Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Police)
: I thank my parliamentary colleagues Ron Mark and Chester Borrows for their contributions to the debate on the estimates for Vote Police, and I thank Ron Mark for his comments regarding the recruitment of additional police officers for the New Zealand Police, and for the role that New Zealand First has played in ensuring that the additional officers were available. We are now recruiting the third tranche of those 1,000 sworn officers and 250 non-sworn officers. I, too, would like to say that it was not done with the help of, particularly, Simon Power, who spent a lot of time criticising the recruitment campaign. In fact, he did his utmost to try to portray the recruitment of additional police officers as something that could not be achieved, saying we were going to get bunnies as police officers, they would not be up to scratch, and we would not be able to achieve the goal that we had set ourselves. In fact, we now see that we will not only succeed in recruiting those police officers but exceed the target in terms of the number of police officers that we are recruiting. So I thank the member Ron Mark for those comments about that.
I think it is worthwhile to point out that the Martin review in the late 1990s, which was adopted by the then National Government, proposed a reduction of 500 police officers from 1999 on. What would we be like today if there had been a reduction in police officers? Mr Borrows was talking about the need to have additional officers and the need to have them in the right place. I agree with him in that respect. But that was not National’s policy, and it was not its action while in Government. It has been the action of this Labour-led Government, working with a confidence and supply partner, that has given us the additional police officers, and we are also working on the next tranche, as Ron Mark said. The next part of that agreement is to work towards achieving comparable numbers to those in Australia, and as Ron Mark said, that is something the National Party now has as its policy.
Mr Borrows mentioned a loss of confidence in the police following the Clint Rickards fiasco. I have to tell Mr Borrows, who was a former police officer and has very good contacts with regard to the New Zealand Police, that I do not believe there
was a loss of confidence. There was a dent in the confidence of the police, but if one looks at any survey of the public, in terms of their attitude towards the police, one will find there is a high level of confidence in the police. I suspect that politicians wish they had the same level of confidence shown in them that the New Zealand Police has shown in it in the public surveys.
Mr
Rickards posed a particular difficulty for the New Zealand Police for one good reason—one that Mr Borrows would know—and that was the arcane employment laws that the police worked under. Mr Borrows’ entire working life as a police officer, I believe, would have been spent working under the old arcane employment laws, which made it incredibly difficult to get rid of a police officer who had committed a serious offence. It was made difficult because of the hoops that had to be gone through before an officer could be dismissed. One of the recommendations that came out of the commission of inquiry was to change the way we undertake industrial relations within the New Zealand Police and to bring them into line with the industrial and employment relations that we have for the rest of the workforce. That is one of the recommendations, as the member knows, that has been picked up, and its implementation makes a huge difference to the police.
Another important recommendation that Mr Borrows talked about was to develop the code of conduct. It was amazing to me, when I became the Minister of Police, to learn that the New Zealand Police had never had a code of conduct. Many years ago I worked as a public servant, and amongst the things we did have in the Public Service were codes of conduct. They were things that one expected to be guided by in one’s role as a public servant. But that guidance became diluted over time. In fact, it was not until last year that a code of conduct to cover public servants was brought back into the Public Service. In the 1990s codes of conduct were not being implemented and had died out. It was not until Mark Prebble became State Service Commissioner that a code of conduct was brought back into the public sector. The police have never had one. They have had an oath of office, but not a code of conduct.
