These developments led me to wonder why Hawke's Bay figures so highly in New Zealand's indexes of deprivation. Perhaps we should all get angry and do something like the Northlanders did a couple of weeks ago.
The final outcome of the Northland byelection is now in and with Winston Peters winning the special votes by a margin of two to one over the National candidate, the magnitude of the regional revolt against the Government is now even more marked.
My guess is that Tuki Tuki MP Craig Foss will be dusting off his CV. His majority is only two-thirds of what National enjoyed in Northland and he could not survive the kind of political tsunami that struck there a fortnight ago.
This week, the next round of prison reform was launched for consultation and I was disappointed at the superficial coverage it got in the media which focused almost exclusively on job losses in the Corrections Department.
Briefly, units will close at three jails - Rimutaka, Waikeria and Tongariro-Rangipo. The Howard League literacy programme runs in all three of these sites so I'm familiar with these jails.
The units to be closed are no loss at all. They are old and reflect a discredited penal philosophy. Most of the prisoners displaced will be accommodated at the new Auckland South jail, in most cases much nearer to their friends and family and in a far better and more enlightened environment.
A strong element in rehabilitation and reducing re-offending is the maintenance of family bonds during a sentence, so these changes are sensible and likely to be cost-effective in the medium to long-term.
I have witnessed just how few visitors get to the remote jails such as Waikeria and Tongariro-Rangipo, so bringing offenders closer to home has got to be a step in the right direction.
What the media mainly missed was a major restructure of how jails are to be administered. Corrections chief executive Ray Smith, who has to be one of the best senior public servants in the current crop, proposes broadening the job descriptions of prison managers, (who are tasked largely with the custodial aspects of the jails) to include direct responsibility for rehabilitation, learning, job skills and reintegration.
Ray Smith also proposes an entirely new position in each jail and it is worth quoting from the discussion paper.
"A new position of Assistant Prison Director Industry, Rehabilitation and Learning would be established. This position would report directly to the Prison Director. The purpose of the position would be to drive the employment, learning, rehabilitation and reintegration outcomes for prisoners with a focus on reducing re-offending.
"The role would be accountable for ensuring employment and learning opportunities are targeted and case management is integrated across the entire site. The position would lead a team of specialists at each prison site".
This amounts to a welcome refocusing of Corrections resources.
International research (and experience) clearly shows concentrating on these aspects will reduce the sky-high rate of re-offending that is behind New Zealand's shamefully high rate of incarceration.
Literacy or a lack of it is a crucial factor in criminality. A while ago I came across a quote from British author Neil Gaiman in a lecture he gave on the importance of reading.
"I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons - a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth - how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now?
"And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read."
Jobs will be found for nearly all of the prison officers displaced by this round of reform and all tax-payers should loudly applaud what Ray Smith and his team are trying to achieve.
-Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is a supporter of pro-amalgamation group A Better Hawke's Bay (Amalgamate Hawke's Bay). He is chief executive of the NZ Howard League and a former president of the Labour Party. He is a political commentator and can be heard on Radio NZ's Nine to Noon programme at 11am on Mondays and Sean Plunket's RadioLive show at 11am on Fridays. All opinions in this column are his and not the newspaper's.
