Post-Cabinet Press Conference: Monday, 6 May 2024

Kia ora and good afternoon, everyone. It’s a pleasure to be joined today by our corrections Minister, Mark Mitchell, to make a significant announcement as part of Budget 2024. Our Government, as you know, has a crystal clear vision of what it’s going to achieve for New Zealanders. We are laser focused on rebuilding the economy and reducing the cost of living so that more Kiwis can get ahead. We will deliver better public services like health and education, and we are going to restore law and order in New Zealand because all Kiwis have a right to feel safe in their homes, their workplaces, and their communities.

Now, like all New Zealanders, I’m sick of hearing stories about Kiwis who are the victims of violent attacks or are having to go to work worrying about whether their business is going to be the next ram raid target. I want all New Zealanders to understand what we’ve inherited and the current reality that we face, because since 2018 gang membership has increased by 51 percent, violent crime is up 33 percent, ram raids have nearly quadrupled—they’re up 290 percent—and retail crime has more than doubled, up 100 percent. Sadly, New Zealand has become less safe after six years of soft-on-crime policies where victims have not been the absolute priority. But the good news for Kiwis is that our Government has committed to a very different approach to what we’ve seen over the last six years. For us, making New Zealanders safer and reducing the number of victims is how we will measure our success.

We’ve outlined our commitment by focusing two of this Government’s Better Public Services targets on restoring law and order. The first is 20,000 fewer victims of violent crime by 2030, and the second is to reduce serious youth offending by at least 15 percent. Our goal of keeping Kiwis safe is exactly what we’ve already taken a number of actions on with respect to law and order. Three strikes is coming back, and we’ve stopped all public funding for section 27 reports. We’re adding 500 new police officers to the front line, we’re putting gangs on notice and giving police substantial new powers to go after them, we’re establishing military academies for the most serious and repeat youth offenders, and we have plans to change the Sentencing Act so serious offending means serious consequences. These actions are geared around making New Zealanders safer today, and they will go hand in hand with this Government’s approach to social investment, where we deliver interventions earlier and more effectively for those whose lives expose them to greater risk. This approach will support us to identify, to fund, and to scale up actions that will have the most positive impact on people in the long run, giving them more support and better choices than a life of crime does.

But all of this is to say that safety and victims are clearly this Government’s priority. Part of improving the safety of Kiwis means ensuring that dangerous offenders are not on our streets, where there is a high chance that they will only create more victims. That is why today we are announcing a significant uplift in funding for the front line of Corrections so that we can increase the capacity in our prisons and support more offenders to turn away from crime. This investment is only possible because of the Government’s savings programme. We’re able to do this because we acted quickly since taking office to rein in Government spending and to root out wasteful spending, because we want that money prioritised and going towards our front-line services. Within Corrections itself, we’ve identified hundreds of millions of dollars from optimising back-office support services that we are now reinvesting to keep New

Zealanders safe: more capacity in our prisons to keep dangerous people off the street, better pay for front-line staff so we can attract and retain the right people, and more access to rehabilitation programmes for offenders.

This is an investment in the safety of New Zealanders and one that this Government is very proud to make. And, with that, I’ll hand over to Mark to talk you through the detail of the announcement.

Thanks, Prime Minister. As the Prime Minister said, today’s announcement is delivering on our promise of investing more in critical front-line areas to keep New Zealanders safer. The Government is investing $1.9 billion in Corrections to deliver more front-line corrections officers, more prison capacity, and more support for offenders to turn away from a life of crime. Corrections are recruiting more officers now than ever before. We’re supporting this drive by providing new funding to recruit and train another 685 front-line corrections staff, including 470 corrections officers to respond to growing prisoner numbers. Our front-line corrections staff do an outstanding job and have faced significant staffing pressures over the last few years. In recognition of this, we’re also investing in pay increases for our front line so Corrections can continue to attract and retain the right people and give them the right training to do their job safely.

To ensure capacity, safety, and security across the prison network, we’re funding an extension to Waikeria prison that will allow for up to 810 more beds. With 45 percent of the prison population on remand, we need to do as much as we can to help them turn their lives around. So we’re investing $78 million to ensure remand prisoners have access to the rehabilitation programmes to help them achieve their goals and break the cycle of reoffending.

The investment we’re announcing today will support our tough-on-crime approach, with sufficient prison capacity to manage the growing prison population. It will protect New Zealanders from known offenders, give offenders the support they need to make positive change in their lives, and ensure our prisons are better resourced so that police, courts, and victims of crime can have confidence that offenders who pose a risk to others can be subjected to a custodial sentence. Keeping New Zealanders safe is at the heart of this investment and it is part of this Government's commitment to restore law and order. Thank you.

Thank you, Mark. I just want to quickly run through the rest of the week, or my week. I'm in Wellington until Wednesday. I'm travelling to Nelson on Thursday, in Auckland on Friday and over the weekend. And, with that, Mark and I are happy to open up to any questions you may have.

Well, the $442 million is cost savings. It’s taken from the back office and is going to be reinvested in the front line. So it will be used across the additional recruitment, training, and deployment of those corrections staff.

So the uptake in officers is contained within that $1.9 billion. Obviously, the—

Well, so, basically, the cost for prisoners in the system at the moment is $120,000 annually, and that takes into account the cost of the bed, food, you know, sustenance, life support. So it's $120 per prisoner—

So, Jenna, what I’d just say is just to give everyone a bit of a sense of it, it’s $1.9 billion in funding going towards Corrections; $442 million has come out of, actually, back office savings over the forecast period, out of Corrections; and the balance has obviously come from other reprioritisations, but it's a total budget of $1.9 billion. With that, what we've got is the 685 more corrections staff coming in. We've got funding for pay increases for staff; we've got, obviously, the extension to Waikeria—another 810 beds; and we've got also about almost $80 million in rehab services going to remand offenders as well. So all of that goes into there.

There's a couple of things we can't talk about. Obviously, there's commercial sensitivity around the pay piece and there's also commercial sensitivity around the build of the prison as well. But that hopefully gives you a sense of the bucket of $1.9 billion and the activity it's covering.

No, no, that's in addition. So at Waikeria, we'll have 600 beds that will come online at the middle of next year and then there'll be an additional 220 beds that come on with the new wing. We also have, under the previous Government, where there was—

Well, this is budgeted inside the $1.9 billion.

No, no—

There's 800 extra beds going into the system.

Well, and if you let me finish, what I was going to say is that under the previous Labour Government, what happened was there was about 400 beds that were decommissioned because they weren't funded. We are funding those and those are going to be brought back online. So that's an additional 400 beds that are coming online inside the system.

So it will be 820.

Eight hundred and 10, sorry.

Yes, correct.

No. Waikeria hasn't been delivered. Waikeria will be delivered in the middle of next year.

Yeah.

So I can give you a high level sort of overview of where that's come from, and that is quite simply a reprioritisation of the delivery of services to our prisoners, and that is making sure that when a prisoner comes into Corrections, you've only got them for a limited time. We want to make sure that we deliver the programmes that actually are meaningful, that give them real life skills, so that when they leave prison, they've got a much better chance of reintegrating and actually rejoining society. They’re also going to reprioritise around the way that they are managing assets, and, of course, the third part is that there will be unfilled vacancies and there will be some—probably less than five—positions that are on a fixed contract that will not be renewed.

Well, I just think, though, that what they've done, and what we've asked all of the agencies to do, is to do a health check through a cost savings process to actually identify how they can manage their existing assets better. Corrections has done that. In terms of reprioritisation around services, it's quite simply: Corrections have been operating in silos in the way they approach and deliver programmes to prisoners, and we want to get much more focused and make sure that we're actually delivering the programmes that are going to actually create the most benefit for them.

No—

What we've got is, essentially, look, it's the exercise we've asked all agencies to go through, to say, “Hey, listen, look at unfilled vacant roles that you may have today”—of which, in the back office of Corrections, there were some—“reorganise yourself in a way that actually delivers and supports that. Make sure you’re streamlining programmes, things that aren't working; stop that dumb stuff. Make sure that it's all working in the right way.” There’ll be improvements around asset management, there’ll be improvements around a whole bunch of different things that—

Well, those are issues for Corrections to answer to, but all I'm saying—

Well, no, but I'm just trying to give you a sense of—we've tasked CEOs of agencies to come through with back-office efficiencies and savings, and we're trying to give you a sense of what has happened. In this case, largely, in Corrections it's being driven through not filling vacant roles that have existed in the back office, reorganising, and also making sure they streamline programmes, and programmes that aren't working we're stopping. I think that's a great example of what we want to see, and that's the message that we've been trying to say since we came to power, which is that, you know, we think, given there's been an 84 percent increase in Government spending and we know a lot of that's been wasteful spending, we know a lot of it’s been building bureaucracy, we know a lot of it's been building management structures and back-office functions that aren't supporting better front-line delivery. And so we are recycling that money into this, coupled with additional money that's coming in from other prioritisations and savings, to make sure that Corrections gets new money in order to be able to deliver what we want to deliver.

I’d say it’s a pretty low priority.

Ha, ha! We thought we were going to get asked about slushy machines. Look, the reality of it is—

Well, from what I understand, it's actually about—it costs about $50,000 a year to run the slushy machines right through the whole entire corrections network. But the one thing I'd say to you is this: is that this is a decision for Corrections themselves, but, in my view, the welfare of our corrections officers must always be considered. They work in hot, cramped conditions where they’re carrying 7kg of equipment on them and their core temperature and dehydration is something they fight with every summer, and my expectation is Corrections take the steps that they need to take to actually keep the welfare and the safety and health of our corrections officers at the forefront.

Well, it’s the project that is currently under construction—yes, that will—

Yes, that will—yes, yeah.

Well, I think what we're doing is we're restating our commitment as the incoming Government to get that delivered. And yes, you're right: it's about 500 beds plus a specialised mental health unit of about 100 beds, which will be delivered the middle of next year.

Yes, because we've committed to the full expansion of Waikeria.

That sits under Waikeria. That's the first phase that will be delivered in the middle of next year.

A hundred of those are, yes, absolutely.

Well, I think they are 810 beds. They're still corrections; they're still prisoners inside the system. It’s just that there’s a specialised—it’s a unit that can deliver additional psychological treatment for those with severe mental health issues.

So we’ll be delivering 610 in May, and the additional—which is a whole new wing, so that’s—

Yeah, yeah, that’s right.

So at the moment the Waikeria Prison hasn’t been delivered, so it won’t have—

Well, so that’s the old prison—I’m talking about the new prison. I’d have to check on those numbers.

Well, again, that’s a decision for Corrections. At the moment, it’s part of the overall network, but that will be a decision for Corrections.

Well, because, if some of the prisons are old and you’re looking at replacement, we’re looking at investment—Christchurch men’s is a classic example. And I come back to the point that I made that, yes, we’re building 810 new beds in terms of capacity—there’s an additional 400 that we’re going to bring back online that were decommissioned under the previous Government.

No, no, there were 400 beds decommissioned through the whole, entire network in the country at different prisons.

Well, the thing is with Waikeria, there is the ability to—there’s plenty of land there, and if we needed to we could increase capacity there.

No, no, we—

There’s an 810-bed extension.

Yeah, no, no, we’re definitely—

Absolutely.

Well, we’re adding the 810 additional beds with the new facility in Waikeria. The rest of the network, that’s a decision for the CEO of Corrections. It is a moving feast for us because there has been severe underinvestment in corrections over the last six years of the Labour Government. We are bringing fresh investment into corrections. We are creating capacity because what we’re doing is we’re putting public safety at the heart of what we’re doing, which is not what happened in the last six years, which means we have to build capacity, and we’re building the capacity that we believe will meet our needs going forward.

So, Jenna, there’s an 810-bed extension to Waikeria from where we sit today— we’ll make sure we get you the total numbers.

Well, I mean, I can't give you a number now because it's commercially sensitive, we’re actually—

No, no, no, it’s because we’ve got a prison build up and running and it’s commercially sensitive.

That’s right. They’re under negotiation at the moment, so there’s commercial negotiations going on in terms of the delivery of the extension to Waikeria so I can’t give you a number on it—

I can’t give you a number on that because the number sits inside the $1.9 billion and we have budgeted enough there to be able to deliver Waikeria, but at the moment Corrections are in commercial negotiations to make sure they deliver the best possible value for every taxpayer dollar spent. So I can’t give you a number and I can’t talk to that because there’s commercial sensitivity around it.

Sorry, can I go to Adam?

Well, I mean, the good news is at the moment, as the incoming Government, we’ve changed the recruiting campaign—that looks quite different now. We’ve had a massive uptake: we’ve had about 20,000 applications—I thought it was 13, but I got the updated number—

[Inaudible] 20,000.

It’s closer to 20. We’re currently recruiting, training, and deploying 130 corrections officers a month, which is the best they’ve done for a long time. And, finally, we’ve actually got ahead of attrition, so now we’re getting a net gain in terms of corrections officers coming into the system.

Six hundred in extra front-line staff, corrections staff—685.

No—well, we always have to take into attrition—Corrections will do that. What I’m telling you, though, is that we’re on the right side of the ledger for the first time in a long time. We’re actually recruiting and training and deploying corrections officers over and above the attrition rate, so we’re doing very well. We’ve got a big pipeline of people applying, we’ve got big cohorts being graduated every month, and we’ve now got ahead of attrition. So we’re tracking in the right direction, but as the Prime Minister has said in the announcement today, it’s—

685.

—685.

Well, they could be working in the community, with community-based sentences; they could be psychologists—they could be a range of other roles that are front line inside Corrections.

Well, obviously, there’s one pay round negotiation that will take—that will kick off mid-year, and the second one is in December.

Well, we’ve got to go through a bargaining process, as per normal.

Again, that’s a part of the bargaining process, and all we’re saying is we’re budgeting for pay increases. We’re obviously budgeting for the extension of Waikeria, we’re budgeting for extra incremental new front-line officers, we’re budgeting for extra remand services and rehabilitation services to remand us up.

Sorry—Jo.

This is the Budget—so what we’re saying is there’s $1.9 billion of new money, essentially, coming into Corrections, or there’s $1.9 billion going to be spent on Corrections; $442 million of it has come from savings that have been identified within the Corrections budget through the back-office functions. So it’s being deployed out to the front-line services, and, in addition to the $442 million of that $1.9 billion, there’s about $1.5 billion that’s coming in that’s new money coming into Corrections.

This is the new money coming in on top of—

Again, we’ll look into that on Budget night. You’ll see it all revealed as to how it all hangs together, but what I’m just saying to you as part of this pre-Budget announcement is there’s $1.9 billion going to Corrections; about $442 million of it comes out of savings that have been recycled into that front-line service—

Yeah, well, as I’ve said, we’ve alluded to it. We’ve asked for savings to come out of Corrections. They’ve gone off and done their exercise. They’ve identified that there were a number of unfilled vacancies that were sitting in the back office, in the bureaucracy. A lot of it has come—you know, there’s been a significant amount of money that’s been saved out of that and, obviously, being redeploying those roles, given they’ve been unfilled for some period of time, and then, likewise, just streamlining some programmes and making sure that what we’re doing is actually working, and just reorganising the back office. So I think that’s a good example of what we’ve talked about, and I think Corrections have actually done an exceptionally good job where they’ve taken that exercise of generating those savings, thinking through their own organisation, taking responsibility for it, and then offering those savings up, which we can recycle back into the front-line services where it needs to be— much better use of the money.

Correct—yep.

Oh, I doubt it, Jason—you’re very good at maths.

Correct.

Correct—yeah, correct. And that’s coming from other reprioritisations and savings, which you’ll see when we put the whole Budget together and we announce that on 30 May.

Yes, it’s all operating—

Well, in that Budget is the money that we need to expand Waikeria by 810 beds, and that money is also the money that we need to make sure that we are expanding the number of prison officers and corrections officers that we’ve got. There’s $80 million for rehabilitation services for remand, and, obviously, a pay increase, as well.

No—so the capital funding is inside the $1.9 billion.

Sorry?

No, it includes that. So it covers the delivery of the 600 beds next year, and the additional 210 on top of that. The one thing that I would say is that we did have to immediately, as the incoming Government—where the previous Government only funded Corrections up to 8,500 prisoners. So we’ve had to fund it up to 10,000 straight away. We’re at about 9,600 at the moment, so we’ve got about 400 capacity.

Listen, we don’t want to double-bunk people but if we need to, we will. The reality of it is—we’ve been very clear about it—that we’re putting public safety at the heart of what we’re doing, and that means that offenders that commit crimes and are violent towards law-abiding members of our society in our communities—they’re going to go to jail. We have made a big announcement today—$1.9 billion—because we’re investing into our capacity to make sure that we can meet that need. We’re hoping that with our approach, which is a tough-on-crime approach putting victims at the heart of what we’re doing, is that maybe the criminal world might figure out there’s a different Government here and it’s just not worth it anymore.

Well, we’ll have enough capacity—we believe we have enough capacity right now in terms of what we’ve committed to that we won’t have to move to double-bunking. But I’m just saying to you that if we have to move to double-bunking, we will do that.

No, what we’re saying is that we’re going to deliver an additional 810 beds at Waikeria, which we think, without a doubt, will meet the capacity needs of the approach that we’re taking to public safety in our country. And the budget, $1.9 billion, has got enough money there to be able to deliver that for us. The first stage will be delivered the middle of next year. The second stage will be delivered end of 2028.

OK, sorry guys; we need to move on.

Look, I don’t know how to make this any clearer. Maybe it’s a completely different philosophy from what you’ve experienced under the previous administration, but what we’ve been doing has not been working. What we know is there was an 84 percent increase in Government spending. There was 18,500 more public servants added into Wellington.

There was $2 billion spent on consulting and contracting. And what we’re saying is that money can be better deployed—if we take those resources to deliver ourselves better outcomes. We are focused on the outcomes here, and the outcomes here are less violent crime, less gang members, lower levels of ram raids, retail crime—that’s what our outcomes are about. So we’re backward engineering and saying, “You take the money and deliver those outcomes.” It’s not actually about—the money is interesting to a point and the quantum does matter, no doubt about it, but it’s what you do with the money to get an outcome. And so what we’re saying to Corrections is—

Well, I’m just saying to you the brief has been pretty clear to all CEOs of all agencies across Government, which is there is wasteful spending going on, there is inefficiency management layers in the back office, there’s huge amounts of bureaucracy that have been created, and we want that money taken out of the bureaucracy and out of the wasteful spending out of the back office, and we want to prioritise the front line. Now, that’s up to the assessment of an individual CEO, who we’re holding to account to deliver the targets and the outcomes. So it’s a different approach, right? We start with the outcomes and you work backwards to say, “What do I do with the dollar to get a better result than what I was getting before?” And it may mean stopping some programmes that actually just do not work, and just because we’ve been doing them, doesn’t mean we just keep doing them. We will stop dumb stuff. We will stop stuff that’s not getting results and outcomes, and that is across the whole of Government and it’s very necessary, because we are focused on outcomes, not the inputs, right? The inputs matter to enable you to get to that outcome, but I’m going to hold those CEOs and Ministers accountable for those outputs and those outcomes.

Well, look, again, we’ll talk about that with the Budget. What we’re talking about here today is actually Corrections, and we’re making sure that Corrections is getting $1.9 billion—

I’m sorry; you’re going to have to wait till 30 May to see the totality of the picture, but I’m just giving you a fundamental philosophy about how we’re actually going to fund public services going forward.

Sure—got it. But you’ll actually have to look at it in the totality of the 30 May Budget.

Look, that is a question for the chief executive of Corrections, in terms of ratios and numbers.

Well, we want to deliver the amount of corrections officers that Corrections tell us they need to be able to run a world-class corrections service, and that’s what we’re doing.

Well, in terms of the ratio, I can get that information for you. I'll ask the chief executive to be able to supply that to you. But, from a Government perspective, we want to make sure that we deliver the corrections officers that we've been told they need to be able to run a world-class corrections service, to be able to deliver the programmes that we want to deliver. By the way, a big part of the announcement that no one's asked us about is the $78 million that's going towards remand prisoners. They’re prisoners that under the previous Government were not getting any programmes delivered at all.

OK, guys, we got time for two more questions, sorry.

Sure.

Well, we clearly want sentenced offenders to get access to those rehabilitation services. And I agree. I’ve looked at that, I remember, a year or so ago, and could see there was a big drop off in participation in those rehab services. But, also, we've got 45 percent of our prisoners on remand, and, actually, we also want to make sure that those also get access to those rehab services quicker too, and that's what this is about in this particular piece of spending here. But, obviously, we've still got work to do to make sure we've got more rehabilitation being done while we've got prisoners in our system. That's our big opportunity to get them to turn their lives around. So we are very committed to rehabilitation. We're very committed to social investment, ultimately, as well, but we are going to be really clear. We are going to restore law and order in a series of actions in 161 days, of which this is one of them—it will help us do that.

Well, as you know, we've asked for 6.5 to 7.5 percent across the system—out of the system, out of expenditure—and, as we’ve said, we’ve tasked CEOs very much with delivering that, saying go back to the back office, look at your front office.

And that is a good thing. I mean, there's been identifying 5.8 percent of expenditure that is actually not adding value that can be better redeployed into the front-line services.

That’s right.

That’s a good thing.

Well, it has come—we've tasked our CEOs very clearly, and say, you need to prioritise the front-line services. I don't know how I can be any clearer about this. But it's just naturally what you do as a CEO. You take over an organisation, you have a certain budget. You've got to ask yourself, for the dollars that I'm spending, am I getting the results or the outcomes that I'm being asked to deliver against? We've been very clear on the targets and the goals that we have, and how CEOs deploy that money is completely up to them. But, in this case, this is a great example of where we've been able to recycle funds out of the back office into the front office so we can better support front-line corrections services.

Again, all I'd say on that is that, you know, it's a tragic set of circumstances and our hearts go out to the family that has been impacted here. It's an ongoing police investigation and it would be inappropriate for us to comment further than that at this point in time.

No, just what police have talked about publicly.

Absolutely. We remain fully committed to those and highly value the relationships that we have with iwi and hapū that are engaged with the corrections system in a really positive way, and have got a big input to that, so, yes.

And are getting good results.

Yeah, absolutely.

Look, I mean, again, it's not something I’ve been briefed on. I'm conscious of the story that's broken today. What I'd say to you is the Minister has a huge amount of complex pressures and infrastructure across healthcare. He'll be taking advice on that and obviously we’ll have more to say about that shortly.

Not that I'm aware of, no. I'm just conscious that, you know, we've got workforce challenges in healthcare, we've got infrastructure challenges in healthcare, and, you know, we want to put targets in place to get to focus on the front-line services, not the back office. OK, team, thank you so much.

So let me be clear: some of those prisoners that are locked up for 23 hours a day—and of course we want to see a movement in the right direction on that—they are violent prisoners, and when you're a violent prisoner and you're a risk to other inmates and staff, then there's consequences around that. But, on saying that, and coming back to the question around a sentenced prisoner receiving programmes, I recognise—I'm the first one to recognise and say—that Corrections have been under a lot of pressure for the last six years in terms of numbers, and that has dictated the way that they manage the prisons and the prisoners. And I'd have to say that because now we're starting to move in the right direction, we're actually starting to see quite a bit of success around recruiting, training, and deploying new corrections officers. It means that now they're freeing up time and they're able to re-engage with programmes. So there’s movement in the right direction on that.

I think we're just going to continue to see incremental movement in the right direction. I think it just comes back to the numbers. The numbers have been a big challenge around resources, and we're moving in the right direction on that. I'm very proud of the work Corrections are doing; the recruiting campaign is going extremely well, and, like I said to you, I'm going to graduations every month. We're graduating over 130 new corrections officers a month at the moment.

OK, team, thanks so much—appreciate it.

Thank you.