Paul TamathaTAMATHA PAUL (Green—Wellington Central): Kia ora Madam Speaker. Today I am taking a call on behalf of Te Pāti Kākāriki to speak about one of the I guess keynote aspects of this Budget. Amongst a slash-and-burn Budget where almost every other facet of our public services has been cut there's one area that has gotten a massive amount of investment and that's the budget line that is $1.9 billion into increasing Corrections with a large chunk of money going towards a mega-prison at Waikeria.There's something deeply disturbing about a Government that would rather invest billions of dollars into locking people up after the harm has already been created as opposed to preventing harm from happening in the first place. But this Government and its Budget isn't motivated by reducing harm in communities; they're motivated by looking like they're doing something. We have a Government that says that they care about victims but if they did they would not have cut $25 million tagged for improving outcomes for the victims of crime. We know that one of the biggest drivers of crime is poverty—and not just material poverty but also a poverty of opportunity.Last week I went to the youth prison in Christchurch and I heard about how some young people prefer to be in prison as opposed to being in their communities because at least if they were in prison they had guaranteed meals every day and a bed to sleep in. How sad is it that in order for some young people to have their basic survival needs meet that they would much rather steal a car or hurt somebody in order to get their basic needs met?If we look at the areas that the Government has made cuts to within this Budget we can see that there's $1.81 billion worth of cuts within the housing space including scrapping the Homelessness Action Plan making it easier to evict people from emergency housing and from public housing and reducing the funding for rangatahi transitional housing. This is where we need to realise that having a safe and affordable roof over your head where you don't have to be in constant fear is an important part of crime prevention.Angela Davis who is an African-American researcher looking into prisons and the role that they play in our societies said that prison construction and the attendant drive to fill these new structures with human bodies have been driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit". Her writings on the American prison system may feel far away but they are becoming more and more relevant to us when we look at another item that has been funded within the Budget which is the reinstatement of the three-strikes law and the fact that that has been imported from America the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. We're building jails and building prisons at a rate that matches the United States. In fact Aotearoa now has one of the highest rates of imprisonment in the world.If prisons worked this Government wouldn't be increasing the Budget for prisons by $2 billion. If prisons worked their populations wouldn't keep rising year on year. If you take it in conjunction with some of the other decisions that have been made in the Budget—the removal of prison population reduction targets millions of dollars being put into three strikes reduction of funding for courts like Te Ao Mārama the removal of funding for section 27 reports the establishment of military boot camps and the new "young serious offender" category—it's clear that the Government is happy to continue funnelling people into prisons instead of investing in our communities.Prisons cannot be the only answer yet sadly they have become that. Prisons shouldn't be the place that you finally get support for mental health and addiction issues because the public health service is under-resourced. Prisons shouldn't be the first place you get the opportunity to connect with your whakapapa and your identity. Prison shouldn't be the place you finally get a diagnosis for health issues that you've struggled your entire life with yet they have become the only issue. I ask that we be a bit more creative in our response to the harm that is created in our communities and that we invest in those things that we know are the drivers of crime instead of continually focusing on bottom-of-the-cliff approaches."