Mitchell MarkHon MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. It's a pleasure to take a call on this the Corrections Amendment Bill. It is unusual—and I just want to acknowledge the Minister—that in the Minister's opening speech to the House we didn't really hear much about rehabilitation. I know that he's committed to rehabilitation. I think the whole House recognises that within our criminal justice system and within the corrections system rehabilitation is a critical part of the solution—being able to get people out of prison and integrated and having successful lives back in the community again. I don't understand at all—and maybe one of the speakers after me can stand up and explain it because the Minister didn't—why the clauses around rehabilitation have been taken out of the bill. This was a critically important part of this bill. This Government's funny. When this Government came into power they very quickly congratulated themselves on a lowering of the prison numbers and yet every other metric that goes wrong gets blamed on the Opposition. Now we're starting to see the numbers rise again. I would put it to the Minister that they've become so obsessed on numbers and releasing people and getting them out of prison and transferring the risk back into the community that actually they're losing focus on what really matters and what really matters is around rehabilitation. It's around identifying the best way to be able to rehabilitate people and get them back into the community. The other puzzling thing about this bill is that they've taken out the flexibility that was going to be provided around using police station cells. You know from experience myself there's a big cell block at the Auckland Central Police Station. It was always underutilised. It used to be staffed by police jailers and it probably still is. But actually if you had pressure on corrections facilities it gave you the flexibility to be able to treat that as a corrections facility—to actually be able to use cells and give prisoners their own cells. For whatever reason you've decided with this bill to remove that and take away the ability to have that flexibility inside the system. Why would you do that? It seems counterintuitive because what you're saying is that you're backing yourself to be able to lower the numbers. What if you don't? What if you don't lower the numbers? DEPUTY SPEAKER: I'd ask the speaker not to bring me into the conversation. Hon MARK MITCHELL: Sorry Madam Deputy Speaker. You're right and I apologise. So I put this proposition to you because the Minister again talked about criminal justice reform. We haven't seen any indication yet in terms of where the criminal justice reform is going. We've had the conference that you put on that had a massive cost blowout and brought people together that were already actually talking with justice and the justice sector. We're now 18 months into this Government. We still have no indication as to what's happening with these reforms. The only indications that we have had were very early on with the repeal of the three-strikes legislation which of course they realised was deeply unpopular with the public and they had to move away from that. Their own Labour justice Minister got thrown under the bus by their coalition partner. The only other indication that we've had is a weakening around sentencing bail and parole laws and if that's what's going to happen then quite simply you're going to be releasing back into the community more people that should actually be in jail that should be getting rehabilitated and that are a risk to the community. We are going to have a tragedy. That's going to happen. I can predict it right here and now if that's the road that you're choosing to go down in your reforms to the criminal justice system. The Minister actually admitted it—he said most of this bill was put together by the Hon Louise Upston. Could I acknowledge her and the work that she did as the Minister of Corrections. She was deeply passionate about the work that was undergone. But if your idea of reform is to come back to this House and tell us that you are going to weaken our bail sentencing and parole laws and that what you're prepared to do as a Government is transfer that risk back into the community then we're not going to support that. If you come back to this House and you show that there's been some thoughtful reform done in our criminal justice system and we can see the benefit of it then I assure the Minister that we will support that. But up until now we've seen no indications we don't know what work's going on and like I said we're now starting to head towards the middle of the second year. So I'd expect to see something come through shortly. Thank you very much Madam Deputy Speaker.