Today on Newshub Nation ` our prisons are overflowing and former inmates keep reoffending, so what's wrong in our justice system? A new law means men with historical homosexuality convictions can have their records wiped clean. We are there as one man tells Justice Minister Andrew Little just what that means to him. The extraordinary life of Helen Kelly ` we speak with the man who documented her relentless fight for workers' rights during the last year of her life. And we find out why Green MP Golriz Ghahraman thinks Twitter has become Trump Land. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2018 Kia ora. Good morning. I'm Lisa Owen. Welcome to Newshub Nation. A highly critical report on our justice system says policies based on panic and dogma have resulted in a broken system. The report, released by the Prime Minister's chief science advisor, suggests that New Zealand's overflowing prisons are extremely expensive training grounds for further offending and that recruitment centres operate there for gangs. It also says there's no good evidence that our high imprisonment rates are helping the victims of crime. Now, on Radio Live Drive, Sir Peter Gluckman told me what's needed is an apolitical discussion based on evidence but that New Zealanders aren't good at having civilised conversations on complex matters. So today we've accepted that challenge, and I'm joined by criminal defence lawyer Stephen Bonnar QC, Corrections Association vice president Paul Dennehy, Hapai te Hauora chief executive Lance Norman, and former prison inmate Alex Swney. Welcome to you all this morning. Thank you for joining me. Can we start with what is a seemingly basic question but goes to the core of this, Steve ` what is the purpose of prison? Well, it should be about rehabilitation and reintegration into society, but over the last 30 years or so, it's just become more and more about punishment. Alex, what do you think? Unquestionably... Apparently, it's supposed to be ` first to third ` deterrent , then rehabilitation, then reintegration. But it's overwhelmingly ` and the statistics show this ` it is all so punitive and so negative and so destructive. So we like to think that it's rehab. It's not. It's just a miserable,... punitive, negative experience. Paul, what do you think? Well, I agree with Steve. It should be the environment for rehab and reintegration. From our perspective, it's not an environment where we think it's a punishment, as such. The punishment has already been metered out to the person who's come to prison. Loss of freedom, you mean? Loss of freedom. So our staff, their job is to manage the people in front of them safely and securely, humanely, and ideally with a view to making them better people when they are released into the community. Lance, do you disagree with any of that? I agree with all of that. Obviously, if you've done a crime, there needs to be some sort of repercussions, and incarceration is that, but you need to go there, you need to be rehabilitated, and you need to be reintegrated back into the community, and unfortunately we're not doing either one of those very well at the moment. But not only are we not doing it on the way out, we're not doing it on the way in either. OK, well, let's talk about what it's like now so we can talk about what changes might help. Paul, how bad is it in terms of overcrowding? It's bad. I mean, yesterday the prison muster was something like 10,726. Capacity is not much greater than that. We are double bunking every prison facility that we can. We're looking at extending facilities, creating new builds, because the prison population is just increasing. And what are the repercussions of that? What does that mean for the people in the prison and the people working in the prison? So, obviously biased ` the people working in the prison are our priority. They're faced with increasing numbers of people housed in an environment perhaps set for one ` double bunking ` increased violence, tensions, frustrations. Staff are working exceedingly long shifts ` up to 10 days in a row. The environment that they try and make a better place for the prisoners is one that's at bursting point. From the prisoners' perspective ` overcrowding, tension, frustration, a lack of ability to perhaps get on to those rehabilitative programmes. So undoubtedly, in your mind, double bunking and overcrowding is dangerous. Very much so. Alex, is that an environment that encourages people to go from bad to good? No. It's anything but. It just embitters them. That sort of proximity, it's a dehumanising environment. Sure, it's hard for the guards, and I know there are plenty out there that think it shouldn't be easy for the prisoners. We're not talking about it being easy for prisoners; we're just taking about it being humane. And if we really are a... We like to think that we're this progressive, liberal society, but when we go to this part and look at this aspect of our society, we, frankly, are miserable. You have actually written a submission, if you like, to the Justice Minister. I've read it, and in it, you say that you had not seen violence and intimidation like this before, in your experience. Yeah. Yes. I used to say I don't need to go to Antarctica to know it's cold. It's cold. But you do need to go to prison to know what prison is like, and if it wasn't so frightening, it would be fascinating. It is this unreal environment that you just can't imagine. It attacks you in every way. And I know there'll be people out there saying, 'Oh, look, you've done wrong. 'If you can't do the time, don't do the crime,' but the problem is it's supposed to be something that springboards these people back into our societies ` constructive members ` and it is doing anything but, because it is such a miserable environment. OK, well, let's address that issue. Lance, Alex is saying there'll be people ` and he's right ` saying prisoners deserve this. 'You did the crime; do the time. 'It's punishment that you're getting.' But evidence shows that it's not working, so I'm wondering, how does the government convince the voters that this is not the right thing? Firstly, you've got to take a step back. New Zealand is a society that hasn't addressed the following issues ` poverty, homelessness, social deprivation, family violence, gangs, unemployment, inequalities in a lot of areas. So because we have that in our society, that's a breeding ground for crime, so if you want to address these issues, that's where you've got to start. You've got to start addressing those issues. Then you've got to look at the whanau who are in prison. A lot of these people have numeracy/literacy issues. They might have been born into foetal alcohol syndrome. They potentially could have mental health issues. We know a huge amount have traumatic brain injury. So they're actually going into the wrong system. They're going into a justice system, and they should really be going into a health system. So there's a whole bunch of people in prison at the moment that you believe don't belong there. Correct. Other facilities. So not only do they not belong there, when they're going there, they're not getting the appropriate support mechanisms to help them rehabilitate, because they don't have the appropriate brain rehabilitation organisations or the skillsets to deal with mental health issues or the behavioural issues that the community has within the prison system. Yeah. You nodded your head. Do you agree that there are a lot of people in there that are better served somewhere else? I do. In that report, I think it said there's 91% of all those within prisons have got mental or substance issue problems. We're faced with dealing with persons who are sent to prison. We don't have the training to deal with people with mental health issues. I will just follow up on one of Alex's comments ` staff within prisons don't see that they need to punish people within the prisons on a daily basis. They're there to manage them. The punishment's already been metered out. It's not our job to punish anyone any further. But I think that there are many people within the prison environment who should be elsewhere. Yeah. OK, Steve, one of the issues that has arisen is that we tightened bail laws as a country in 2013, roundabout, and that's led to a big increase in the prison population in terms of remand prisoners. So do we need to change those laws back, or what would that look like? I think there is no doubt that we are sending far too many people to prison. That's generally. Then you look at the Maori population in prison; that's a disgrace. And it's just that we've had 30 years of governments, political parties of all hues, outbidding themselves on tough-on-crime policies because they see it as vote winners. What we do need to do is depoliticise the debate about criminal justice. We need to be mature enough to talk about it in an apolitical sense rather than in a vote-catching sense. And to that extent, I congratulate the current minister of justice, Andrew Little, for having the courage to actually say some of these things that he's been saying the last few weeks, because it's the first time in my career that I can remember a minister of justice having the courage to actually say, 'We need to be talking about this stuff, and we need to be dealing with it in a different way.' Lance, Steve's raised there the fact that he thinks it's disgraceful, the number of Maori people who are in jail, and they're overrepresented at all stages of the justice system. That suggests conscious or unconscious racism or bias. How do we change that? I'm not sure if there's such a word as unconscious racism. I think it's just racism. That's what I call it. OK. How we change it is you've got to acknowledge there has been major hardship for Maori in Maori communities over history. There's been land confiscation, there's been loss of language, there's been loss of culture, there's been negative policies for a number of times. And then you have urbanisation, etc, etc. And when I go back to my original point where we have domestic violence, we have unemployment, we have social deprivation, we have poverty ` predominantly Maori are overrepresented in that space as well. So if you wanted to address the whole system to change, address all those leaders that go into the prison system. Look at the corrections and the justice system. It needs a major overhaul. When Maori go to jail twice as much as non-Maori for exactly the same crime, that's not unconscious racism; that's racism, so there needs to be conscious efforts to say, 'How do you reverse that?' And then how you reverse it is you include Maori in that conversation. Restorative justice programmes work very well. They're cost-effective. They're good for the victim and the perpetrator; that's what the evidence says. So there are other methodologies of doing it. Don't look away Maori for low-level drug offences or fines. There's other ways of dealing with that, rather than, as you were saying, being punitive on every particular crime. And similar to what you were touching on there is strong whanau connections, family connections. You were mainly in a jail in South Auckland, Alex. How many hours a week were you allowed visitors? Oh, it was only a fraction of an hour. It was 45 minutes a week. Yeah. So let's think about that for a moment. You've got a situation where we know that, upon release ` and the vast majority of these prisoners are will be released, so they're going to be somebody's neighbour ` your chances of reoffending are vastly reduced, they're reduced by a factor of 8:1, if you are returning to a strong whanau and support network. The best way of maintaining those sorts of networks, those sorts of relationships, is through visits. And New Zealand's most modern prison has got the worst visiting regime, so I could not get my wider network involved in my time there because they would only ever be coming at the expense of my family, and I was never going to deny them that, of course. Yeah, 45 minutes a week. I'm just wondering, is that because of staffing issues, Paul, or is that the way it works? I'm unsure, because that's a private provider, unfortunately. Of course. Yeah. So I don't know how they run their regimes there. Elsewhere in the prison system ` certainly Otago, where I'm from ` two hours a week is what a prisoner could expect. Right. And still, that's not much family contact when family ties are what you are partly saying brings people back on to the straight and narrow. I want to talk about gangs before we go to the break. Paul, gang members reoffend at nearly twice the rate of other people. I mean, how's the problem being managed in jails? They're supposed to be gang-neutral environments. What can you tell us about that? I'm not sure you` (LAUGHS) They're anything but. Come on. I'm not sure you could have a gang-neutral environment. The gangs are a problem. They're a problem within prisons. They're a problem in society, because prisons are a reflection on society. How they're being managed is we keep them separate as much as we can. Is it working? Is what you're doing working, do you think, in that space? I think it is to a certain` It's not. I think it is to a certain extent, because otherwise there'd be more incidents of violence between gangs. OK. Alex, you think not. What's your impression? The gangs prosper. The place is run by gangs. In what sense? Oh... This is their family; this is the safety net they have; this is what they know, and so there are a dozen families, a dozen gangs, and they're just all pervasive throughout the whole prison system. We're just fooling ourselves. We need to acknowledge the reality of this. We can't hide behind these platitudes. I'm sorry. The place is broke. We need to fix it up. It starts back in the community. You are not a health worker. There are way too many patients in there, not prisoners. Who would blame anyone responding to a gang environment? We're human beings; we cry out for social contacts and connectedness, so it's naive to break them down. It's better to work with them. Some of the safest wings were where officers were working with constructive gang members and working with a gang rather than against a gang. All right. We're going to have to go to a break shortly, but very quickly, Steve, Corrections has an operating budget of about $1.4 billion. How much of that do you think should go towards prevention and rehabilitation? At the moment about 14% goes to rehabilitation and reintegration. I'm no expert. I don't hold myself as an expert in how Corrections should spend its money. But you do look at some of the Scandinavian countries that put much more of their resources into rehabilitation programmes than they do into jails, and they have the lowest recidivism rates. Now, I don't know what the figures should be. I know that it's roughly $100,000 a year to incarcerate a prisoner full-time. That's $100,000 that I think you could send at least four of five people through drug rehab. All right, we'll talk more about that after the break. We do have to go to a break. But stay with us. We'll be back shortly with our panel. Welcome back. We're discussing the justice system with Paul Dennehy, Lance Norman, Alex Sweeney and Stephen Bonnar. Lance, research suggests that targeting at-risk kids early can reduce the risk of them becoming criminals. You're doing work around that area. Is that where we should be spending the money? It's totally where we should be spending` Everything should be a preventative methodology. So we know that truancy is a lead indicator for potential incarceration. So not every truant is going to prison, but there's a high likelihood people who are in prison have been regularly truant. So if we were to focus on that and get our kids back into school ` firstly, they're getting an education achievement, which is positive; but secondly, we're reducing that flow into the prison system. So we need to invest heavily in preventative and strength-based initiatives prior to getting into the system. Once you're in the system, it's just a management of which pathway you're going through, but you've got to try and minimise how you get people into that system. Some people regard that as profiling, and it makes people uncomfortable. What's your view on that? See, you might call it profiling; I call it needs assessment based on what the community requires. If the community requires better social support mechanisms or cheaper health systems or better education pathways, and a particular grouping happens to be in that grouping, that's not profiling. That's just supporting a community based on the needs of that community. Alex, about 70% of prisoners, Corrections says, go through rehab courses a year, but we still have these terrible reoffending rates ` about 49% of all released prisoners bounce back within five years. So what's wrong with the rehab that's being offered? Well, it's very superficial, to be honest with you. It's ticking the boxes. It's justice by ticking the boxes. And they're being played too, you know? People just do it to get out. It's all with a view to getting out. So, all I see here ` Lance, this is gold, what we're getting here ` but out there in New Zealand, the narrative is owned by these ambulance chasers with this way outdated view of looking for the next sensational case and the next victim in court and what we're going to go and do to the perpetrator of the crime, rather than looking` we need to acknowledge the victim's plight, and there'll be a deterrent element in the prison` but we need to look at that prisoner and how they ended up there. Their path there was inevitable in so many cases. As a society, we need to think how did` the average reading age there of between 7 and 8 years of age, it's no wonder that person arrived there. So as a society, we need to be saying to ourselves, 'We've let these people down, and they have ended up here. Now we have to make them better.' And I can just see them rolling their eyes. Frankly, it is just dumb politics that says being tough on crime is building more prisons. Look, we need to draw a line in the sand, New Zealand, and say, 'Do not build Waikeria. Do not build this extra prison out there.' That will be like an obese person letting their belt out, thinking they're losing weight. We will fill it. Our incarceration rates are already 50% higher than our convict neighbours across the ditch who cheat at cricket, you know? And we want to go and get worse. And, look, no one's suggesting that you don't need prisons for the worst offenders and for the safety of the community, but the issue is we are imprisoning people who don't need to be imprisoned. Well, who doesn't need to be there? What prisoners` The person that stole $40,000 worth of honey yesterday. OK, so what prisoners would you, kind of, suggest are better served by other sentences? I think we need to have a good look at drug sentencing. The length of sentences which are being handed out for drug dealing offences` and, look, I'm not suggesting that drug dealers don't` ...deserve some kind of punishment? ...deserve some kind of punishment, but we're getting lengthier and lengthier sentences. The war on drugs, so to speak, has not worked. We've lost that. We've been incredibly tough sentencing on drugs for 30 years. Are there less drugs in New Zealand than there were before? No. What do you think about that, Paul? The war on drugs or` Just the fact that there's a suggestion here from Steve that there are a bunch of people who would be better served serving their sentence somewhere other than jail. Do you see that with the people you're dealing with? I think that's true. I think we're already amongst the highest in the OECD for people on community based detention. The reality of the situation facing the current prison situation though is that we do need the new build at Waikeria. As loath as we are as a society to build it, we are at breaking point in terms of our current capacity. So let's do what we do better, rather than expand what we're doing wrong. So, look, here's a terrible situation, we've got so many` the first third of the punitive part of it. So, you should be rolling up to parole ready to be released. 6% get out on their first parole, because there aren't enough case managers. We're worried about the teacher ratios ` you know, one teacher per 30 children ` we've got one case manager per 60 prisoners. So they just aren't getting the care` At the prison you were in? That's what you had? At the prison I was in, yeah, on a good day. It was generally worse than that. And so we don't need more guards, we need more case managers to prepare these prisoners so they're better when they are released. And people just can't get into some of the rehab programmes that they need to do to get through the parole system. I mean, that's the part of the problem as well. I mean, that's quite right. We do` Do you feel you've got enough staff? We don't` Why would you want a larger prison when the existing system isn't working? And in Peter Gluckman's report here, he talks` and he's bang on the money when he says, 'We are tinkering with a system within a system.' The system is broke. You don't spend more money on that sort of system. Let's just hear from Paul about whether you think you've got enough staff in the right places and are prison officers engaged in rehabilitation? We don't have enough staff. The police have increased their numbers. Increased police numbers mean increased arrests. Increased arrests mean increased people going to prison. We need the new facility, as loath as we are, because we haven't got enough capacity now. Do we have enough case managers, programme facilitators` No, but we haven't` I'm sorry, we haven't got enough capacity because we are sentencing, we aren't treating, we aren't` all the stuff in the back that Lance talks about, we are not doing. True. However, we need to deal with it now. And we need to make a decision now. OK, let's deal with it now. Let's deal with it now by doing the stuff we should be doing, that we claim we are doing in prisons. All right, I want to suggest a couple of` well, some people regard these as radical suggestions. So, Lance, what do you think about raising the Youth Court age to 23? Because research suggests that people have run out their criminal offending by about that age. What would you think of that? I would agree with that, but there's a number of things that need to be changed ` restorative justice and investment initiatives, review of the bail laws, a lot of these crimes could be done easily by being bailed to a residential address, a review of the Drugs Act. All of these things need to be reviewed concurrently. Currently, cannabis ` a Class C drug ` can be up to a three-month imprisonment or a $500 fine. That's possession. That's for possession. So a $500 fine is relatively light. Going to jail for three months is at least $25,000 to the taxpayer. Why wouldn't we say it's a $500 fine and go and do some community service. Why is it even an option for the Ministry of Justice? OK, well, I just want to ask you, do we need a sentencing commission? Because there was a suggestion around inconsistency in sentencing ` that some people were getting harsher penalties for the same types of crimes. Do we need a review of that? I don't know whether this sentencing commission is the answer, if this commission is simply going to be saying we need longer sentences, or if any sentencing commission is simply going to be reflecting a public panic or is penal populism, as Peter Gluckman refers to it. We just need to... A sentencing commission may give us some more consistency, in terms of sentencings, but I don't know that that will necessarily answer the question of whether we should be sending a particular person to prison or not. Right. There was another idea that was floated before the election ` it was by ACT's David Seymour. And he came up with this idea of giving prisoners discounts on their sentences for educational achievement ` you could earn up to six weeks off your sentence for gaining literacy, numeracy skills and getting a driver's licence. I haven't agreed with a lot of ACT penal policy over the last few years, but that was one policy that did seem to make some sense to me. If you can incentivise people to educate themselves, then it must be a positive thing. Could I talk on that? Because I did take literacy lessons. There was two elements of it ` literacy and yoga ` that I was involved in within the prison. And we had some uptake, but it was just so depressing how little it was. And even when they did it, they were doing it for their own good, but without any confidence it was going to make any difference to their parole chances. So if someone` And the few that I knew were trying to get tertiary qualifications ` extraordinarily difficult to do. Now, these are people in there trying to make good of their time. So they should get credit for that, you think, in terms of parole hearings, etc? Yes. And I see no sign of that. It needs to be formalised. To be fair, I think the Parole Board takes account of that sort of stuff. No. I saw no signs of that at all. Really? Yeah. And it needs to be formalised. It's not formalised. I agree. I agree some formal incentives should be a good thing. But my experience is at least the Parole Board, when considering community safety, do take into account educative programmes. But it should be formalised, so you know if you're doing this, you're being incentivised to do it. And it's not. I agree with that. We're gonna have to go in a second. I want a chance to ask Lance, should ethnicity be considered as a mitigating factor when considering sentencing? Because some countries ` for example Canada has given special consideration to First Nations people. I think if you introduce those rules, it becomes a little bit complicated. But I think you have to have an appreciation that some ethnicities are more over-represented for other reasons, and therefore could be dealt with differently. But I think if you start` because that comes back to your profiling question. I think there needs to be an acknowledgement that Maori are over-represented in prisons, notwithstanding ` it's over 50%. There's been continuous hardship from 1840 until today on a bunch of things. And the systems need to reflect that hardship and that... the needs of that community. And it doesn't mean you're gonna get treated differently, but there needs to be an appreciation, and there not only needs to be an appreciation, we need to stop being racist against Maori in the system. So, in my view, there's five things that are a solution here. You need to look at the preventative measures. You asked before the budget on Corrections, on $1.4 billion. So I'd rather have a conversation about the $80 billion the government has, and where that's allocated. We need to invest in social community programmes. We need to make sure that there's no pathways into prison, if you're in prison, there's pathways out of prison. It's clear we need to keep this conversation going. But at least we have started it this morning. Thank you all for joining me this morning. We did invite the Department of Corrections to join us in this discussion, but they declined. If you've got something to say about what you saw on the show, let us know. We're on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Or you can email us at nation@mediaworks.co.nz. This week Parliament passed a law enabling hundreds of men to have their historical homosexual sex convictions wiped. It was a particularly significant moment for one man that we have followed since 2016, as he campaigned to be free from the stigma of convictions he's had for decades. On Thursday the journey ended in a meeting with the Justice Minister to tell him what it means to have that record cleared. Mike Wesley-Smith was there. This man we'll call John is one of about a thousand men still alive who were convicted simply for being gay. I don't think we` I don't think anyone had to be put through the court system for what they are. So angry? Yeah, it still lives with me today. Decades ago, people rallied at Parliament to preach prejudice. I don't love homosexuals. As far as I'm concerned, you can stay in the gutter! But today John is here to meet with the politicians who helped pass the law allowing his convictions to be quashed. Those of that opinion will say 'aye'. MP'S: Aye. To the contrary, 'no'. The ayes have it. (APPLAUSE) Probably the best thing that has happened in modern history. John's come here to say thanks. He's grateful but also a bit anxious. How are you feeling now? WHISPERS: Nervous, man. Nervous? Yes, nervous. You'll be fine. You're both union men. Well, that's true. Once inside, the nerves weren't a problem. Come in. Thank you. Nice to meet you. John told Andrew Little about a justice system deeply prejudiced against gay men and police who used threats of public shaming in newspapers to get results. The cops rang my lawyer and said, 'Tell him to plead guilty, or we'll make sure it goes in The Truth.' You're joking. No, I'm not joking. The other two or three times I was caught, I would call it entrapment, cos they were hiding in the toilets. I mean, you see that on TV, but that did happen. And then they'd open the door, and 'pow!' Were they targeting you, do you think? Yes, I do. But I can't prove that. What was the attitude of the judges like? I remember one judge saying to me, 'No idea what to do with you. 'You've got such good reports from everybody.' I think he put me on community service or something. The Minister says he's pleased the law passed, a bill first introduced by his predecessor, Amy Adams. A real hallmark of this law was that it was unanimous. Parliament was unanimous. And it showed you that, left and right, it should just not be the province of politics to argue about your rights because of your sexual identity. You'll get that expunged. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, cool. Yay! (LAUGHS) I'm happy about that one. It was a short meeting. Really do appreciate it. Well, thanks for coming down. But for John, it was meaningful. What will it mean to see those convictions gone? A huge relief. And a clean record. And a clean record. And still to come, we dissect the week's political news with our panel but first, we talk to filmmaker Tony Sutorius about a new Helen Kelly documentary and his fight to include controversial footage from inside Pike River Mine. After being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, Helen Kelly stood down as president of the Council of Trade Unions, but she never stopped fighting for what she thought was right. Now, almost two years after her death, a new documentary details the battle she faced during her final months ` for her health and for the causes she believed in. Filmmaker Tony Sutorius spent a year with Helen Kelly. I asked him if she ever felt like giving up. So Friday I'll have chemotherapy and radiation and meet Workers Union mediation. (CHUCKLES) They don't really sound like they go together, do they? This is the work I want to do. I'm sure that the things I'm doing are the things I would prioritise, but I just haven't quite figured out how to prioritise my time. I think I've taken on too much. It became clearer as she became sicker that it wasn't certain that she'd make it to the end of those battles, and they were very intractable. Yeah, she hesitated, and she had, I think, some dark moments, but she was very, very determined and a very brave leader, I think. She kept it to herself a lot of the time when she was really sick, and a lot of people really struggled to believe how sick she was when it became really obvious. So, yeah, she did have some doubts, but she didn't share them very often. So one of the big issues that did dominate that last year of her life was Pike River. How do you think she would feel about the way things sit at the moment with that? I think she'd be delighted with the incredible achievements of the Pike River families. They were really inspired by her, and they were really tough in their own right anyway. After she died, I think they kind of crossed another Rubicon and they decided that it was time to fight back, and they did. I knew them by then. We were mates. So it was really interesting to see that from the inside. They found another level of bravery about being judged by New Zealand and just decided to push through it. That's Helen's inspiration. Yeah, I was gonna say, do you think that was in part because of the way they saw her acting? Absolutely. Helen had a really strong view that New Zealand is very tough on anyone who stands up, anyone who argues back. She used to say all the time we're like a fishing village and no one wants to upset the fleet owners for fear of what might happen to them. It was interesting to watch people look at her. They would pull back a little bit because they would think lightning would strike her when she would say these things, but it didn't. And I think it inspired a lot of people to be braver. That was probably Helen's greatest legacy, actually. Someone said it at her memorial service ` she left you feeling braver. Yeah, she wasn't afraid to poke the tiger, was she? Not at all. In fact, she took a certain amount of glee in it sometimes, I think. She was very happy to do that. Now, in this movie, you are hoping to use some footage from inside Pike River, the mine, that has never been seen before. That's right. What does it show? The footage was filmed four months after the last fire and explosion had gone out, and it's acknowledged, in fact, by the police and by the chief executive of Solid Energy that it does show a fully-intact, clothed miner. He's lying on the ground. He has his knees slightly raised. You can see the tread on his boots. And to be clear, the significance of that is what, in the context of this? I think New Zealanders will remember that Police Commissioner Howard Broad was saying, at the same time that this image was shot, that all they were were a pile of ashes and the families just had to accept there was nothing there and it was time to walk away. It wasn't true. If you look at these images down the mine, there's wooden pallets, there's plastic buckets, there's rubber hoses. It wasn't an inferno down here. That was simply never true. So why do you think that this film would be the right forum to show that footage? When you see down into the mine and when you understand the journey of the Pike River families, you understand that, in a really literal way, the Pike River miners, the Pike River 29, are New Zealand's skeletons in the closet, you know. It's this horrible example of everyone deciding it's too hard or politically, you know, just undesirable to do the decent and obviously right thing. And these families have been asked to just suck that up on behalf of the government and the rest of us. It's horribly unfair, and it just feels obscene and yuck, and it's the sort of thing New Zealand, you would think, would never stand for. I think that's a very good way of explaining Helen's drive. It's something that she saw in New Zealand ` that a lot of us like to not see or perhaps have never seen, but it's there. And do you think that, in the context of telling her story and her involvement ` cos you see a lot of Helen Kelly with the Pike River family in your film ` that that is why it is the right place as well? Yeah, I think the Pike River families feel that it's the right place because they know that Helen was an essential part of their journey and was kind of like their spirit animal, in a way; she got them up, she got them moving, she got them fighting, and they're now winning, and it's because of Helen's inspiration. You know how kids sort of play at going to shops or doing whatever. One day apparently I was walking out with a little suitcase, and Mum said, Where are you going?' and I said, 'I'm going to a meeting.' We had another young kid living with us the same age of me ` Albie. We would play campaigning and meetings and offices. While all the other kids in New Zealand were playing other games, he and I would be organising the next protest. She was raised by very activist parents. She had a house in her childhood that was full of people. Yes. I'm kind of wondering, could she be anything else, having been raised in that environment? Yeah, I think she could. Actually, there's a lot of people who were raised in similar environments from that time who didn't go on to become Helen Kelly. I think that the legacy that it left her with is not quite the obvious one. It's not just the politics that she got from that; it's actually the humanism. That's the most important thing. She was remarkable in this way. She would engage with absolutely anyone she met on the same basis. They could be a forest feller or a coal miner or the prime minister; they were all the same in her evaluation. That's a profound thing, cos New Zealanders all think we're like that, but when you see someone who actually does operate that way, we're really not. It's a different thing. In your film, there's a scene where there's a big fry-up. There seems to be a ton of people in her house. I think some of them are going to a concert. And I'm wondering to myself, does this woman ever separate herself from work? Does she ever go home and close the door and go, 'OK, that's it. This is me time now'? Perhaps occasionally, but I have to say I never saw it. I think one of the defining characteristics that Helen had was that she didn't have this big line between her private and her professional lives. I found that really, really hard to understand at first, because as a filmmaker and a journalist, you think you have to have that, but she really didn't. She allowed people that she came across in her professional dealings to become her mates. And they did become her mates, and then she just helped them when they were in trouble, and that's basically what she did. There are very few, for example, political figures who would actually have day-to-day relationships with people across the spectrum of New Zealand society. Helen really, truly did. They were her friends. That is the big difference about Helen, actually. That's why she sounded different when she spoke ` because it was coming from a real, genuine, human place. She knew these people. Kia ora koutou, everybody. It's lovely to see you all here. I'm Helen Kelly. I was the president of the CTU. I'm nobody now. I'm just here to say hello. A lot of people will be wondering that if they were given a finite amount of time to live, which, in essence, is what happened to her, would they use every ounce of that to battle for other people, which, in essence, is what she did. Was her family happy with that? Was she happy with that ` to be fighting right up to the end for all these causes. She didn't spend every single second on it. I mean, she did` she put some time into herself and more time into her family, so I don't think they felt neglected. Yeah. But, um, yeah, I mean, I spoke with Dylan, her son, about it, and he said, 'Well, that was Mum.' Everybody knew. No one was surprised. (CHUCKLES) It's just how she rolled. It's probably that same thing. It's like not having that big line that, you know, when people think that if they found out they were dying, they would, sort of, leap on to the family side of the equation, and that's where they would stay. She didn't have a separate part of her life, so she kept doing the things that she cared about. The other thing is that you go places here in this film which have not been seen publicly before. You followed her when she had radiation treatment, and she went in to the hospital for chemotherapy. What was it like to be there? And how did she see that? Having you there filming? I mean, Helen was a strong self-advocate, and if she thought that something was kind of, you know, not appropriate, she had no hesitation at all in biffing me out. But actually, she wasn't concerned about letting me in and letting me see what it was like. It was the strangest thing. She never equivocated about how sick she was. She never beat around the bush. She would just` No. And yet no one really believed her, because she had just this amazing life force all the time. She championed the use of medicinal cannabis and came out publicly and said she was using it. Did you ever see her using it? Did you ever meet anyone who was giving her the product? Um, no, I stayed away from that deliberately, because I didn't want to create legal risk for anybody. There would have been the potential for my footage to be, you know, taken by the police if that had happened. But, you know, she would tell me about it. It was quite funny, actually. She would come home, and there would be things just piled up on her doorstep. People from all over the country were sending her all kinds of lotions and potions. (CHUCKLES) So, cannabis product, you mean? Yeah. Piled up at the doorstep? Absolutely. And it really did` It made an important material difference. It's one of the important reasons why she was able to just keep going each day, cos she wasn't feeling sick, you know? She could eat, and she could keep working. So, I'll take the cannabis for my cancer. And this minister there, that's Peter Dunne. And he's meant to be able to give me approval to take it legally. And he's pissed off, because I've raised it as a public issue. So, what do you think her attitude to dying was? What did you learn about that during the year? I think she was pretty pissed off about it. I mean, you know, I don't think she was really sanguine about it. But what she said to me was that everybody dies. And, you know, in this day and age, we're a bit protected from that knowledge, and we all act surprised and horrified, but, you know, 100 years ago, everyone would've just considered it perfectly normal. So she was fundamentally reasonably accepting, but she was very frustrated that there was going to be work still to do. And she was worried that some of the people who she` who needed her help, she wasn't going to get them far enough down the track to be able to continue without her. So she was a bit scared about that. I can actually remember her coming to be on Newshub Nation, and she was in the Green Room reading a book about how to die gracefully. Mm. Did she manage that, do you think? Oh, look, I think it was, sort of, as magnificent as that experience could be. She was surrounded by love, by everybody that she knew and then by her closest family right at the end. Everything was said. And I think she had inspired the people who needed to keep fighting to do it. And importantly, she'd brought them together. It's one of the most interesting things Helen did was she brought people from Pike River to people from forestry to people from other industrial situations and got them talking to each other and realising how similar, fundamentally, their battles were and that they could help each other, particularly women. They started to really be able to step through the social barriers to say no and fighting and standing up. That was a profoundly important thing. And it was happening right around her deathbed. She was literally lying on her deathbed giving people instructions about what to do. It was funny, sort of. (CHUCKLES) Tony Sutorius' documentary on Helen Kelly will be released in cinemas on the 19th of September ` Suffrage Day. Well, still to come, Green MP Golriz Ghahraman talks about receiving online threats so bad they were referred to Interpol. But first we catch up with our panel, PR consultant Trish Sherson, sociologist Jarrod Gilbert and political commentator and unionist Morgan Godfery. Welcome back. I'm joined now by our panel ` PR consultant Trish Sherson, sociologist Jarrod Gilbert and writer and trade unionist Morgan Godfery. Good morning to you all. Talking about justice this morning, Andrew Little has signalled that we can expect some changes, and that we need to have some changes. Alex Swney, we spoke to him this morning, he spent two years in jail. He says the gangs are running the place, Jarrod. This is your area of expertise. He reckons we should be working with them, taking some more radical steps. I think it's probably unfair to say that the gangs are running the prison, per se. But we do know that they have a significant influence among inmate culture ` that's a given. And we know at certain times in Serco-run prison ` I think I was here talking to you about that, when Serco were having problems and the gangs were in actual fact running large tracts of that prison. Do we need to work with them? I think we've got to a point where we don't have much option. For such a long time we've looked at the gangs and said we're just going to legislate them out of existence or beat them out of existence, and it hasn't really happened. The gangs have endured. The leadership now is maturing. They're giving every indication, in many instances, of wanting to change. I think we've got an opportunity now to reach in and try to work with them. It's a brave thing to do, but this whole area now is about being brave. And I think that is one area we need to do it. Are people brave enough, Morgan? I mean, we're talking there about 90% of Maori` sorry, 90% of our top two gangs in New Zealand are Maori. And Maori are over-represented in these statistics. So are people brave enough to take those steps? Yeah, I think we're brave enough. If you just look over the last 10 years, the conversation has changed dramatically. 10 years ago, you would not have been able to say that we have to work with gangs, or we have to work with prisoners to ensure that we keep them out of there. You couldn't say that. But now that's a given. That's a truism nowadays. So I think we are brave enough. I think the politics has moved on. Nowadays, people are saying if you want to keep gang members or whoever out of prison, make sure their kids are in decent schools, give them a job, make sure they have health care to go to when they need it. Do you think, though, we are at that stage, Trish? Because while the politicians might be starting to talk about it, they need voters. They need to bring voters on board. Are they gonna do that? Yeah, well, that's right. And I wonder, too, about in the system itself, how mature it is around these things. So some of the work that the Howard League for Penal Reform is doing is absolutely amazing. Now, they currently have the ability to get 500 teachers into prisons. They've taken over a thousand mainly Maori probationers and taught them to read and write and get their driver's licence. Their literacy programmes are amazing, and they're just about to graduate their first te reo classes. But the issue that they have is there is no centralised system to deal with, so it's on an individual prison basis. So some prisons they can get in and do the work. Some prisons, like Christchurch, they can get in and run the classes, but they are not allowed to have their graduation ceremonies. And Tony Gibbs, who is the president of Howard League, one of the most powerful stories he told me was an older Maori man who was at a graduation ceremony, had his whanau there, got his certificate, and he said to Tony, 'This is the first certificate I have ever received in my life.' And the power of all of that combined` So the system needs to be adaptable to this kind of stuff. The system needs to be adaptable and go, 'Hey, what are the basic things we can do for people and with people while they're in the system?' I think one of the great things about what the Howard League is doing is it's bringing people into the prison. So we're not saying, 'Corrections will just take care of this.' It's actually involving the community, which we need to do far more of. And what does that do, too? You have the teachers ` and a lot of them are ex-teachers, so they're giving their time and going to prisons. They then share that out in the community. So it's a maturing and it's a new conversation. I'm wanting to know from all of you whether you think the new Waikeria Prison plan will go ahead, whether it will be built, this super prison. Jarrod? It will be built. I don't think there's any doubt about that, personally. Does that represent a failure? I think yes, it does. But I think we're in a situation where means dictate we can't have overcrowded prisons. And whilst we're having a much more mature conversation than we've ever had, I'm not entirely sure the public will take the policies that would be required to reduce the prison population so substantially that we didn't need that prison. That's a view. It's not a popular view among many people in this conversation. But I think it's a pragmatic view, and I think that's the one the government will take. Trish, what do you reckon? I think it will be built, only because time is not on our side here. We're already at overcrowding space. What interested me this morning was the guy from CANZ talking about the impact that's having on prisoners. Violence, antisocial behaviour. Violence. So, to me, it's a pressure valve release. We need to have people in humane conditions. But we've gotta reach a point now ` and that's where I thought Lance was amazing ` looking at this as a holistic issue. It is not Corrections in a silo. It is not prisons. It's all of that stuff about incredibly smart, precise, data-driven welfare, where we can now pinpoint` We're almost out of time. I want to quickly get Morgan on this. The paradox here is that we have falling crime rates, yet a rising prison population. But the problem is if you don't build the prison, then you have to do things like double-bunking, which we know Judith Collins got a lot of trouble for, because it was wrong, because it was inhumane. So you think it's inevitable too? Unless we change sentencing laws, bail laws immediately. We're gonna have to do that or build the prison. Stay with us. We'll be back after the break. Welcome back. You're with Newshub Nation and our panel. Some of the other news of the week. Clare Curran ` it's the story that doesn't seem to stop, Morgan. Is there much left to run on this, and can Clare Curran stay in her job? Well, I think it's a bit of an injustice that we lost one of the leading Maori broadcasters, one of the very few Maori journalists at RNZ over this. Why did Clare Curran now immediately correct the record when she saw what Carol Hirschfeld said publicly? And why is she still there, is the question. Why would the Prime Minister keep her there after this has happened, after this huge controversy? Why did Carol Hirschfeld have to take the hit, was the thing that I can't understand, and which I think is a really big injustice here. Trish, what do you think? I think it's a first test for the Prime Minister that she has had a fail on. One of the hardest things as prime minister is whether or not to let go a minister. And especially if that minister is well liked, has a big portfolio, is important. That is not Clare Curran. So if any minister you had to sack, this is a pretty easy one to do. And I just can't see how you would support someone like this, who you know into the future is going to continue to be a soft spot for National. This story hasn't finished yet. Someone described the Clare Curran story as the vending machine in your office that's broken and keeps giving out free things. (LAUGHTER) So if I were Ardern, I would have thought, 'This is my first real test as prime minister,' cut it off and then move on. And you've also` for the rest of your ministers, it's like a ritual burning in the town square. They're all like, 'Ooh, that's tough. OK. I'm not going to step out of line.' Jarrod? Jacinda made an error, didn't she? And I'm sure she recognises that now. Because this could have been cut off at the pass some time ago. But it keeps going and going and going. But it's early days to lose a minister, though, isn't it? Well, but what's worse? And the reason it'll keep going is cos we don't know what this meeting was about. And so there's still intrigue there, isn't there? There's still something of substance here, let alone everything around the periphery. And the phone message ` whether we get to hear the phone message or not. Now, the other thing this week was the petrol tax. Can we call it a tax? Is it a tax? Morgan, the excise going up over the next three years, which is a double whammy for Auckland motorists. But everybody's going to pay that. Yeah, it is a tax, but I think it was the only option they had. Because a comprehensive capital gains tax is off the table. A wealth tax is off the table. Income-tax rises are off the table. So it only left this. And, you know, the National government raised fuel excise taxes during its three terms as well, so it's not an entirely controversial thing. I think what really go them is this happened overnight. This is gonna happen this year; this isn't going to happen incrementally over, say, nine years. It's gonna start immediately. So to offset the impact it's going to have on low-income people in Auckland, they really need to get the public-transport projects moving, which I think they're doing. Yeah, but Jarrod, I'm wondering, as the person who lives outside of Auckland on this panel, does the rest of the country look at this and thing, 'Argh! I don't wanna pay for Auckland's problems'? Well, I think so, and hence why petrol tax is quite a good one. Because it is localised, isn't it? Or is it a national tax? So part of it's a national tax, part of it's Auckland. Suddenly I take more interest! But actually, I'm from Auckland, so I have a bit of a soft spot for it. But I don't think anybody, whether they're from Auckland or outside of it, would deny that Auckland's got an issue. I can't understand why people are still living here, actually. Once you leave Auckland and you appreciate what life is like without traffic, you begin to realise how much life your wasting, and how many` So that's the answer, eh? We should all move, Jarrod? We'd have you in the south, for sure. Trish, do you think they've managed to get away from the, 'You've bumped up taxes'? I don't think they have at all. I mean, an excise is a tax, right? Just go and have a look at the dictionary. But I think the bigger point is this ` in terms of the Roads of National Significance and getting those projects done ` in particular, look at ones like Levin to Otaki. What you're gonna have now is a classic New Zealand situation. You roar from Wellington up the two new bits of highway, then you hit a bottleneck and you sit in traffic for three or four hours. And, you know, tourism in New Zealand is one of our most important earners. You try and travel north from Auckland on a holiday weekend, you hit the same thing. So I think it's been a massive win for the Greens. I think in terms of our infrastructure in New Zealand, we are only playing catch-up. This wasn't future-proofing the infrastructure. And so I don't think it's going to be a win A) for New Zealand infrastructure or B) for constituents, because 20 cents a litre on petrol, you're a family in South Auckland who's driving in for your cleaning job, that is crippling. That is a huge amount. And the take-home message is they said no tax; this is a tax. I think, for most people at home, they're gonna say, 'Hang on a second. This is a breach of promise.' So it's not looking popular across the board. Although, in saying that, I think we would all recognise something needs to be done, and sometimes taking action is important. I think the problem here is that they made the promise of no new taxes as a political issue. Yeah. All right, thanks for joining us this morning. In this week's Ask Me Anything, Green MP Golriz Ghahraman was in the hot seat. Now, she talked about how she's coped with the extreme harassment she's received online since joining the political world. Twitter used to be such a nice, you know, like, leftie little political bubble. And now it's Trumpland. Yeah. You know, it is. I get the misogyny, I get the, 'You're too young.' Then I get the, 'Immigrants shouldn't even be allowed into politics.' The I get the real race stuff, where it's like, 'You're a terrorist. We need to load our shotguns.' You know, the real` that stuff goes up to Parliamentary Security. It has to. At one point, it was getting taken up to Interpol. Really? Cos it was getting a bit... Yeah. Well, next week we'll be speaking with National Party Senior Whip and transport spokesman Jamie Lee Ross. Do send us your questions. You can reach us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram or by email. But that is all we have time for this week. Thanks for joining us. We will see you again next weekend. Captions by Madison Batten, Elizabeth Welsh and James Brown. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2018 This programme was made with the assistance of the New Zealand On Air Platinum Fund.