Hipkins Chris: Courts (Remote Participation) Bill — Third Reading 
Hipkins Chris: Courts (Remote Participation) Bill — Third Reading 
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CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 I will take only a reasonably brief call on the Courts (Remote Participation) Bill because I think most of the things that I wanted to contribute have already been contributed by other members. I will not take up the House’s time repeating those contributions. 
I will pick up on the initial comments that Chester Borrows made in his contribution about the importance of parliamentary debate and not taking entrenched party-line positions unnecessarily on things. That is a two-way process. One of the things I was heartened by last night in this debate was that the Minister of Justice came down to the House took calls and actually listened carefully to the debate and engaged in it. We often see situations in this House—and it is something I am sure the current Government would say happened under the last Government as well as under this one—where Ministers do not engage in the Committee stage of a debate. They sit there and try to push things through as fast as they can. I think that if we go back to the principle of what we are doing here why we are here what is our role here we see that the purpose of the Committee stage debate is for us to go through a bill line by line and every party in Parliament can speak on it even if that party was not on the select committee that considered it. That is where amendments like this can be considered argued and thrashed out. I think we saw that happen last night with this bill. I welcome the Government’s contribution to that debate and the willingness of the Minister to come down to speak. 
I had not intended to be involved at all in this debate. I came to the House last night to speak on an entirely different matter. I was pretty disappointed when I sat down and picked up a copy of the bill that was being debated and saw what would happen under the status quo of the bill without the amendment that the Minister put forward. Effectively in some situations it could have led to somebody not being able to be present at his or her own trial. That seemed to me to be wholeheartedly unjust. 
I congratulate all of the members who took part in the debate particularly the leadership of Lianne Dalziel David Parker and Simon Power in negotiating the compromise agreement that was reached. I know that the Green Party took a particularly strong position and spent some time giving us time to sort it out. I thank the Green Party for that and also the contributions of the Maori Party and the ACT Party. It is relatively unusual for parties to all work together in the collaborative manner that we did last night. I think that is quite sad. I think the public would like to see a lot more of that from us. I hope that this new spirit of goodwill emerging right before the school holidays will continue through the holiday period and perhaps when the House resumes after the holidays we might find that we can continue with other legislation in the same vein. 
With that I conclude my comments and simply wish everybody all the best for the adjournment. I am sure they will all be busy in their electorates.