Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you. The National Party won't be supporting this bill. We believe that it's another example of a kind of band-aid approach to governing that the Government has exhibited over the past five years. Rather than deal with the underlying issues they're just putting a band-aid on here and a band-aid on there.The core issue if we want to help New Zealanders get better access to justice is to deal with the incredibly slow processes of the court system and the years of delay that New Zealanders face getting access to justice and to getting an outcome—whether it's in a criminal setting and thereby having a sense of justice; or in the civil setting such as the Family Court getting matters resolved in a timely way; and when it comes to commercial matters getting things sorted out so that the parties can get on with their lives. These very long delays that we've seen over the past few years balloon into years are the primary problem that needs to be sorted when it comes to improving New Zealanders' access to justice. Indeed certainly the interminable delays and stops and starts and meetings all add to the legal bills that people have to face on both sides. So rather than focus on that more effectively—and yes there are programmes; there are a dozen programmes throughout the justice system focused on trying to speed up the courts. But in our view there hasn't been the real focus on that as is required because there's about 20 things that need to be done to deal with his longstanding issue more effectively. Some of them are indeed related to the rules of the court which are very laxly dealt with where people who are meant to be turning up to a hearing or a part of the court process don't turn up there are no consequences and so legal bills are paid but nothing happens and for another two months they're waiting for something else to happen and then they don't turn up and there are no consequences and another two months of delay occurs. So there are so many more fundamental things that need to be dealt with. Then when you look at the priorities that this Government has had in the justice sector over the last six years rather than really focusing on this issue they have preferred to focus on things like banning hate speech and screwing the scrum on electoral finance and a whole bunch of other things which I think they would have been better to have kept focus on the issues of access to justice.So what they've proposed in this bill is a couple of things—some of which we're happy with: removing the user charge of $50 for legal aid; fine not the end of the world. Maybe it provided some way of dealing with the cost of the system. What people have to realise is that there are sort of three categories of people in this context: people who just pay their own way through the court system who have the resources to do so; then there is another category who can access legal aid but it is in the form of a loan that needs to be repaid because they have been judged to have the means to do that; and then there's another group of New Zealanders without the means to do that and they are granted legal aid directly and they don't have to pay it back—it's a grant; it's a gift.So this bill is focused on that middle group who do get legal aid but are required to pay it back because they are judged to have the means to do so. The proposal here is that they should pay no interest. Now of course the primary problem with that is that it will mean that people will pay back that loan even less than they are at the moment because there's no incentive to do so whatever. Inflation—which is ripping in the economy at the moment at 6 percent and has been over 6 percent for a couple of years—is steadily eating into the value of the debt. So all that means is that money that could be used to deal with other issues such as increasing the rates further of legal aid payments to lawyers to make it a more attractive proposition to them or money that could be diverted to one of the many many issues that need to be resolved to speed up the overall process of justice and thereby increase people's access to justice and also limit the amount of cost in the system in the first place—instead of focusing on that they are indulging in what we would call a band-aid solution".So on that basis we think the Government could have come up with a better response and should have come up with a better response. So we don't support this bill today."