Katene Rahui: Legal Services Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Katene Rahui: Legal Services Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:659;Page:8494] 
RAHUI KATENE (Maori Party—Te Tai Tonga) 
: 
 This is an extraordinarily apt time to be considering the affect of the legislation that governs our legal services. The Government is of course at this stage involved in a consultation process to improve Government agencies’ responses to victims of crime. The point of that process is to find solutions about how to enhance the rights and role of victims in criminal justice processes. This consultation process itself comes hot on the heels of the release of the legal aid review. The report  
Transforming the Legal Aid System 
 states as one of its basic premises that an efficient and effective court system is central to effective access to justice and within that having a more satisfactory process for victims and witnesses is critical. But there is a statement in that report that is particularly relevant to this bill today. In the section on customer services the report notes that the court system tends to focus on the perpetrators of crime and only to a lesser extent on victims. The families of perpetrators of crime however are generally ignored. This is part of the tragic context of a justice system that insists on defining and separating out people as victims as perpetrators as children but rarely as members of a family. The shame of that approach is that the potential for families to live better lives and to wrap loving arms around an offender so as to avoid patterns of offending into the future is effectively neglected. 
The Legal Services Amendment Bill introduces a new definition of victim. A victim now also includes a parent or a legal guardian of a child or young person or a member of the immediate family of a person who has died or is rendered incapable by an offence. This is very significant in that it is moving towards a justice system that reflects and responds to the community rather than isolates out individual offenders. All of us will know someone who has had a brush with the law. Indeed in the life of this Parliament there have been members who have had various encounters with the police the courts or the corrections system. And so all of us also have the potential to empathise with the families and loved ones of offenders. We understand the traumatic impact of incarceration upon a family; we know the toll taken. The Maori Party knows also the heavy burden borne by far too many of our people. Maori have a higher risk of victimisation across all offence types and this is especially so for Maori women. Maori are also far more likely to be victimised multiple times. The risk of victimisation for Maori is particularly high for serious offences such as sexual violence and violence by partners. One of the most staggering statistics to my mind is that 18 percent of Maori women who had a partner were victimised at least once compared to 5 percent of all non-Maori. These results are too disturbing to table in this House without doing all that we can to address them. 
Faced then with this situation we are now looking at legislation that is to respond to the situation of victims facing additional stress when fronting up to the justice sector. The bill will ensure that victims of crime attending a Parole Board hearing or coronial inquest will not be subject to financial eligibility testing. It stipulates also that any grants made will not have repayment conditions attached. Another factor of this bill is that the Legal Services Agency will write off legal aid debt where the individual circumstances of persons who have received legal aid make it inequitable to seek recovery. Again I think about the disproportionate numbers of Maori who are seeking legal aid and who are struggling to make their way through seemingly insurmountable barriers. Maori and Pasifika persons feature strongly amongst those most likely to experience problems in accessing legal assistance. In Dame Margaret Bazley’s opinion if the legal system fails Maori it fails altogether. One of the key recommendations in her report is that the legal system needs to focus on the legal needs of Maori and Pasifika peoples and the barriers they face in accessing legal aid with a view to enhancing their access over time. I will add to that: let us in this House make sure that it is in quick time not in time that is dragging on for decades to come. I refer again to the report I spoke about yesterday written by my father and Dr Oliver Sutherland in 1973 which concluded that there were two standards of justice in the courts of New Zealand. It was their analysis that Maori offenders were at a disadvantage in the courts and in the main did not receive just and fair treatment. I quote from the report: “the administrators of justice in New Zealand will have to recognise that in this regard they themselves rather than the Maori offenders are the problem”. 
Thirty-six years later then what are we doing to properly address the difficulties that many Maori applicants for legal aid still face? In the  
Report on the 2006 National Survey of Unmet Legal Needs and Access to Services  
the results for Maori revealed that the perceived costs of lawyers’ fees prevented a significant number of Maori from seeking help—more so than New Zealanders on average. Over a third of Maori with problems felt that perceived costs had stopped them from approaching a lawyer to help them with their problem or to see whether they could get legal aid. The problem area where cost was the greatest barrier to accessing such services from a lawyer was in whanau or relationship breakdowns. For consumer-related problems a category where Maori were least likely to seek help cost was also a relatively significant issue. 
This bill in itself will not magically address longstanding issues dating back over decades about the inequitable treatment of Maori within the justice system. It is also a bill that is being debated in the context of considerable upheaval within the sector and particularly in relation to the Legal Services Agency. The Maori Party will support this bill as it is an important step in seeking a direction for the justice system. Of course we will always support any attempt to ensure that people gain adequate access to justice. However there are many other issues that we want to see addressed including the aspiration of a justice system strategy based on kaupapa Maori and within the context of Maori cultural values. These are issues that my colleague the Hon Dr Pita Sharples is pursuing in the Drivers of Crime work programme and in the context of the future work ahead the Maori Party is delighted to support this bill as a move in the right direction.