Clendon David: Third Readings —Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Third Readings —[Sitting date: 28 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10474. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): I am pleased to take a short call on this bill or this suite of bills as they now are to affirm the Greens’ continued support for this legislation. It is actually quite a rare day that the Greens are able to support a Government justice bill throughout every reading for the reasons of course that generally they fail to meet the standards of good lawmaking and they fail to improve the situations for offenders or for victims or the judicial system. But in this case it is legislation that we have supported and are happy to continue to support through this final reading.The point has been made that the provisions of this bill in other circumstances could well have been addressed within the contents of a Statutes Amendment Bill. But of course there are time constraints. This legislation must be in place by 1 July this year which is barely a month or so away and so of course we are quite happy to cooperate and to see this legislation go through in time to ensure that the original legislation is enacted as was intended at the time.It is true that the purpose of this legislation or the original legislation should I say—the principal legislation—was to improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of our court processes and to remove delays from the court process. And it is well said—it is an old well-tried cliché—that justice delayed is justice denied. It is important that we get our justice system working effectively. Justice bills must be seen as some of the most important that go through this House.We make law in this place clearly. The courts the police and other arms of the justice system enforce that law and take people to task if the law is not complied with. We have the capacity the State has the capacity to fine people to deny them their freedom and their liberty in the extreme cases so it is doubly important that the processes around the judicial system—the justice system generally—are seen to work effectively efficiently and properly in order to maintain public confidence and to ensure that that confidence is well founded.Unfortunately at the same time that this very useful legislation is being put in place to minimise or at least to reduce some of the delays and some of the roadblocks to good process in the courts we are seeing other aspects of policy and implementation of policy that are working against the intention of this—issues like staff cuts in our courts. Anecdotally we are hearing repeatedly from lawyers from people who work in the courts and from people who have business in the courts that the loss of skilled staff and the loss of experienced staff in our courts is causing ongoing delays. Work is not being done in an effective manner. Judges’ time is being wasted. Witnesses’ time even defendants’ time is being wasted because of cuts to staffing. It is critical that we do not save pennies and lose pounds in the way that if we do not have sufficient staffing—experienced well-skilled well-trained staffing—in our courts then the processes willfail we will lose the confidence of the public and other participants and no matter what we do in legislation like this the process will fail and be seen to be failing.Sadly also of course recently we have seen—and Mr Little I think referred to this—closures of some of our courts. We have seen reduced services at some of the courts. The consequences of that are quite significant not least of all for offenders and for victims of offending and again for witnesses. Unfortunately that is not saving any money which is what we were told it would be doing. It is simply putting costs on other departments of State. The police for example will be picking up the tab for the extra cost imposed on their budget by some perceived savings in the courts’ budgets.So unfortunately although this legislation will go some way towards speeding up the judicial process sadly other policies that are being enacted are actually working in the opposite direction.We could talk about legal aid and I am aware that there is a sensitivity about that question at the moment. Unfortunately the Government has found itself on the wrong side of a legal judgment. But more generally there have been cuts to the availability of legal aid and that has negatively impacted on access to the courts. We are hearing this again from participants and it is not only beneficiaries low-income people or unemployed people; it is middle New Zealand that is discovering that as the access point the entry point for legal aid is being made more difficult access to the courts is being denied—access to representation. The intention of this legislation we have before us is to speed up the processes of our courts. Self-litigation will do nothing to speed up the process of our courts. Quite the contrary it will slow it down. The cuts to legal aid will inevitably lead to more self-litigation in the courts.We are told in terms of some of the difficulties that this legislation endeavours to overcome but cannot do entirely that some of the slack will be picked by NGOs—by the community law centres for example which unfortunately have had no funding increase for something like 7 years. In other words their funding is being cut. So although we might like to pass legislation to streamline legislation to make our courts work better if we do not support the infrastructure around public access to the courts then our work will be in vain. I could critique the Government’s judicial approach all night—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair.Debate interrupted.