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NBR Radio Weekend Rumble: special guest John Campbell gives Serco a serve

Guest panellist John Campbell joins the NBR team to discuss Serco, Labour's China crisis and more on NBR Radio and on demand via MyNBR Radio.

NBR Radio
Fri, 24 Jul 2015

Guest panellist John Campbell joins NBR’s Chris Keall, Rob Hosking, Chris Hutching and Nick Grant to throw around some of the week's top stories on NBR Radio and on demand via MyNBR Radio.

This week’s agenda: the unfolding Serco scandal,, the state of the economy, and the Auckland housing crisis and the way Labour chose to frame it.

“If we turn our prisons into things where the only thing we are worried about is reducing costs, then we’ll return people to society who are dysfunctional, who are ill-equipped to cope, who are angry, who are violent and who in many respects are worse then they went in," Mr Campbell said.

“That’s not liberal nonsense, that’s just sheer pragmatism. And Serco, it seems to me, is making a compelling case for why it shouldn’t be involved in this business.”

Our prison system, according to Mr Campbell, “is underfunded and punitive in a Victorian kind of way. It's time we took stock and thought, ‘the better we rehabilitate our prisoners, the better they will be when they get out. I don’t see that happening in a Serco prison.”

Mr Campbell also had some choice words about the Labour Party’s decision to release leaked figures about house sales to people with “Chinese-sounding names” in Auckland.

“The notion that we single out one group of people by their ethnicity and set them against 'hard-working Kiwis' is so repugnant to the values of this country,” he said. 

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NBR Radio
Fri, 24 Jul 2015
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NBR Radio Weekend Rumble: special guest John Campbell gives Serco a serve
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