Richard Chambers

It costs us about $40,000 to put one recruit through the police college.

So, you know, frankly, anybody who wants to come home and rejoin New Zealand Police, very welcome and I'm happy to help with that.

Oh, look, going offshore and experiencing policing elsewhere in the world is always going to add value.

I've done it myself when I was within Nepal.

And I think you get to appreciate what policing can be like in other parts of the world and actually puts it all in perspective.

We are incredibly lucky to be Kiwis.

We're very lucky to be police officers in this country.

So I've got no issue with some.

wanting to go offshore and experience it elsewhere because, you know, they come home and, frankly, they probably come home better, realising actually that what New Zealand Police does is pretty much world-leading, the way we police and what we have to do our job.

Oh, look, I mean, I don't get into that.

I said very early on in my tenure, Mike, that what mattered was quality.

I was not prepared and I'm not prepared to drop standards today

to make sure that we hit that number.

I want quality police officers because I know that that's what Kiwis want too.

So yeah, I've set very clear standards and expectations and if we select the wrong people to be police officers in our country, we spend many more years trying to fix things.

We're on track later this year to hit that 500, but we'll have 500 outstanding cops.

And we've also had about 100 rejoin since January last year who have left police and done other things in New Zealand.

Some of those have come back from Australia, but they've tried a few things outside policing.

So I think that says a lot about who we are as an organisation and what it means to be a police officer in New Zealand.

People of the Republic of China is the biggest risk factor in not only the Taiwan Straits, but in the Indo-Pacific region.