offenders is having an absolutely dramatic impact on their lives and on the quality of their lives but also on the quality of their families' lives as well as they all learn how to rehabilitate and find a new life get education and find employment and independence away from their peers which once saw them leading a life of crime. I am very pleased that the Budget this year will see an extension of that programme. Justice is a huge winner out of this Budget and the Department of Corrections will also be receiving added funding—$225 million to be exact—to deliver some of the services around its core services but also to reduce offending. This will have a further $765 million invested into capital and the reason for that is that we are managing the capacity within our prisons and the safety of the prisoners the staff and also the public. Community corrections—although this might sound a bit odd community corrections is probably one of my favourites because we see the interaction that people who are serving community sentences have within their communities. In the past I have had a few projects where I have experienced the value of that community service—places like the Woodstock lookout which was a very rundown overgrown area with historical value. We had a community services programme running there that has turned it into a fabulous little stop-off point with a shelter and historical panels and interpretation panels. The interesting thing about that project was that community services workers were working on it and their sentence ran out before the project was finished but such was the ownership that they had of that project they continued to work on it and that is the value of having them integrate back into the community working with organisations like councils and small community groups and other volunteers. This is the value that it has to these people because they are now part of the wider community where once before they were quite isolated into their group of people who had led them into this life of crime. I would also like to talk about policing. As we know—and we have heard much about this over the last few weeks—in the increase in the Budget for policing which is going to see 1125 new police staff 880 of those are going to be front-line police. Of those 880 front-line police we are very happy in West Coast - Tasman to have 24 of those in the Tasman policing district. So the Tasman policing district is the West and all of the top of the South Island including Marlborough Nelson the West Coast and Tasman. Of those 24 police we are going to have one of those officers on patrol 24/7 which means a patrolling officer will be patrolling all day every day. That is great news for those small rural communities to know that they have got that oversight of the police all day. We know too that the first tranche of those new recruits entered the Police College this month on 10 July the 40th anniversary of decimal currency as it turned out. They will be graduating in 3 months and taking up the beginning of those new positions around the country. All of the 12 policing districts across New Zealand are receiving extra policing staff.But one of the things that I would like to note about these Estimates is that it is this Government that is now able to allocate more to each of the votes because of the outstanding performance not only of this Government and its financial management but also the hard-working Kiwis who are out there and have played their part in our economic success. Because of their efforts in innovating in producing more in buying more and in helping make us one of the best-performing countries in the OECD we can now invest in more things that New Zealanders deserve like justice. Thank you very much.