Adams Amy: Coroners Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is subject to correctionAdams Amy: Coroners Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 07 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11681. Text is subject to correction.]Hon AMY ADAMS (Minister of Justice): I will take a call on Part 1 of the Coroner’s Amendment Bill to run through the rationale behind the principal provisions in the part to talk to my own amendment on Part 1 and to respond to a number of the points that have been made in the discussion so far this evening.I think the one point that the Committee is in clear agreement on is that our coronial system is an incredibly important one and an incredibly well-respected one but also one that really works with people when they are at their most traumatised and at what is a very foreign time of their life no matter who they are. I have certainly been in the situation of dealing with the death of a loved one and finding you are caught up in this coroner’s process and for most of us it is something we have never dealt with before. If we deal with it it is all foreign to us and no matter how good caring and professional the people—and they absolutely are—I think it is incumbent upon us to make sure that the system operates in a way that is as clear and as time-efficient as possible.No one wants to be in that process any longer than they need to be and it has a very real impact on bereaved families and loved ones when the process of getting probate and attending to the resolution of the estate is held up in the coronial process. There is a very real need I believe to ensure not only that we have a coronial system that is well-respected and professional as it absolutely is but also that we have absolute clarity about the very important roles each of the professional parties play in the system that we reduce duplication and also that we provide a legislative framework that is cognisant of advances in medical technology.Part 1 of course begins by setting out the Chief Coroner’s role and it is very clear about that. The first major change is to be very clear about the types of deaths that need to be reported and I think these changes—and there are a few of them in this category—are critical. We do not need or have any benefit from our coronial system and the very high-quality pathologists and coronial staff that we have being caught up going through processes where the cause of death is plainly apparent.Under the bill natural-cause deaths in custody or care are not going to be required to have a mandatory inquest; it will be sufficient if an inquiry is held. To require families to go through that much longer process of a detailed inquest where it is very clear to the parties what the cause of death was is I think an unnecessary and very difficult requirement to put them through for no discernible benefit. Clearly the coroner will always have the ultimate ability to order an inquest should they think that it is necessary but to require it as a matter of course without any sort of flexibility there I think is absolutely unwarranted and this bill will change that.The bill also now provides in Part 1 the ability to provide for preliminary investigations to be directed by the coroner so that the pathologist can use medical imaging and new technologies to determine whether in fact a full post-mortem is required. We know that the act of post-mortem is a very invasive one and one that many cultures find quite troubling. If we can avoid the need for very invasive post-mortem processes because medical imaging equipment can give us the answers we need then again I think that is something that we should provide for once more within the control ultimately of the coroner.It is important that we have real clarity between the roles of the coroner and the New Zealand Police. The police obviously carry out the investigative work for the coroner. They are both statutorily independent roles and must maintain that independence. However we do need absolute clarity about the ability of coroners to get the investigative capacity that they require from the police but none the less not be able to control the police and ensure that they respect their ultimate independence. The test that we have landed on of “reasonable and necessary” I think is the right balance.It might be the right point to talk just briefly to my Supplementary Order Paper 174 which also goes just a little further in that space of clarifying very clearly the definition of roles between the police in the extraction of a body and the role of the transportation providers who are the mortuary services who are under contract to the ministry who obviously move the body to the mortuary for post-mortems. I mean it is a somewhat grisly topic but of course there are situations where the bodies are in difficult situations—often forensically there have to be tightly controlled scenes—and they are often in places of quite difficult access so we have to have real clarity around the control and responsibility for the movement of the body from those situations to a place where the transporter can easily get to them. Obviously if the body is for example on a roadside or in a public park those issues do not arise but none the less we do have situations where that becomes real and it is incumbent upon us to have real clarity of roles. My Supplementary Order Paper will do exactly that.Just carrying on Part 1 of the bill also does something else that I think is worthy of specific mention—I do not think I have heard it tonight in the debate—and that is to clearly provide for the role of forensic dentists in a post-mortem particularly in the situation of mass casualties. I do want to just take a moment to reflect on being at Burnham Military Camp in the days after the February 2011 earthquake watching the incredible unbelievable work of our coronial teams our pathologists and our forensic dentists who came from all over New Zealand at the drop of a hat—left their practices left their families—and did the most remarkable highly skilled highly emotional and yet incredibly necessary work of body identification. It made incredibly clear to me the critical role that they play and this legislation gives us a good opportunity to ensure that the role of forensic dentists is provided for in the legislation as I think this Committee would want it to be.I was going to turn to Jacinda Arden’s amendment but that is in Part 2 so I will return to that when we are debating that part of the bill. Thank you Mr Chairman.