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AGENDA
Presented by RAWDON CHRISTIE
RAWDON A 17 year old youth has been charged after a dairy proprietor was stabbed in the Auckland suburb of Avondale on Friday, while in South Auckland another dairy proprietor is himself facing charges after he was stabbed and retaliated against a youth who tried to rob his shop. These stabbings are set against the background of a fatal attack on an insurance manager in the central city last week after he intervened in a domestic dispute. You might have thought this is s situation made for the Opposition but in an editorial on Friday the New Zealand Herald described National's response as having recently said nothing much on crime. So here to debate law and order are Labour's Corrections Minister Phil Goff, and National's Law and Order spokesman Simon Power, they're with Guyon.
LAW AND ORDER
GUYON ESPINER
Well Phil Goff let's start with you. Thirty years ago when I was seven years old I used to walk to school unaccompanied, about a 20 minute walk, in 2008 would you recommend to a parent that their children could do that?
PHIL GOFF – Minister of Corrections
I think in most areas people can still do that, if you look at the crime rate from 30 years ago you'll find that on the statistics the crime rate per head of population hasn’t changed a heck of a lot, it went up very sharply in the 1970s and 80s, went down from the late 90s but I think all parents obviously take a sensible position and make a judgement about the safety of their children.
GUYON So are we unnecessarily afraid?
PHIL The people who worry most about crime are the ones who are least likely to be victims of it, that’s what all the statistics tell us. If you're an older person you do worry more about crime, but actually it's the younger people that are more often the victims of crime. The people in wealthier areas will worry more about crime but it's the people in the more disadvantaged areas more often victims of it.
GUYON Simon Power is it just perception, I mean when you talk to the academics and the criminologists they tell us as Mr Goff has said that the homicide rate for example when you take out the population changes has roughly been static for decades.
SIMON Well there's been 54 murders this year, that’s slightly more than one a week and the crime statistics that were released earlier this week show us that violent crime as a general category has increased by 46% over the last nine years, so the people out there who are feeling less safe are doing so with good reason because violent crime is on the rise.
GUYON Phil Goff that’s a source of shame surely, 58,000 violent offences in New Zealand last year according to your crime statistics, a thousand a week.
PHIL Well any violent crime is one too many, let's make that absolutely clear but what Simon didn’t mention but I'm sure he read in the Police Commissioner's statement was that the rate of crime actually dropped 1% this last year as it has dropped every year since the late 1990s. Simon mentions the number of murders but he knows last year was the lowest level of murders in a decade, he knows that over 20 years the level of murders hasn’t changed it's been hovering around the 50 mark with a 100 homicides if you count the wider definition, but any one murder is too many, but any politician that for example says that he can do something that would have stopped that random murder in High Street last week is either a fool or a liar because clearly we don’t control that.
GUYON Simon Power is that what you have to say?
SIMON Well what I'm saying actually is that I was really surprised with legislation on the books prior to parliament rising for the year to deal with sentencing to deal with gangs to deal with domestic violence and to deal with taking assets and money from organised crime was left untouched going into the general election while the government pushed through urgency on bills such as the Public Authors Bill which I'm sure is noble legislation but actually it's not what's on the minds of New Zealanders today, and I think what we've seen is the prioritisation of the government to deal with these issues. Frankly I was astounded that these matters which had national support weren't put to the parliament before it rose at the end of the year.
PHIL Well let me comment on that, that was a matter of house management in the sense that to get urgency we needed the support of another political party for a legislation across the board and didn’t have the support of that party for that legislation, but if we're gonna talk about the effectiveness of legislation Simon you realise that in 2000 I changed the bail law to make it much tougher, you realise that in 2002 I changed the sentencing law and the parole law, the consequences of which we have 71% more people in prison than we had at the start of this decade – nobody can claim that the law has not been toughened or that the government has been soft on law and order.
SIMON Phil since you were the Minister something else has happened in that three year intervention and that is that you have changed the bail laws again to make it easier to get bail, a move that everybody in the parliament supported. You can talk about when you were Minister of Justice but the fact is in the last three years your government has been consumed with reducing the prison population not with public safety.
PHIL Well let me answer those points immediately Guyon, firstly the bail law has not been softened and there's a High Court judgement that I've given you that you know says exactly the opposite to what you’ve claimed. Secondly if the law had been softened why is there 3,300 more people in prison than when I became a member of this government, a 71% increase which shows very clearly not only have the laws been toughened but since 199 when the Police budget was being cut and Police numbers were being cut we've put 2,500 additional Police staff on the books, more Police, tougher laws and more early intervention work to deal with the causes of crime.
GUYON Let's pick you up on that Minister because in August 2006 you announced your early interventions package, it was going to be a major change to the criminal justice system, you were talking about having fewer people in prison keeping lesser offenders out of prison, has that reduced the prison population.
PHIL The prison population has remained relatively stable over the last year, it's I think approximately 400 down from where it was last year but it is three or four thousand up on where it was in 1999.
GUYON What I think viewers need to know is what sort of offences are being committed where people would have once gone to gaol and are not.
PHIL Okay, the areas where the sentences are much longer, people are being sentenced to longer sentences and they're serving a much greater percentage of their sentence, they're in the area of serious offending. What we're trying to do is deal with – we're trying to keep people out of prison obviously where they're first time offenders.
GUYON What sort of offences…
PHIL I'm telling you – the judge makes a decision as to whether the person and the offence are such that it justifies a prison sentence or whether they can be kept on home detention on electronic monitoring, so that will be a range of different sentences, but in every case….
GUYON Will you tell the public Minister what sort of offences?
PHIL I've told you there's a range of offences but the judge makes the decision and the judge's decision is this Guyon, if the judge believes that the person is not safe to be in the community they’ll be put in prison and they are put in prison and they're being put in prison in much higher levels than was the case a decade ago.
GUYON Simon Power do you think that there are people who are not going to prison who should be under this scheme?
SIMON Yes I believe there are, look the Effective Interventions Package that you described its primary driver was reducing the prison population, changes to sentencing, parole and bail that were included in the Criminal Justice Law Reform Bill last year had that as the number one overriding principle in the explanatory note to the bill. What we've seen with home detention since 2001, 2002 is that half of the people on home detention are there for offences relating to either violence sex or drugs, sexual offending or drug related offences, that’s up from about 39% of those people. if you're gonna use home detention as an effective sentence and I believe there is room for it, I want to make that clear, National actually introduced the sentence in the 90s, it has to be aimed at the appropriate people and our biggest concern about using home detention widely is that the public can be put at risk if it's used for the wrong purpose.
GUYON Last time you were on this show though Simon Power you acknowledged that your changes to bail laws and strengthening some sentences would actually lead National to have to build a new prison.
SIMON That’s right.
GUYON That doesn’t get us anywhere really does it because we're told that half of all inmates are reconvicted within a couple of years of leaving prison.
SIMON About 42% that’s right.
GUYON That doesn’t actually get us anywhere does it?
SIMON Well in the end it depends where your priority is and if your priority is public safety as the number one priority, not the reduction of the prison population, actually you have to make some moves. I also said on that programme I'd be surprised if any government after the next election didn’t have to build another prison to deal with the prison population problem.
PHIL There'll be more prisons because the estimates are that the prison population will continue to rise, what we're saying is that those people that need to be in prison they're spending much longer there, the Parole Board for example are declining 72% of applications, under Simon's government they were declining only half. We have 3,300 people in prison, more people in prison than in 1999, a 71% increase. We have one of the highest prison populations in the western world.
GUYON Why is that, we've got the fifth highest rate of imprisonment in the developed world, are we the fifth most lawless people in the world?
PHIL No we're not, our crime rate is roughly the equivalent of that in the United Kingdom, Australia or Canada, our imprisonment rate is much higher, that is because our laws are tougher and that is because our Police if you look at their statistics on crime resolution are much more effective at resolving crime.
GUYON Do you accept that Simon Power? The Minister's saying that Police are better and our laws are actually tougher.
SIMON Well actually it's because we're committing more violent crime that our prison population's going up. Well the Corrections Department had that in an incoming briefing note to you Minister in 2007. It's pretty clear to us that what's happening is as more violent crime is being committed and we're talking about some pretty staggering percentage increases here, more people are going to prison. Now Phil Goff gets around the place very proudly saying he makes no apologies for that and frankly that’s great from that perspective, the problem is in the last three years his government has decided that that wasn’t the right way to move and that reducing the prison population was the number one priority on their books, it's in direct contrast the statements that we hear from Mr Goff regularly in the media and a most curious dilemma.
PHIL I can tell Simon that the prison population over time will continue to go up it won't go down but what we're trying to do is stop people going in on lesser offending, low risk to the community where going to prison puts them in an environment where they're likely to be in a tertiary institution for crime, we don’t want to do that.
GUYON That’s quite clear. I just want to talk about gangs for a minute or so. Minister, a decade in power now you're talking about banning gangs, it's a pretty last minute … isn't it?
PHIL Let me tell you a few things about gangs. Last year there were 26,000 charges brought by the Police against gangs – gang members and associate members. There were 190 clam labs busted, we've made methamphetamine a Class A drug with a potential life sentence.
GUYON Why are you now just weeks before an election talking about banning gangs?
PHIL No we're not weeks before the election.
SIMON Well we are actually.
PHIL The most draconian piece of legislation before parliament is the Criminal Proceeds Recovery Bill which I introduced …
SIMON Why didn’t we pass it then?
PHIL Because the Select Committee has taken a long time over that Simon.
SIMON No it's been back since August last year why didn’t we pass it?
PHIL Yes I know but you took a very long time over it, that strips gangs of the proceeds of crime, that’s not new, that’s something that I began working on and has been progressed to the point where it's now ready to pass through parliament. We've got the Organised Crime Bill that Annette King brought that doubles the sentence for being a member of an organised criminal gang. Why we've looked at the Australian legislation now is because just this last month Australia brought it into effect and we will see how it works we'll work to improve that legislation and bring it in here.
GUYON Okay when you look at that South Australian model it says that courts can act on Police advice to declare gangs to be criminal organisations. I mean isn't it pretty obvious, I mean the Mongrel Mob is that a criminal organisation?
PHIL Well what the Australians are doing and I've talked very closely obviously …
GUYON Is the Mongrel Mob a criminal organisation?
PHIL Oh many of the chapters of the Mongrel Mob would absolutely fit that definition, if not all.
GUYON Simon Power what would National do, would you actually try to ban gangs?
SIMON Well I think it's actually a step in the right direction quite frankly and we'll look at anything that works to do exactly that.
GUYON I've gotta leave it now, but over to Rawdon and the panel.
RAWDON Thanks Guyon, there's a lot on the table there so Andrew do you want to start off?
ANDREW HOLDEN – Christchurch Press
Yeah thanks Rawdon, to be honest on this particular issue I don’t know why we'd bother voting in November because we may as well let these two share the Ministry I mean they are doing the same thing, more Police, longer sentences, tougher sentencing, more prisons, there will be more people in prison, that’s the solution let's just effectively follow a conservative path. Simon is that it, is that all we can offer our community with a bit of luck, with more cops, more prisons, longer sentences, we might keep the crime rate at about 1% better or worse and that’s all there is?
SIMON No that’s not all there is, the series of questions that were put to us took us down that path, but we've made very clear that in the youth crime area and in particularly the prevention of crime area we're putting quite a focus there, it was the focus of John Key's major speech at the start of this year, and you could expect if there was a change of government in four and a half weeks' time to see a new National led government move very swiftly on legislation in that area, as well as areas around on the spot protection orders for matters of domestic violence, to deal swiftly with issues surrounding gangs, their surveillance and the like, we've got actually a very tight legislative package planned.
ANDREW Can you give us a sense of what sort of commitment you're talking about in terms of those youth offenders, I mean you know the last term we've had a thousand more Police, are we talking about – can you give us some specifics, are we talking about 500 more staff who will concentrate on youth offending to stop it at the source?
SIMON You can expect in about 12 days time for John Key to release our Police policy with a specific emphasis on both South Auckland and on youth crime. There is about a thousand hard core youth offenders, as Judge Andrew Becroft, Chief Youth Court Judge would describe them, but that is where the most need should be focused in the short term because it's those individuals, a group actually that I've gotta tell you worryingly with these crime stats that came out this week shows that 10 to 13 year olds committing violent crime has risen 16% in the last year, that’s gotta be the focus if we're going to talk about real prevention, and so you could expect to see some quite marked differences between us and the government on proactive moves in those areas.
PHIL Can I answer your question too Andrew please. Look getting tough on crime on one side is about having adequate policing and tough enough laws but those things by themselves will never be enough, that’s why you have to look at addressing the causes of crime and there's been a lot that’s been happening in that area, but no interest in the media in reporting it, perhaps with the honourable exception of the Christchurch Press that ran a very good series on it. But look if we're gonna make our society safer locking more and more people up will only take us so far, we've got to do things like early intervention, we've brought in programmes like Family Start, we've doubled the amount of money going into intensive home visiting for children in dysfunctional families, those are the kids that we know by age three will have their character set. We've done a lot of things in the prisons as well, for example we've opened up six drug and alcohol rehabilitation centres. We know that 80% of those people who commit crimes are drug or alcohol addicted and we've made some really good progress in that area, we've cut the reoffending by people by 13% who have been through these drug and alcohol centres. There is literacy programmes, we've moved from 40 to 60% of people in prison actually being in work…
RAWDON` So why have we still got an increase in violent crime?
PHIL Because Rawdon as you'll understand well, when you're dealing with early intervention, when you're dealing with working with young people, when you're dealing with tackling the problem of youth gangs there is a time lag between what you do and the effect of that. The three year olds we're dealing with no, if we're effective will show through in the crime figures in 15 years time.
BERNARD HICKEY – www.interest.co.nz
Simon what would a National government do about the P epidemic which everyone I listen to says is at the core of the rise in violent crime and the crisis in our High Courts.
SIMON I think both those points are right, I think there's two things that you can move to do pretty swiftly, one is there is no doubt that there is a link between gang activity and the availability and manufacturer and supply of P in New Zealand, and so for that reason some of the matters that I outlined earlier are going to become critical, and that’s why we along with the government, the Labour Party, are watching very closely what's happening in South Australia with respect to the banning of gangs. I also think there's another point in this, and that is the availability of the precursor ingredients to manufacture P. what we know from under the Official Information Act got documents that went to Cabinet on this point is that it was pushed to one side. Now the availability of pseudoephedrine is a real concern and the ingredients to build P need to be the target of much more focus. Now our Customs people by and large do a very good job on that front, domestically we have to ask how available these ingredients should be.
BERNARD But at the core of the issue is prohibition on this sort of drug working?
SIMON Well I think the crime stats actually show that there was a slight reduction in that area and moves to stamp out P are going to be absolutely crucial to getting those rates of violent crime. It is without a doubt one of the biggest evils the country's seen in a long time with respect to the committing of violent crimes.
BERNARD Why don’t our politicians take a broader view and start debating the fundamental issue of is prohibition on these drugs working?
PHIL Can I answer that – we actually quite agree on that – prohibition is absolutely essential you just cannot allow a drug like methamphetamine to be dished out to people when you know that it makes them aggressive, it makes them commit irrationally violent acts. We're working at it from two sides, one is cutting off supply and we've knocked over 1200 clam labs since 2001, so the Police have been very active, we've got Customs Corrections and Police working together, it's intelligence led, we're stopping a lot of the stuff coming across the border, we're even monitoring every conversation that comes out of the prison by the pay phone to get intelligence levels on how you stop what the gangs are doing, but the other side of it is harder, it's about trying to reduce the demand, how to you get the message across particularly to young people that experimenting with drugs like methamphetamine is going to have a good chance of creating absolute misery in their lives and we've gotta work on that side as well, we're doing a lot more in drug education, we're doing a lot more in drug rehabilitation as well as trying to suppress the supply of the drug.
RAWDON Can I just ask you guys, it seems that you're meeting on a lot of issues around law and order is this why Simon Power we haven’t heard a lot from the National Party about law and order in the run up to this election?
SIMON Well I find that an extraordinary statement given that in the last two and a half years there have been over 500 media releases from us in this area.
RAWDON How significant an election issue is this for you on your list of …
SIMON Oh look I think it is number one equal with the economy if not number two.
PHIL Let me say something in defence of Simon, it's very hard for him in the position where the National government had a track record of cutting Police numbers to complain about two and a half thousand less Police, very hard for a government that did nothing for nine years to complain about the fact there's new bail laws, sentencing laws, parole laws. I suspect that Simon's position on a lot of these issues isn't a lot different from what the government has been doing, everybody knows there's no silver bullet answer to crime, it's on one hand preventing crime by tackling the causes, it's on the other hand being tough on crime, but when you’ve got the level of imprisonment we've got it's very hard for Simon Power to say that his government's gonna spend another billion dollars …
SIMON We won't overspend like you did Phil don’t worry, we won't blow the budget on building prisons.
PHIL Remember Simon which government paid off all of New Zealand debt we're actually at a net positive record on that one.
RAWDON Alright guys, Phil Goff, Simon Power thank you both very much for coming in this morning.
