McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): I feel sorry for those blokes getting out of bed on the wrong side every morning year after year after year. It is a pleasure for me to have the opportunity to speak briefly on the legislation that was the Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill which is now split into three different bills. I suppose if you were a minimalist you would say we have got rid of one piece of legislation and we have tacked some amendments on to three others which from this perspective is a pretty good thing. The legislation will make a couple of key differences to what goes on in New Zealand. Much has been talked about already in this respect but it will give offenders being monitored a much better chance of successfully reintegrating into society. If they are let out into the community and they are in some way or other monitored and they know that they are controlled or that people understand where they are at I think we will be much better off and they will be better off. I think it will give them a better chance as they go through that process of not reoffending and of reintegrating into society and into the workforce. It also makes a contribution to public safety by putting a boundary on the offenders that they will respect by at times protecting victims and at other times by restricting movement. There are a lot of options that this legislation gives the Department of Corrections and gives the courts as to the manner in which they implement it. It is positive legislation. It is a small piece of legislation but like many other bits of legislation the Government has put in place around law and order in the last 8 or so years it will make a difference. The two differences I have just spoken about are two of those. At the moment there are about 4000 people on electronic monitoring around New Zealand. It costs about $3500 per person so in that respect Mahesh Bindra the last speaker was right—it saves us about $90000-odd if you do not lock them up. From my perspective I think that is a very positive thing for New Zealand. It is very positive for our communities and as I said earlier it does help reintegrate those prisoners in a much better and more stable manner. The other thing I just want to talk briefly about—and this has been raised by a couple of speakers—is the concern around the technology. The advances in technology that we are seeing not only in law and order of course but right across our community are immense. Inevitably as we introduce technology and use different forms of technology for monitoring or for whatever else we might use it for there are always going to be challenges around that. The Law and Order Committee did have an opportunity to go and visit the company that manages this technology for the Department of Corrections. I think like any other technology that is being introduced into a system there will always be some challenges around it but we were quite impressed with the way it works. We got to understand how it operates and what that technology enables the Department of Corrections to do. To get back to the point that two Labour speakers made I think our major objective—in fact the Green speaker Mojo Mathers made the same point—is to get these people who are being electronically monitored back into the workforce and back into our community and allow them to reintegrate into our community without reoffending. With those few words I commend these bills to the House.