Salesa JennyJENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): The services of our police are crucial in New Zealand. It is a public service paid for by all of us as taxpayers and police vetting is a public good that should continue to be funded by taxpayers. This bill the Policing (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill proposes amending the Policing Act 2008 to allow police to be able to recover the costs of certain services they defined as demand services". An example that the bill gives of a demand service is the provision of vetting services. I agree with the previous Labour speaker Meka Whaitiri who said that Labour really values our volunteers. We have thousands and thousands of people who volunteer across New Zealand and there are so many services that this current Government no longer funds that our volunteers have stepped up to provide. What will this bill after it has passed have as an effect on many of these volunteers? What this bill says is that they will be charged to go and get the police vetting service before they can provide the voluntary services that they do not charge for. The Opposition parties put through Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs)—three in particular: one from my colleague Poto Williams; another from another colleague of mine from Labour Chris Hipkins; and another from the Green Party from David Clendon. All of these SOPs were to ensure that various groups do not have to pay for these vetting services. However this current Government did not agree to those SOPS and so the Labour Party members do not support this particular bill. This is a National Government that has—[Interruption] The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I apologise for interrupting the member but there is a degree of rudeness occurring. Members can sit down or go to the lobby but not continue conversations like that.JENNY SALESA: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. This is a National Government that has increasingly grown arrogant and out of touch. It is ignoring the really big issues that are facing the majority of New Zealanders: the housing crisis; the rising inequality; cuts to police services health and education. This is a Government that has talked about the $1.8 billion surplus but it does not actually talk about the Government's rising debt—it has risen 600 percent during the watch of this current Government since 2008. Instead the Prime Minister has talked about how he wants to deliver $3 billion in tax cuts. Now is not the time to be talking about tax cuts—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): That's right!JENNY SALESA: —ha ha—not when we are experiencing huge cuts to the police. National has stretched our police to the point where the Police Association president described it as being at crisis point. Crime is on the rise again resolution rates are falling and police are overstretched. That is why Labour will fund 1000 more police—extra police—to stop crime rates from rising and to take the pressure off our hard-working policemen and women. This particular bill is a shonky attempt to cover up financial and operational gaps. This current Government instead of actually just funding a core public service which is our police to do their job well including vetting of our volunteers and vetting of others—it should actually just fund that. What it is doing instead is it is cutting frontline police in real terms which has meant that the police do not have the numbers of staff that they need to do their jobs safely and well. Instead of addressing this issue they want to get the cost from the public from our volunteers so that the police can be funded in that way and we do not agree with that. At the Law and Order Committee there were so many submissions to the select committee that strongly rejected this particular bill. Most of those who made oral submissions to the select committee—who represented a cross-section of charitable and non-profit organisations providing valuable community services and voluntary services in New Zealand—are against this bill. They are against the fact that they should be paying the police for vetting. For the safety of our children—our vulnerable children—we need our police. You know earlier on this year about 2 or 3 months ago the new Mayor in Auckland His Worship Phil Goff and I convened a meeting when he was still the MP for Mt Roskill. We invited the police to come to this meeting in South Auckland. The reason why we convened this meeting was that we have so many dairies so many service stations so many of our small businesses in South Auckland that have been experiencing robbery and physical assaults mainly because a lot of these folks were stealing cigarettes liquor and various other items like that. The feedback that we got from the hundreds who attended this meeting from the small-business owners was that they themselves do not feel safe. When they actually reach out to the police the time that it takes our police force to come to assist them is a very long time and as for the resolution of crime for these small-business owners—many of them do not even hear back from the police. Robberies have risen tremendously—by over 13 percent. Attacks on individuals—assaults—have gone up 9 percent and it saddens me to hear that in my electorate in Counties Manukau assaults have gone up 27 percent. We need our police to be funded well enough so that they are able to do well the job that they do and we need them to continue to be able to do things including vetting of our volunteers. The growing violence does not affect just small-business owners; we also heard at this public meeting a lot of people telling us—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to interrupt the member now. I have been indicating to her that she should speak to the bill. The member can make passing reference to other matters not passing reference to the bill.JENNY SALESA: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. Vetting as I said earlier on is a core service for the benefit of the public. The public have a right to know that their children going off to schools and off to kindies are not surrounded by convicted paedophiles and those are the sorts of things that the police in terms of their vetting process actually do. We do not agree with this user-pays system which police will expect our volunteers and our members of the public to use. Can this current Government guarantee in this particular bill that in future other core crime prevention services would not also suddenly be revealed by re-evaluation as purely a private good and not a public good? We do not think that this particular bill guarantees that. The Government should stop standing by while the Police continue to be underfunded and under-resourced. This Government should allocate the resources that are needed to prevent crime and to stop crime rates rising. Labour has promised 1000 more police in our first term in Government to crack down on crimes and to make our communities safer and Labour strongly opposes this bill. Thank you very much."