Andersen Ginny; Goldsmith PaulHon GINNY ANDERSEN (Labour): Thank you to the Minister for explaining that because it goes right to the point that I'd like to make and maybe he could enlighten us. The bit that puzzles me is that in—it's not called the regulatory impact statement now; oh it is—the regulatory impact statement on this bill the officials from the Ministry of Justice have identified five options and what they consider is that they recommend option four which is to introduce an accreditation system for section 27 report writers to be the preferred option. So that was seen when they weighed all of those options up to meet the Government's requirement to curtail cost but also to maintain the access to justice which is also important as identified by the analysis undertaken for the regulatory impact statement. The advice under option four says that Whilst implementation costs would be greater this option best satisfies the criteria of producing consistent and fair outcomes for regulated parties and of consistency with existing regulatory frameworks. A system of accredited report writers would improve the quality of reports. This in turn would be of greater benefit to judges using the reports and would be fairer to offenders who rely on the reports to present their circumstances to the court." I'm interested I say to the Minister as to why—as in paragraph 48 of the regulatory impact statement—the Government directed officials to option two. The Government directed officials to ignore their own advice on removing the ability to fund the cost of section 27 reports from the Legal Services Act 2011 and to go ahead and remove the discretion of the commissioner to improve funding for this purpose. So my question really is that I wanted to understand from the Minister the rationale of pushing this through in urgency without anybody affected having the opportunity to make comment and without paying attention to any of the detailed analysis provided by the regulatory impact statement and to simply direct an outcome without what appears to be any consultation at all. If the Minister just replies with "It's in our 100-day plan." I'm sorry but that's actually not good enough. I want to know what the reason is. I don't want to know that "We went and knocked on some doors during the election and everybody said 'cost of living' and 'We want to restore law and order to New Zealand.' "—that's great; we've heard that. We want to know and I think New Zealanders deserve to know that if this is being pushed through under urgency if the advice of the officials who know quite a bit about this area is being completely ignored and if the Government is directing an outcome and ignoring that advice—I would love to know what the rationale is what the thinking is and what the reasons are for this direction to take away the legal rights of people to have their backgrounds heard as part of their sentencing. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (Minister of Justice): The member is very smart and has worked out that the officials didn't agree with this policy—and that happens from time to time—and the difference is that the Ministry of Justice officials were not the ones who were elected in this Government. So the primary reason why the Government has pressed ahead with this policy is that we campaigned on it and the people expect us to do what we said we're going to do. That is a pretty basic democratic principle: you go and campaign on something you say you're going to do it and when you get elected you actually do it. So that's what we've set out to do. It's not a question of ignoring the advice of officials—we've read the advice and we considered it—but we didn't decide that we wanted to go down the route of regulating the report writers and having a little team of officials running around and working out who is qualified to write such things. Should they be a sociologist for example opining on these matters or do you need a history degree to do it and how long you should be doing it for and what you should be covering—all that just seemed to us to be a fraught and unnecessarily complicated and expensive business. So that's why we stuck with our intention which is to take the funding away from these particular reports recognising—recognising—that there are many opportunities for people's backgrounds to be considered in the sentencing context. The original intention of this piece of legislation was for people to give brief oral accounts in the court—generally family members—and for that to be considered and there is nothing stopping that from happening."