Goff Phil: Legal Assistance Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Legal Assistance Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11586. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):I want to pick up on a couple of points that the Minister in the chair Chester Borrows has just made. He repeats the justification for a bill that in the end could not be justified. That is why when we look at Part 2 of the Legal Assistance Amendment Bill as in Part 1 page after page of the bill is struck out. Even “(Sustainability)” in the title is struck out. Can I suggest that the reason that the word “sustainability” has been struck out is that in relation to what the National Government was proposing in terms of fairness in terms of decency and in terms of having a justice system that actually deserves that title there was not anything that was sustainable in the original bill if you judge it on the basis of those particular principles.The Minister talks about the blowout as he terms it in legal aid. What the Minister does not tell the Committee is that before legal aid was increased under the last Government it had been static for 20 years. Legal aid had not been increased in 20 years and of course it was going to cost more when you decided that actually if the principle of legal aid—affording justice to all—is to be realised then you cannot makethe threshold for being eligible for legal aid as low as it is. The threshold it will surprise listeners to hear for a single person getting legal aid is an income of $22000 a year. That is less than what you get on the minimum wage. So effectively what we had and what this Government was seeking to worsen was a situation where if you are at the lowest level of income in society if you are on a benefit you could get legal aid but if you are out there working working every hour that you are able to to try to get things together for your family you would be rendered ineligible for legal aid because the threshold was—[Interruption ]—“you” meaning the person who is receiving it Mr Chairman—that they were not so poverty-stricken that they would get it.What this Government seems to be saying in this part of the bill and in the bill as a whole is that if you are absolutely poverty-stricken then you might get some assistance but the Government ignores the fact that a great many people—ordinary hard-working New Zealanders trying to get justice through the system—will get no assistance because the threshold levels are so low. You will be denied the right to justice. And there are tens of thousands of New Zealanders who come into that category. So when the Minister talks about as he did a blowout of legal aid what he was effectively talking about was an extension of legal aid so that people who could not reasonably be expected to pay for the cost of justice themselves would not be denied justice.One of the basic principles by which you judge any society is that access to justice should not be based on the amount of money you earn. What this section of the bill shows more than anything is that Ministers on more than a quarter of a million dollars a year do not understand what it is like for people on $30000 $40000 or $50000 a year when they are confronted with the huge cost of legal bills. They cannot afford it they do not get represented and justice does not get done. Surely—surely—there would be bipartisan agreement in this House that a priority must be that nobody is denied justice by virtue of their inability to pay but the tragic reality of the system in New Zealand worsened by this bill is that time and again people are denied access to justice. Justice is for the rich. Justice is for those who can afford the Queen’s Counsel—and those who can afford the Queen’s Counsel end up getting away with things that they probably should not—and those people at the bottom who are struggling to see justice done are denied justice by this Government. I refuse to believe that this is about the fact that the Government cannot afford to pay for it. The Government could afford to give John Key a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year in tax cuts. Surely it can afford to ensure justice for people. In this clause of the bill surely it can afford to give justice to the child who might otherwise be unrepresented—the child the most vulnerable person in the system. If there is a need for counsel for the child that means that their life has been pretty miserable they have had a hard go of it and they do deserve justice. But this bill constantly in every clause that was put into it by Simon Power denies people justice.If you look at the report back and the summary from the Justice and Electoral Committee you will see how appallingly bad this legislation was when it was introduced. It was so appallingly bad that a new Minister of Justice coming in could not sustain it particularly not one with leadership ambitions and trying to take away the flinty-faced image that she had. She realised that this was poison to her and particularly poison to her when justice to children is being denied. But the Minister has not realised that very effectively because this is the second bill that we have had in the Chamber this afternoon that has sought to take away the rights of representation that children can have. I think that that is an absolute disgrace. This legislation has been gutted of about maybe 70 percent of the appalling—appalling—original clauses that it had in it. What I am saying to members today is that the remaining 30 percent is not worth the paper that it is printed on either.When you look at it there are so many extra procedural things that the court will have to go through that this will not be saving money; this will be costing money. This becomes a bureaucratic nightmare when you work out what the interests of justice involve and where there is serious hardship all for the saving of $50 as a fee on legal aid or for trying under Part 2 to force the parents to pay the cost of counsel for the child. There will be battles between the parents who may be at odds with each other. In the end for the sake of saving a little bit of cash up front there will be huge administrative costs and the child runs the risk of not seeing justice done in his or her case.The regulatory impact analysis of this bill applying to Part 2 says that “The purpose of the legal aid scheme is to provide access to justice by providing legal services to people of insufficient means. It contributes to fairer outcomes by ensuring that parties with unequal financial resources have equal access to justice. Consequently legal aid helps underpin confidence in the justice system.” That is the Government’s own regulatory impact statement. I want the new Minister in the chair the Minister for the Environment to explain how in any way Part 2 of this bill—or for that matter Part 1—meets the objectives set out in the regulatory impact statement. How is it that this bill helps provide access to justice? The whole purpose of this bill is to deny access to justice. It is to deny access to justice to save money. There are many areas where the Government could save money without denying access to justice and particularly without the punitive areas that are involved with changes to the Care of Children Act that are made in Part 2 of this bill. The Minister of Justice under the pressure of submissions that were made to the Justice and Electoral Committee has tried to make this bill acceptable. She has taken out some of the worst features of it but she has equally left features that render this bill unacceptable to our side of the Chamber.In relation to clause 27 of the bill the Minister previously in the chair the Minister for Courts said the paramount principle of the Care of the Children Act was the best interests of the child and that because that was in the principal Act it did not need to be included in Part 2 of this bill. That is not a very good reason. It is abundantly apparent that when you are charging for counsel for the child and putting in obstacles in the way done by this bill and the previous bill that the Parliament has just considered the Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill you are not acting in the best interests—The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Order!Hon PHIL GOFF: “You” meaning the generic “you” Mr Chairman. I am sure that you would want to see the best interests of the child protected in this bill. You are a very good Chair and member of the Parliament. We are interested in upholding what every New Zealander believes should be upheld: that the interests of the child should be paramount. Why is it that this bill is so miserable—