Goff Phil: Juries (Jury Service and Protection of Particulars of Jury List Information) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Goff Phil: Juries (Jury Service and Protection of Particulars of Jury List Information) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 25 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5632. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) 
: 
 I do not blame Jacqui Dean for not taking up the call. It is a fairly insubstantial bill and it is very hard for a Government member to fill in 10 minutes speaking on it. 
Jacqui Dean 
: Oh I made a brilliant speech. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: Having said that and wound the member up as I intended I need to say that Labour supports this bill. When I said that it is insubstantial I mean it was not of sufficient impact to warrant a regulatory impact analysis or statement so that is simply a statement of fact. It is not a significant bill. It has been sitting on the Order Paper for 18 months since it was introduced so the Government has not been in any hurry to pass it. 
The bill does some useful things that bear comment but it is not going to shake the world. The first thing that it does is that it prevents people who have served home detention sentences for 3 months or more from qualifying for jury service for 5 years. I think that is a sensible provision. It brings it into line with the fact that if you have served a jail sentence you are prevented from serving on a jury and there is a very good reason for that. If you are the sort of person who has committed an offence serious enough to have home detention for more than 3 months you are not really in a great position to stand in judgment of another person’s guilt or innocence for that period of time. So I do not think there was any great controversy around that. I think it deals with a problem in the earlier Act and it closes a loophole. 
The second thing that the bill does is to empower registrars to permanently excuse from jury service people who either have chronic ill health or are 65 years or over. Where a person has chronic ill health it makes sense that there be a permanent excusal. If the person is repeatedly ill they are not going to be in a position to serve and it is a burden on them and a cause of anxiety if they keep getting summonses to appear on juries. 
The question of an over-65-year-old was somewhat more controversial when discussed at the Law and Order Committee. That was because from Labour’s point of view although we acknowledge that there is nothing in this bill that says a person over the age of 65 cannot serve the bill as it was originally introduced said that if you are permanently excused because you are over 65 then that is it—you will never and you can never go on a jury again. We had some problems with that. One is that it stereotyped older people and suggested that when you get to 65 you are past serving on a jury—and I am sure you would agree Mr Assistant Speaker Tisch that you are not past serving on a jury. In fact in 20 years’ time there is going to be something like a million people over that age and if you are going to have a jury of your peers you are going to need to have a lot of those people with considerable experience and most important a little more time than others in the community to serve on the jury. 
I think the real problem we are going to have with juries is that as more and more people seek to be excused because they have to work they cannot afford the time off or the jury fees are not sufficient for them to serve on a jury for a week or 2 weeks without suffering from financial hardship you might find that your juries become less and less representative of the communities. 
But anyway our problem was—and the report from the select committee suggested that the select committee was uneasy with the fact—that once you had been excused because you are over 65 you could not reverse that process. Well finally the Minister of Justice saw sense on that and she introduced Supplementary Order Paper 94. That enables people who are excused permanently from jury service because they are of or over the age of 65 to resume being qualified and liable for jury service by having their permanent excusals cancelled as of right on a written application. I think that was a sensible thing to do and that resolved the concerns that we had with that particular aspect. 
The third thing was a more serious problem and that was the concern that defendants could have access to the jury list. The jury list provides the name the occupation the birth date and the address of members on a jury. If a lawyer representing a defendant has access to that information the lawyer is conscious of the obligations on him or her and is liable to keep that information secure and not divulge it to the person whom they are representing. 
But we have a problem—and it is going to be a growing problem because of cut-backs to legal aid—in that more and more people are representing themselves in court. I do not think that is a good idea and I do not think judges think it is a good idea because it makes the court process more drawn-out. If you are going to have a fair trial and a person does not understand the law but they are representing themselves it will take much longer it will cost a whole lot more and you will find that the cuts to legal aid are actually pretty counter-productive. 
Hon Shane Jones 
: False economics. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: It is false economics as my colleague Shane Jones has just commented. The provision that has been made in this bill is as a result of a man who was representing himself in court who had access to the jury list and subsequently decided that he would contact one or more of the jurors. That is a situation that cannot be tolerated and it is a contempt of court. 
This bill makes an effort to try to improve the privacy of jurors by ensuring that a defendant who is representing himself or herself does not have access to the particulars of the jury list. That is good—we support that—but let us not exaggerate the degree of protection that that will provide to the jurors. A person who is a defendant is going to be in court to hear the names of the people called out in the courtroom and it does not take much of a detective act to then—well if your name is John Smith I suppose it might provide a difficulty in determining which John Smith in the phone book or on the electoral roll is the John Smith who was on the jury. But if you have a name like—I think I have mentioned it once before—Lindsay Tisch there is not a lot of them about and you would be able to— 
H V Ross Robertson 
: Hope not! 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: That is unfair coming from an Assistant Speaker Mr Robertson. But you are not going to have much difficulty in tracking that person down. 
So although this bill is worthwhile in what it does it does not apply a great deal of effort or imagination to how you stop people googling somebody how you stop them looking up the electoral roll or the telephone book and I think that it leaves the problem at best only partially addressed. 
So let us sum up what we have got in this bill. We have a situation where you can treat people who have been on home detention in the same way as you would treat a person who has served a jail sentence and that would be that you prevent them from serving on a jury for a period of time. You have the empowerment of registrars to excuse people who cannot and do not want to serve on a jury for a very good reason but we have compensated for that by saying that an older person who is excused can apply to come back on to the jury list and you have partial protection for the privacy safety and security of jurors but just that—only a very partial protection. 
So this is a bill that we will support but this is a bill that is not going to make a huge difference to the system of justice in this country. It deserves a third reading. The Labour Party in Opposition has supported the bill through each of its readings and will support it in the third reading but it is not going to have earth-shattering consequences for the jury system and the people within it.