Davis Kelvin: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDavis Kelvin: General Debate[Sitting date: 29 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5440. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Ka nui ngā mihi atu ki a tātou katoa e w’akahuatia ana i tō tatou Reo rangatira kei roto i te Whare nei.[Huge congratulations to us all for mentioning our esteemed language in this House here before us.]There is a joke going around about the reason why Sam Lotu-Iiga is called the Minister of Corrections and it is that he is having to correct mistake after mistake after mistake. It shows a man who has a very limited time as a Minister because he is no longer taken seriously and is instead becoming the butt of jokes. Why on earth would anybody want to privatise anything? We have had Minister Tolley here today defending—or not even able to say that the Government will not engage Serco in any more contracts. Keep Serco away from our kids—that is the message I have. It cannot be allowed to go anywhere near our children. It has made such a stuff-up in the prisons.Contraband in Mt Eden prison is so easy to come by. Drugs—I mean nobody would really be surprised if a little bit of cannabis was found in a prison. But we do not have a little bit of cannabis being found in Mt Eden Corrections Facility; we have a full-scale meth ring being organised out of Mt Eden Corrections Facility. Tobacco—I am told that a 50 gram pouch of tobacco is worth $800 on the inside. A packet of cigarettes is worth $1000. Weapons are brought in with barely any check and I believe that in terms of cellphones there are so many cellphones in Mt Eden Corrections Facility that the inmates are considering setting up their own call centre. And I believe the dysfunction in Serco is so great that the inmates are considering contracting Serco to run their call centre but then they have got more brains than that because they know that anything that Serco touches is doomed to failure and they would not bother with that. I believe that you can get anything in Mt Eden Corrections Facility at the right price and I believe that for the right price you can even get some of the hidden texts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership from inmates in Serco prisons.The fight clubs—we have all seen the videos of the fight clubs. How that was able to go on under the National Government’s nose for so long? We had Minister Tolley saying: “Oh we’ve known about fight clubs for yonks.” Well if those members had known about it for yonks why did they not do something about it? They were able to hide a riot in May of last year. They downgraded the language so that it was called a prop. Well I have heard of props only when you are talking about rugby players. They have downgraded a riot where the crisis response team from Pāremoremo had to come in and quell things down and where prisoners had barricaded themselves in cells but this was not a riot; this was a prop.Then there is the issue of people being thrown off balconies. We heard the Minister say today in the House that he heard of a report about the incident involving Alex Littleton only in the last week. Well Alex Littleton was thrown off that balcony on 2 February of this year. But let me tell you a bit about what happened. Ray Smith pre-empted the report that is going to come out. He said there is so much attention being paid to this case that he better pre-empt it. In his press release he said that Alex Littleton was chased by one other inmate and he fell. He fell over a balcony. Well I ask anybody how on earth do you fall up and over a balcony? It seems like the law of Serco is greater than the law of gravity. Alex Littleton hit the ground and with two broken legs dragged himself in front of a glass guardhouse where the inmates who had thrown him over—four inmates not one inmate—came down and started kicking him and bashing him and the solitary guard intervened only when he was getting his head stomped on.The ratio of guards to prisoners should be about 1:15. Instead in Serco is about 1:50. If we want to know why it is that people can bring in contraband and why all these things can go on in the prison it is because Serco is cutting costs because it wants to give its stakeholders a profit. It is cutting costs on the staff and that in turn is not only endangering other staff but also endangering inmates there. If we do not address this prison violence it is going to spill out into the community and we are going to see more community violence. Kia ora.