Government Crime Advisory Warnings

All right, for anyone still laboring under the impression that New Zealand is an innocent little place like it was 50 years ago, those prison busts yesterday should absolutely shatter that delusion. What happened yesterday was the single biggest bust in our prison system. Twenty people arrested and charged across three different prisons, Mount Eden, Spring Hill, and Auckland South. They've been charged for allegedly smuggling meth, smuggling phones into prison in exchange for cash payment. There are bribery charges and there are allegations that prisoners were organizing drug importation and transactions while still in jail. It is not just corrections guards, it's also senior officers, which is actually more worrying, obviously, because it tells you that it's not just the junior guys they recruited yesterday and didn't properly vet. It's people who've been there for a while. It's people who are on decent money, the kind of money that you wouldn't necessarily expect to be corruptible, perhaps. That is what a network looks like right there. And it's not just in our prisons, by the way, that this stuff is happening, right? We just had a police off officer busted for leaking intelligence to her killer bees boyfriend this year. We've had people busted out of airport uh ports, the baggage handlers busted at airports, and this is what we've been warned about by that crime advisory group who've been working for the government and who did a series of reports last year. They warned corruption is rising, and insider threats where trusted people are corrupted is a rapidly growing problem. And it is rapidly growing. I mean, think about this, right? It was 2011 when we had our first ever corrections guard in this country jailed for corruption. 2011. 15 years later, we just had a whole network allegedly pulled out. And it's the gangs. It's the fact that we have more sophisticated gangs from Australia. It's the price of our drugs, makes this a more lucrative place to do business. It's the low wages we pay our prison guards and police officers, and our and our baggage handlers. If you still think that we haven't got a correction uh a corruption problem, just look at what is happening and what has happened yesterday. Twenty people are not a few bad apples. They are a sign that we are now like the rest of the world and we have a corruption problem.