I made my first visit to a South Island  prison,  the Otago Correctional Facility, also known by some locals, (who clearly have not been there) as the Milton Hilton.  I found some positive and progressive innovations being piloted by committed and hard working people, but this work  hampered as ever by our chronic underinvestment in long term solutions both inside the wire and in the communities into which  inmates are eventually released.

I spent  time at Otago Polytech and was impressed by some excellent examples of a tertiary institute partnering with business, applying the research and development capacity of staff and students to support real world efforts to design and manufacture green tech products suited to both New Zealand and international markets.

The primary purpose of my visit however was to engage with SMEs (small and medium enterprises),  to speak to and ( more importantly) to listen to business people who are working to improve their own sustainability, contributing to their own future wellbeing and to the long term viability and resilience of our regional and  national economies.

One of the leaders of our Green team in the South, Dave Kennedy, has blogged about some of the fun we had. It seems we even managed to persuade a local right wing blogger that it is possible for a Green MP to display signs of rationality – who knew?!

The Tiwai smelter has of course been at the forefront of many peoples’ minds, and I have found a lot of support for the idea that while negotiations and debate about the future of the smelter will continue, a great deal more effort needs to be applied to looking for alternative sources of employment and economic activity to supplement or in time replace the region’s over- reliance on too few industries.

Fortunately there is a very useful background document that can inform this thinking and future planning, a 2012 Berl report commissioned by WWF, entitled ‘A View to the South : Potential Low Carbon Opportunities for the Southern Region Economies’.

This excellent report focuses on options and scenarios that play to the region’s strengths, and on industries where the South already has a comparative advantage.  While many of the challenges are national and indeed global, the solutions and future well being are likely to come from locally derived strategies that will contribute to a richer and more prosperous New Zealand.

The Bill is a shabby piece of lawmaking, which among other things will further embed private management of prisons; will change the strip search regime in a way almost guaranteed to make prisoner – prison officer relations more fraught and so more likely to lead to violence; will allow for the denial of the minimum entitlement prisoners currently have of one hour of exercise per day, and will do other unhelpful things.

The Bill got even shabbier when we saw an S.O.P (a proposed amendment) presented by the Minister late on Tuesday, with no forewarning to opposition parties.  The amendment is intended to make a retrospective change to the law, to cover the government’s tracks in regard to the smoking ban the then Minister Collins imposed about 18 months ago, without any legal authority.

The government is deeply embarrassed to have lost a High Court case brought by an inmate at Paremoremeo prison (who is a non-smoker, as it happens), where Justice Gilbert stated unequivocally  that the ban  declared by the Minister was “unlawful, invalid, and of no effect”.

The inmate who brought the case to Court put out a release yesterday pointing out that “The government’s hypocrisy is mind-blowing.  It imprisons about 9000 people for lawbreaking [the average prison muster at any given time is 8500 - 9000], yet it demonstrates an abject disregard for the rule of law itself – a case of do as I say, not as I do”.

You would have to say, he’s got a point.  As I highlighted in a speech last night, government members are fond of saying that it is ok to transgress prisoners’ basic rights because that is part of the consequence of their offending.  But when the government itself  has broken the law, it is ok to retrospectively change the law to avoid the potential consequences?

The Court has been around since 1980, and a review of the activities and processes of such an institution is not in itself a bad thing.  The changes being proposed however have set major alarm bells ringing, and we are opposing the bill. We believe that potentially it makes  vulnerable parents and children less safe; creates serious financial and other barriers to  access to the Court, and will in the long run increase rather than reduce social and economic costs.

Our opposition to the Bill is shared by Labour, the Maori Party, and Mana. NZ First have supported the Bill, but made it very clear that there will need to be significant changes made if their support is to continue beyond first reading.

According to the Minister in charge of the Bill;

“The changes in the bill respond to widespread concerns that the court is not able to focus enough on the most serious cases, has processes that are difficult to understand, and has seen its costs greatly increase in recent years. The cost of running the Family Court grew 70 percent, from $84 million in 2004-5 to $142 million in 2010-11. This increase in cost is despite application numbers remaining comparatively stable.”

The real reasons for the cost increase require closer investigation, but one way the reform  seeks to cut costs is by reducing the involvement of lawyers in the Courts’ processes.  Once again quoting the Minister :

“Lawyers for parties will attend care of children proceedings in which they are needed. Lawyers do not need to be involved in the initial stages, except for urgent cases. This reform is designed to give family members the opportunity to resolve their disputes themselves, with the assistance of the judge. But if a case proceeds to a defended hearing, parties may choose to have a lawyer.”

The bill as drafted significantly reduces the right of lawyers to appear in the family court.  Putting aside the lawyer jokes and some of the less favourable perceptions of that much maligned profession, we need to ask how it can be a good idea to oblige lay people who are already under stress, and in some cases living  in dangerous situations, to endeavour to navigate their way through a complex legal environment.

At the moment applicants to the Court can choose to represent themselves.

“Although it is rarely advised, you can elect to represent yourself in Court, rather than engage a lawyer to act for you. You must still follow all the rules of the Court and the Court’s practices and procedures”.

That statement comes from the Family Court website,  along with other cautionary advice to ‘self-litigants‘.   “A self litigant is a person who chooses to appear in Court ‘for themselves’ and is not represented by a lawyer. It is not as simple as it might sound. All the rules of the Court, and the Court’s processes and procedures, must still be followed. This requires a substantial understanding of the legal process.” (italics added by me)

So you, a member of your family, a friend, while in the middle of a messy and difficult relationship break up and trying to do the best for any children involved, might be obliged to ‘self-litigate’, despite the obvious ‘warnings’ against such a course of action by the Ministry of Justice.

You can have a say about this bill via a petition , and by making a submission (before closing date of February 13th) to the select committee.

Dole has been on notice that its so-called ‘ethical choice’  label is misleading.  A consumer might reasonably believe that it indicated that some third party verification proved that the fruit was in some way ‘ethical’ in the way that Fair Trade certified products are.  The ethical choice label used by Dole is in fact just that, a label, with little in the way of genuine underpinning or substance.

This apparent case of greenwash is not only confusing for consumers, it also undermines the considerable investment and commitment of  genuine third party certified distributors like All Good bananas .  All Good product is more expensive than some others, because they pay growers a fair price, and ensure that everyone along the production and distribution chain is treated decently and honestly. (Disclosure : one of the principals of All Good is a personal friend of mine, and a sustainability hero, so please do your own investigation to see that I’m not making stuff up!). 

So what has this to do with New Zealand’s place in the world?  There has been a furore this week following the publication of an article in the New York Times, where the ‘reality’ of New Zealand’s clean green image is challenged.  Kiwi ecologist Mike Joy has been vilified by some for daring to speak out about the divergence between the image and the reality.

Some may think that if you don’t like the message, the solution is to shoot the messenger.  But there is too much at stake for that.  Our export of primary produce, our tourism industry, our economic and social wellbeing, all rely heavily on the quality of our natural environment.  We do live in a stunningly beautiful country, and can legitimately make some claims associated with that.  But if we oversell the brand, if we make claims we cannot substantiate, if we cannot present an authentic value proposition, then we will be found out and the consequences would be severe.

No-one actually expects us to be 100%, no-one realistically expects perfection, but while we are so far short of that standard, and in danger of moving further away from it, then our ‘brand’  is in major trouble.  Let’s continue to celebrate the good, while acknowledging and working to remedy our shortcomings.  Let’s put our energy and efffort into cleaning it up, not covering it up.

I remember my first visit to the unit, hosted by Prison Fellowship director Robin Gunston.  The overwhelming impression was of the inmates being without exception engaged in some useful activity, with a sense of purpose.  This was in marked contrast to the atmosphere common to many other prison wings, where boredom and a sense of just marking time is the norm.

The Corrections Department has historically not been an easy place for NGOs to operate.  Some questionable methodologies have been applied to evaluate the success or otherwise of various initiatives from the community sector.  Similarly, the bar for proving ‘value for money’  of  ‘third party’ initiatives seems to be set much higher than for evaluating ‘internal’ programmes or initiatives.

What is crucial to resolving our shamefully high recidivist rate is recognising that working  with individual prisoners and endeavouring to alter their behaviour is necessary, but not sufficient.  The other side of the equation is the need to locate those individuals within a wider social context, to seek to acknowledge and remove the barriers to reintegration that are beyond the control of the released inmate.

The faith based unit was designed to affect change in inmates’ attitude and understanding while they completed their sentences, to give them some self-management tools, and then to continue to provide practical support and guidance post-release.

Corrections claim it wasn’t working.  I look forward to with interest  to seeing what strategies the Department comes up with and puts in place that will work better.

I don’t agree with the Minister’s proposition that perhaps it is time to take the cameras out of our courtrooms, but the argument for continued open and unfettered access to judicial processes becomes harder to sustain, the longer we see it being misused, and the criminal justice system turned into a sideshow.

John Bowie in the NBR (21/9/12) argues that the practice, started in the 1990s, of  ‘sending cameras into court…was hardly going to “educate and inform” the public. They are there to open the nightly news with all the salacious sensation that [murder] trials engender’.

He may have a point.  Justice Andrew Tipping, New Zealand’s longest serving judge, recently retired from the Supreme Court, has expressed concern that ‘the quality of media coverage is impacting on the public’s perception of the court system’, and not in a good way.  Justice Tipping  said that ‘…the art of court reporting has not improved in my time on the bench [1986 - 2012].  I think it is largely because journalists are under extreme pressure and we are in a soundbite era…the country shouldn’t have to endure diminished confidence in the justice system due to bad reporting – that is unhealthy for society’ .

Television is of course not the only medium guilty of sensationalising or dumbing down the reporting of crime and judicial process.  Jeremy Rose on Mediawatch (September 16) captured the unease many people felt about all media, including television, print and radio, and the reporting of (among other things) the release from prison of Stuart Murray Wilson.  The endless and aggressive use of the ‘beast of Blenheim’ label served to fuel and even risked giving license to ‘vigilante action’, and lead to a situation ‘where the media moved from reporting the news, to helping to create it’.

New Zealanders are being misled, not only by the nature of reporting, but also by its sheer volume.  Research in 2008 showed that on average about 20% of the main TV news stories were about crime and about half were stories that dealt with either crime or disasters. A  comparison of the emphasis on crime and violent deaths in selected lead newspapers around the world showed New Zealand came third in the number of such stories.

This helps in large part to explain why so many New Zealander’s believe society is getting more dangerous, and crime is on the increase, despite the evidence that our crime rates are actually levelling off or trending down. The false perception creates fear and moral panic, and has played into the hands of the ‘lock ‘em up’ brigade, with their simplistic punitive ‘solutions’, calling for longer and tougher jail sentences.

We need an informed and rational discussion about how to reduce crime, enhance public safety, and restore confidence in the justice system.  Reversing the massive financial cost of imprisoning more people – a 250% increase in the last decade – would do us no harm either.

The media would do well to engage in an internal  debate, to collectively agree to some guidelines or standards about crime and justice related reporting, with a view to paring down the sensationalism, the soap opera, the cheap ‘tabloid’ type reporting that titillates but also potentially traumatises.

A voluntary code might require some effort and restraint, and for some people spoil the ‘fun’, but surely that is a better route than waiting for a present or future Minister to cry ‘enough’ and regulate or legislate much tighter boundaries?

In a pre-budget release, we learned that  $65 million of operating expenditure from Vote Corrections would be ‘reprioritised’ over four years in a way that we are told will reduce reoffending, reduce the prison muster, will provide more rehabilitation and reintegration services, and improve access to drug and alcohol addiction treatment.

Minister Tolley told us and I quote :”It’s time to get serious about breaking this vicious cycle of prison and reoffending.  Offenders need to be made accountable for their crimes.  But while they are in prison and upon their release, we must do more to rehabilitate, and then reintegrate, if they are to avoid a return to crime”

Actually it’s way past time to get serious;  we have for years been going backwards in Corrections policy and practice.  There has been an enormous social and human cost from the ‘tough on crime’ agenda that has obsessed successive governments for too long, as they accepted a wholly unfounded assumption that most New Zealanders want a punitive approach taken to crime rather than one that focused on real solutions and improving public safety.

The Corrections Minister went on to say “We know that two thirds of prisoners have addiction problems, and that up to 90 per cent can’t read or write well.  By seriously addressing these major contributors to crime, alongside increased employment opportunities, we can reduce the likelihood of reoffending.”

She might well have included other factors that research shows have landed too many people in prison over recent years – like mental illness, like a history of abuse, like suffering a head injury, like being hearing impaired

All of these are highly characteristic of our prison population, and it is only by addressing these and other causative factors that we can hope to dramatically reduce our prison population and break the downward spiral of offending and reoffending.

While I’m genuinely pleased to see the Minister indicate a change in direction, it is clear from an analysis of the numbers in this budget (among other things) that her colleagues are not yet persuaded to make the real structural changes that will deliver better social and economic outcomes.

A decade ago Vote Corrections sat at about $450 million, while this year we see an appropriation in excess of $1.1 billion dollars.

A 250% increase over a decade is wholly unsustainable, particularly when most of it has been so poorly applied or targeted that it has produced very little positive good and has done a great deal of measurable economic and social harm.

The challenge is to put in place a programme of ‘justice reinvestment’, to move away from spending on keeping more people in prison for longer, move away from throwing scarce money into concrete, steel and wire, and to spend instead on treating causes.

If we go down this path of investing, rather than wasting money and human potential, we will I am sure see a ‘multiplier effect’.  For years a vocal minority, aided by an often uncritical and compliant media, has fed the ‘tough on crime’ policy, while a large number of community organisations and individuals have quietly got on with the business of lending practical support and assistance to a whole host of rehabilitation and reintegration programmes.  Properly resourced, the volunteer and community sector could assist the government to gain a very high rate of return on every dollar invested. We don’t need to spend more money, we just have to spend more wisely, and over time the social and economic costs will come down.

The widely trumpeted $65 million ‘reprioritisation’, on average $16.25 million each year for four years, is a very small drop in a very large bucket.  While it will be a welcome addition to the sector if it is directed to real solutions, the total amount budgeted for rehabilitation and reintegration has in fact decreased from last year’s actual spend – only by a few tens of thousands, but a decrease nonetheless, and this is indicative of the Minister and this government having a long way to go if they are serious about delivering solutions rather than just perpetuating problems.

The old Auckland City and North Shore City councils had a largely chemical-free regime in place to manage roadside weeds, following many years of public concern and protest about the use of chemicals.

The weapon of choice in the other legacy councils was glyphosate, aka RoundUp.  Despite the protestations of its manufacturer Monsanto and others, independent research has linked Roundup to serious adverse effects on human health and the environment, including the aquatic and marine environments.

There is now a process underway that will decide whether the chemical-free policy and practice becomes the norm for the whole Supercity, or a return to the use of glyphosate becomes the default. 

The public’s opportunity to affect the outcome of that review might be limited.  It appears that the choice of methods – chemical or otherwise – is being reviewed and will be decided upon by Auckland Transport, the largest of the Council Controlled Organisations (CCOs), rather than by our democratically elected and accountable councillors.

To date very few coucillors seem to be aware of the issue, or have had an opportunity to hear from those who have concerns about going back to a regime that is known to have ill effects.  The local boards, I understand, will not get a say until after the first draft of a policy is completed by Auckland Transport, rather than having them involved in the process right from the beginning.

 There may be an assumption that chemicals are more effective and cheaper than organic and mechanical methods.  This is unproven as yet, and is a particularly dubious proposition if you factor in the likely associated costs to human health and environmental quality. 

North Shore City and the old Auckland City were not noticeably ‘weedier’ than other legacy councils, and to revert to chemical use despite years of protest and abundant evidence of harm would be a seriously retrograde step.

Now would be a good time to contact your councillors and local board members to make sure they are informed and active on the issue.    These processes otherwise have a habit of rolling along under the public’s radar.  There are a lot of battles to fight to protect human health and the environment, so we dont want to be revisiting old battlegrounds!

Listen in to Green Auckland on Planet FM next Monday at 9.05am (or any time after that via the archive)  to hear my interview with Dr Meriel Watts, an adviser to the Weed Management Advisory Group and a former consultant to the Auckland City Council on these issues, to get her take on the current situation.

It is not the first time that Digital Earth has come to New Zealand – Auckland hosted it in 2006, thanks largely to the efforts of Richard Simpson, who was at that time a city councillor – but it is a real feather in Wellington’s cap to have won hosting rights for a much sought after event. Apparently there was even some outfit called NASA in the running to play host!

“With a vision to harness the world’s data and information resources through international cooperation, the ISDE [International Society for Digital Earth] aims to establish a digital replication of our planet which will allow us to monitor, measure, and forecast natural and human activity on the planet.”

We are constantly bombarded with information, and the generation of new knowledge (or at least new information) proceeds at an extraordinary rate.  I have been excited about the potential of the Digital Earth project to utilise and make that knowledge more accessible, ever since the Auckland event that focused on issues of sustainability, defined at the time as ‘humankind’s collective survival goals’.

I am under no illusion that there is a technological silver bullet that will save us from ourselves in terms of challenges like climate change, resource depletion, peak oil, diversity loss.  Some of the information management and spatial technologies do however provide us with some powerful modelling, representational and analytical tools to inform our decision making and advocacy for behavioural change.

There could be significant economic spinoffs from the Summit too, as it provides an opportunity for New Zealand companies with a stake in the technologies and their application to demonstrate what they can do.  Companies like Right Hemisphere have proven that distance is not an insurmountable barrier to successful innovation in hi-tech , even in the highly competitive and demanding aviation industry.  I’m confident that the tourism sector will also work hard to see that the 500-odd delegates in town get a good taste of what Wellington and New Zealand have to offer!

The issue is not new, nor is it unique to New Zealand, but there is significant  potential for our retail sector (and the many thousands of people directly and indirectly employed within the sector) to take a big hit if the trend towards online shopping continues unabated.

On one side of the argument are claims of anti-competitive ‘price-gouging’  by local sellers, taking advantage of a captive market and so charging whatever the market will bear. Allowing consumers to purchase overseas, the argument goes, is a good way to ensure local suppliers are pricing goods fairly.

The other side of the equation however is that retailers routinely see people in their stores who inspect, try out, try on and generally inform themselves, using the retailers’ time and expertise, and then walk away from the store and buy online  straight out of an American wholesale warehouse with a dramatically different cost structure. 

I’ve personally heard people bragging of having spent time in local motorcycle accessory shops getting advise and taking advantage of the opportunity to inspect and compare goods on offer, then buying directly from the US or Australia. We all like a bargain, but one can question the ethics of such a practice, and the likelihood that in time we will simply drive the local suppliers out of business which doesn’t really help anyone’s cause.

Being a bit more diligent about applying GST to such purchases is only fair, according to retailers, both to level up the market a bit and to provide much needed funds to the government’s coffers.

It’s a tricky equation.  Retailers need to be on their game, making sure that the ‘shopping experience’ for in store customers is as positive as it can be.  Many of course are adapting, by offering both direct in store sales while also getting into the online game themselves (if you can’t beat ‘em…).

For consumers, there is the risk that if online purchases don’t measure up to expectations, getting refund or other recompense can be difficult, or not viable financially.

The political challenge is to find the right level of regulation to protect the legitimate concern of local business people and their employees, without denying people the right to make their own choices as consumers with access to a global marketplace.

Most of the time, they would be right.  Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly evident that in the case of people convicted or even accused of crimes, we are not meeting the standards that we should expect to be met in a liberal democracy.

Roger Brooking, the author of Flying Blind , has blogged recently about some of the brutal and degrading practices that are commonplace in our prisons.  Sleep deprivation, constantly repeated strip searches, inadequate physical and mental health care  - these are attributes most of us would ascribe to totalitarian regimes with no regard for human rights or the rule of law.

There is a Corrections Amendment bill currently before Parliament, and it would be nice to report that the law is moving towards more rather than less humane treatment of accused and convicted people, but unfortunately the reverse is true.

I recommend a look at the first reading speeches for this Bill, where Julie-Anne Genter and I spell out the reasons the Greens are opposing it.  Julie refers specifically to the issue of ‘squat searches’, to the evident discomfit of the Hon Maurice Williamson, who would clearly prefer not to be confronted with the reality of what is being proposed.

If an MP or anyone else gets squeamish about such treatment of people, so plainly described in Roger’s blog, then let them speak out against such abuse, and in favour of more humane and intelligent treatment.

The proposed legislation would serve to worsen the situation Roger describes.  I encourage people to challenge government MPs and others who support the bill, ask them why they think it is ok.

Ask them to justify this sort of treatment which does not match our commitment to human rights, and which in any case does nothing to make our communities safer.  We just end up with people being released from prison who are more alienated from society and societal norms, more likely to reoffend, more likely to respond in kind to the the brutal treatment they have been subjected to.  We can do better, and we should.

Wilson has served 18 years in prison, is coming to the end of his sentence, and under existing law must be released no later than September this year.

The Justice Minister, Judith Collins, has indicated that we will soon see before Parliament a bill that would make it possible to extend Wilson’s sentence, to keep him in prison despite the completion of his term.

The Minister denies there are any human rights issues, and insists that in any case the bill ‘will be assessed for consistency against the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act’. This is at best disingenuous – the Minister knows full well that even if a bill is deemed inconsistent with NZBORA it can be passed unhindered through the House.

Section 4 of the NZBORA states that :

• No court shall, in relation to any enactment (whether passed or made before or after the commencement of this Bill of Rights),—

  • (a) hold any provision of the enactment to be impliedly repealed or revoked, or to be in any way invalid or ineffective; or

  • (b) decline to apply any provision of the enactment—

  by reason only that the provision is inconsistent with any provision of this Bill of Rights

This is a wholly unsatisfactory situation, and one that a private member’s bill in my name would seek to rectify if pulled from the ballot box, but it is the current law.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in Article 11,  speaks plainly against “…a heavier penalty be[ing] imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed”.

Wilson’s crimes were horrific, and if sentenced today he could be liable to a sentence of preventative detention, effectively an ‘open-ended’ sentence that would allow for his continued imprisonment.

To use the power of Parliament to retrospectively apply a heavier sentence is, however, a dangerous road to tread.  Parliament makes law which the judiciary then applies, and retro-fitting that relationship in response to a single case is rarely a good idea. This is especially true when there are existing remedies, other means to deal with any threat to public safety.

The Minister does of course have every right to present a bill, and doubtless a bill such as that being proposed will find some level of support both in Parliament and in the public domain. What the Minister must not do is push the bill through in haste, in any way that reduces the opportunity for the fully informed and balanced debate which is appropriate to anything that meddles with or potentially compromises our basic commitment to human rights and the rule of law.

It is when we as a society are dealing with the most beastly of human actions that we must take the greatest care to exercise our reason, our commitment to justice and proper process, our humanity. 

Mr Joyce insists that opposition to his 19th century ideas of  ’growth’,  based on more mining, more extraction, more road-building, more export of high volume / low value commodities, is contrary to the wellbeing of New Zealanders.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is extraordinary that Mr Joyce is not recognising what smart New Zealand business people and others have long since worked out: that ‘business as usual’ is not an option if we want to build a sustainable and resilient 21st century economy that reflects our social and environmental aspirations.

A little tinkering around the edges, splashing a bit of greenwash about, will not deliver the future that is within New Zealand’s grasp.  We need courageous political leadership to help affect a fundamental shift, a managed transition to a low-carbon, high value-added economy, with a much higher level of self-reliance in basic necessities, while leveraging our natural advantages and the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit of our business sector (not least of all our SMEs).

While primary production is important and will remain so, we will not achieve our collective objectives through producing ever larger quantities of milk powder and pine logs.  Seeking to extend our ability to feed our oil addiction for a decade or two more is no substitute for investing heavily in developing alternatives to a carbon intensive economy, especially at a time when there is massive demand internationally for solutions that recognise that economic wellbeing is utterly dependent on maintaining environmental integrity.

We recently heard that despite a levelling off of the prison muster, and the government’s professed confidence that they have in place strategies to reduce offending and recidivism, Ministers Tolley and English have  nevertheless determined that we need yet another ‘fiscal and moral failure’, a 960-bed men’s prison at Wiri.

I invite you to do some arithmetic around the $900,000,000 Wiri proposal.  This big number is supposed to be the maximum required to build, maintain and operate the prison (including a profit margin for the private consortium of Fletchers, Spotless and Serco) for 25 years.

Let’s assume that Bill English got it right when he suggested a capital cost of $250,000 per bed, despite that figure being markedly lower than the previously estimated cost of Wiri’s construction,  in excess of $400 million.  Giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming the lower figure, that accounts for $240 million of the $900 million total.

Spread the remainder over the life of the contract; build in some assumptions about the occupancy rate for the prison;  assume (despite the lack of any evidence!)  that the private operator can dramatically reduce the $93,000 cost per prisoner per year, and see if you can produce numbers that make sense.

My calculations tell me that either the prison is going to run at a very low occupancy rate, or Serco is expected to achieve some truly heroic savings, which could only come at the expense of maintaining acceptable conditions for staff and inmates.

We are now told that the Wiri prison is needed to replace capacity which will be lost with the closure of some of our older prisons, with Invercargill, New Plymouth and Wellington’s Mt Crawford being the likely candidates.

The combined capacity of those three sites is little more than half the proposed capacity at Wiri, which begs the question of which other sites will be closed.  The degree of centralisation this would seem to entail is bad news for inmates and their families who might hope to maintain contact through visits while inmates serve their time, given the added costs of travel for people who are seldom well off financially.  The available evidence is that reducing contact between inmates and their family and other support networks reduces the likelihood of rehabilitation and reintegration, whih is bad news for community safety and the economy.

I had (foolishly, it seems) been optimistic that a more enlightened social policy and good economic sense might prevail, that the Government would cut their losses and abandon the project. This could even have been done with a degree of Ministerial face saving, given some evidence that prisoner numbers are leveling off, and lining it up with the Government’s professed enthusiasm for cost cutting in the public sector.

It beggars belief that this massive amount of money, $900 million , is to be wasted, when all the evidence is that a fraction of that amount, spent intelligently on reducing offending and recidivism, could see us closing prisons rather than building newer and bigger universities of crime.

‘Justice reinvestment’ is the shorthand for a strategic approach that proposes spending much less public money in the long term while getting much greater gains from managing and reducing offending differently, and increasing public safety and well-being.

Some of this Government’s own initiatives are at least pointing in the right direction – the ‘prevention first’ programme being rolled out by the Police; the intended (albeit long overdue) pilot programme for drug courts in Auckland and Waitakere; policies aimed at diverting young offenders away from the justice system.

These are the sorts of approaches – along with proper drug and alcohol assessments and treatment; literacy and skills programmes; support for released inmates to find stable and affordable accommodation, a job, and help to reintegrate back into society – that will get us to where we need to go.

Instead we have this ‘public private partnership’ being touted as the answer.  The history of private prisons internationally is that they end up costing more, do not reduce recidivism, and become a cash cow for multi-national providers of ‘services’.

Worryingly, legislation before the House also contains provisions to devolve powers to private contractors that should stay firmly within the domain of the State, such as determining an inmate’s security classification.

This decision is an expensive travesty, and the Government should be ashamed of its lack of imagination, its refusal to accept  compelling  evidence that it is wrong,  and of being lost in a 19th century mindset around corrections.

I’m never persuaded by reassurances that ‘front line’ resources will not be reduced.  I saw first hand in the tertiary sector how (initially at least) ‘front line’ teaching staff numbers were not reduced, but ’efficiencies’ (i.e. cuts) in support staff meant that academics were spending more time with administration and so spending less time with teaching and research.

It is a particularly critical time in policing as the new Commissioner seeks to improve public safety and confidence with initiatives like ‘prevention first’.  The focus on community engagement, and preventing crime and reoffending, is exactly the right approach, but it will fail if police officers are not adequately resourced or lack the time to build relationships and to understand their communities.  No amount of dealing out iPads and iPhones and other no doubt useful technologies will compensate for an over-stretched and stressed human resource.

Given the government’s enthusiasm for privatisation, one hopes the cuts are not a precursor to seeing here what is happening in Britain, where  there is a move afoot  to farm out to the private sector many of the functions of the police forces, including core functions like “investigating incidents, supporting victims and witnesses, managing high-risk individuals, patrolling neighbourhoods, managing intelligence, managing engagement with the public”.

A police spokesperson in UK has said “Bringing the private sector into policing is a dangerous experiment with local safety and taxpayers’ money…We are urging police authorities not to fall into the trap of thinking the private sector is the answer to the [governing] coalition’s cuts.”

We need a well resourced police force focused on reducing crime as well as enforcement.  We don’t need a run down service, relying on ‘Rent-a-Cop to plug the gaps.

The Greens see a lot in the report that we can support, but there are also some serious issues or concerns that the report skirts around. (In his presentation Phil O’Reilly, one of the authors, did make clear that the Group worked to a quite specific terms of reference).

Mr O’Reilly also proposed in his speech that “Our target should not be to try to balance economic growth and environmental protection. It should be about enhancing both environmental protection and biodiversity and engendering economic growth as well as all the other things that we seek in society.”

I couldn’t agree more.  I have long been suspicious of the language of ‘balance’, which has become a code for accepting  a little more environmental degradation in exchange for a little more (invariably short term) economic benefit. That’s just a race to the bottom, and we should have no part of it.

The report correctly notes that “The concept of green growth is also based on the realisation that natural capital is finite and that all ecosystems have limits, and that sustaining growth will mean working within those limits.”  We desperately need to be doing more to assess and report on the state of our natural capital and ecosystem services, and to embed those values into our economic strategy as firmly and as routinely as we address purely economic data.

Rather than simplistically measuring ‘growth’ as increases in production, consumption and exchange, we need to measure and incorporate indices of environmental and human wellbeing. Fortunately we do not need to break much new ground in this – such approaches have been adopted or trialled in a number of developing and developed countries.

One of my personal frustrations with the report is that some of its better recommendations propose doing things that people in business and the public sector were in fact doing at least five years ago, and in some cases much longer.

Recommendation three, for example,  proposes the Government should support coordination and integration of programmes to build business capabilitywithin SMEs, while involving private and public sector stakeholders.  Recommendation four encourages the government to facilitate businesses’ practical understanding of how to improve environmental performance and to take advantage of ‘green growth market trends’.

I know from my time as a sustainable business adviser that such programmes were gaining real traction and delivering measurable outcomes across a range of sectors, but sadly many of them took a hit and were scaled down or lost altogether when the government withdrew political and financial support soon after the 2008 election.

This report does provide some grounding for a better informed and engaged public debate about our future economic and environmental direction.  To do so will however require a willingness to adopt some different and challenging  assumptions about what constitutes ‘progress’ and ‘value’.

David Clendon: What is the Government’s contingency plan if there is a catastrophic oil spill or leak resulting from exploratory drilling?

Hon HEKIA PARATA: Maritime New Zealand is responsible for ensuring that New Zealand is prepared for, and able to respond to, marine oil spills. The Marine Pollution Response Service consists of internationally respected experts, who manage and train a team of about 400 local, Government, and Maritime New Zealand responders.

I didn’t find that particularly reassuring at the time, and find it much less so now given what is happening off Tauranga. We know some smart and dedicated people, both professionals and volunteers,  are working desperately hard trying to avert a major disaster, but so far we have seen just how little capacity we have to manage an accident.

Nobody ever wants an oil spill anywhere in the marine environment, but in terms of acccess and ability to respond,  the location and timing of this spill could have been a great deal worse.  The vessel ran aground on a reef scarcely 20km from Tauranga, one of our largest, busiest and most modern ports.  It occurred in calm weather, and was known about almost immediately. Yet we have still struggled to bring together the necessary expertise and hardware to deal quickly  with the crisis.

How much worse would the situation be if we were to allow deepwater off shore drilling, which the Energy Minister and her government are so eager to do, and an accident occurred a long way offshore in foul weather.

The American response to the Gulf of Mexico disaster involved hundreds of vessels, and many thousands of  military, civilian and volunteer personnel.  It also required a second rig to drill the relief well that ultimately enabled the stemming of the oil flow into the waters of the Gulf.

New Zealand does not and will never have that sort of capacity.  The oil companies will resist having to take responsibility to provide it.

There will always be accidents at sea that threaten our coastlines, wildlife and the livelihoods of people who rely on the marine resource.  We need to continually assess and reassess the risks of such accidents and put in place appropriate safeguards and countermeasures.

To knowingly invite and even encourage deep water drilling, an activity that we know is highly likely to cause problems entirely beyond our ability to resolve them, would be reckless in the extreme.  I hope that the reality of having to deal with the Rena incident will cause the government to think again about our energy future in the interests of our environmental and economic wellbeing.

What I found was a rather more interesting (and also more demanding!) event, the brainchild of an enterprising group of AUT students who donated their time and skills to organising the morning as part of their communications degrees.

Posing as a ‘star’ for the morning, alongside Blair Strang, a real star,  I was invited to compete to see what distance I could clock up on an exercycle in blocks of three minutes.  I don’t find an MP’s lifestyle to be especially conducive to maintaining fitness, but  managed to produce at least some reasonable results, although Blair did manage to take the lead (by a modest margin ) in our final ‘contest‘.

The point of all the silliness and panting was to raise awareness of what Habitat does in the community, and of their plan to host a sponsored ‘Bike and Build’ cycle ride from  Auckland to Wellington next year, with proceeds to go toward completing a building project in Wellington.

So if you are keen to ride all or part of the way between our two largest North Island cities, for a good cause, keep an eye on the Habitat website for details.  You have plenty of time to get fit for it if you start soon!

The technique is used to extract ‘unconventional’ oil and gas – that’s industry speak for sources of hydrocarbons that until recently were deemed too expensive or difficult to extract, but as the reality of peak oil kicks in the boundaries are being pushed further out.

The technique has been implicated in serious contamination of water supplies, and a correlation has been drawn between fracking and swarms of earthquakes in at least three American states.  It has been banned in France, is under investigation in other European states, and some parts of the US.

Fracking has happened in Taranaki, and has been proposed for other parts of the country, including the East Coast and Canterbury. The industry in New Zealand is staunchly defending the practice, with John Bay, the Chair of the Petroleum Exploration and Production Association (PEPANZ), insisting that problems elsewhere were caused by ‘cowboys’, whom our government would not allow to operate here.

Given the present government’s enthusiasm for extraction of oil and gas, and their willingness to downplay the risks,  I’m less inclined to rely on them!  The fracking that has occurred in Taranaki was done without resource consents .   The Taranaki Regional Council only last month decided that perhaps there had better be a consenting process in future.

The Greens believe in evidence based policy.  Much of the evidence we are seeing indicates that fracking is  dirty, dangerous, and completely at odds with an intelligent 21st century economic or energy strategy. We want a halt to the practice until we see clear evidence that fracking really is safe, poses no threat to human health; our land, water or level of seismic activity; and that any benefits really could outweigh the costs.

I”m launching a petition that asks Parliament to initiate an independent investigation through the Office of  the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, and for an immediate moratorium on the practice until or unless the PCE can give fracking  a clean bill of health. I hope you will sign it, and encourage others to do the same.

So download the petition [PDF] here and get people signing it!