Sir Don McKinnon

And then when it came to the punchline, the inmates could see it coming, and they were dead silent. That's Sir Don McKinnon, who set up the Pāremoremo Debating Club in 1972. And there's nothing worse than telling a joke, releasing the punchline, and there's dead silence. That speaker was crucified for the rest of the night.

And occasionally you'd get the very, what I call a very do-good speaker from the outside who had his or her own ideas on prison reform and would suddenly launch into a sort of a, well, of course, you know, if I was here amongst you guys, I'd be demanding this and demanding that.

And then partway through this delivery, you'd hear one inmate give a very loud yawn. And another time, a prison inmate would actually release a very loud fart. This guy's argument was utterly destroyed. What were you doing at the time that you got involved with the debating teams at Paremoremo Prison?

Well, I was living up at Long Bay at the time, which of course is only about 20 minutes from what was then the very new prison at Paramarimo, and having a bit of an association with the Auckland Debating Association. But I was at the time, I had a real estate business, I was farming a few cattle, I was doing a bit of property development, a little bit of everything.

Why debating? I mean, you know, when people think about prisoners, especially some of the country's worst criminals, convicted criminals, and debating, they doesn't feel like they go together. No, no, they're very much part of prison activity. It is a way of bringing inmates together. It is a means of drawing them out, making them talk about things, making them speak publicly and things like that. No, it is not an alien factor in prisons at all.

What are your first memories of those men? There was a degree of curiosity having a look inside this concrete steel monolith which had been built. We all knew who the main inmates were because there'd been so much publicity about them and particularly since the major riots at Mount Eden which sped up the building of Pāremaremo.

Oh, that was just a thrill. But it wasn't as though it just suddenly came. This had been a build-up for a few years. Our teams were, the prison teams were getting better and better and better. I knew that to take inmates out of Poramarama would not have been possible three years before.

But having built up slowly to a point where I could convince the then Minister of Justice that look how far these guys have got, it's worth giving them credit for that.

and allowing a team to come outside the institution for a debate. Taking two teams out for a debate was quite a handful, but on the other hand, the only revenue for the Auckland Debating Association was to have people paying to come to these debates, and that wasn't going to be possible if they stayed in the prison. We did have a couple of finals in the prison earlier on at different levels, but that was all part of the build-up.

There was a time when they were going to kidnap me. It wasn't over a hell of a big issue. I think they decided their Christmas food parcels weren't big enough or something. I got word as I came into the visiting room that night that someone just said to my ear, watch out for so-and-so. Now, I wasn't too sure who so-and-so was because I just missed the name.

But anyway, I came in and I noticed there was three guys, three inmates standing in one corner of the visiting room. I had seen them before, but they weren't regular attenders. But these were the three who were going to kidnap me.

I didn't know much, but I walked straight over to them and said, well, hi, Sully, how are you? You know, how's the family and how are the kids and all the rest of it? And by the time I'd, everywhere, all the other inmates were watching me as I went up for these particular three. And at that point, the whole idea of kidnapping me fizzed away. And was there ever any tension?

I recollected about three or four times when I went there where there was very high tension. And this was a case of something that had happened during the day. Someone might have suicided. There might have been a huge fight in one of the blocks. There might have been a fight between people.

you know, three or four guys, each members of the debating club sort of thing, a disturbance that really upset the whole prism. A couple of times I was rung to say, look, you don't need to come over, there's quite a bit of tension. We'd talk about it and I'd say, look, I'm quite happy to come over. If it helps release the tension, and in both cases it did, by going over there, letting the debate, I mean, you could cut the air with a knife when I went into the visiting room.

But by letting them go back to the normal, who's going to speak first, who's going to comment on this, who's going to be the chair of the debate sort of thing, you brought the whole, that group back to normal. So when that group went back to their cells, the tension had come down a little bit.

After three or four visits to the prison, you only know them as the individuals that are in front of you, less by whatever the crime was. The crime is just something that's in the background. And after I'd probably been there even six months, you actually forget why most of them were even there.

Did the debating make a difference to their lives, do you think? You know, did it stop them going out and committing? Are there less recidivists? Yes. I don't know. I get asked this question a lot. Did I make a difference? I think my involvement and setting up the debating club, bringing in outsiders, all the rest of it, I think it all helped.

nōralaise their life in the prison and made it a little bit easier for them to adapt to the outside world. But I can tell you some very prominent names in the debating club who came back to prison within a couple of years of going out. I can tell you others who just disappeared into the landscape and were never seen again.