Delahunty Catherine: Legislation Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Delahunty Catherine: Legislation Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 05 December 2012. Volume:686;Page:7260. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party is happy to support the Legislation Bill. It is about two issues: housekeeping and power. It is about housekeeping because the job of this Parliament is to make sure that the output is comprehensible modernised and regularly reviewed and it will do that. I would just like to acknowledge Charles Chauvel and the Regulations Review Committee for their work because I think it is very important. That housekeeping needs to be done well like any housekeeping. It may seem to outsiders to be obscure but when you live in the house you know that it needs to be done well for the benefit of others. 
But it is also about power. We would argue that accessible language for the law is really another language altogether. We need to make sure that legalese which could be called a language of its own is comprehensible to people. Legalese is something that lawyers will understand and that many politicians with more experience than me can use but many citizens find it utterly incomprehensible and totally alienating. A really good example of that is that wonderful Australian movie  
The Castle 
 where they go to court over the airport versus the family. In that movie the man in court fighting for his family home does not know after he has heard the judgment whether they have won or lost. He thinks that they have won when they have lost and then later on he thinks that they have lost when they have won. That is a really good example of how many people feel when they are before the courts. It is really a matter of some shame that the citizens of a country cannot understand the law. That of course was Australia but I do not think that we can deny that this country also has obscure laws. Having spent some time in the Environment Court as a lay advocate I have seen the confusion on many faces including my own if I am going to be honest because the law is not designed for clarity. It is designed to achieve certain purposes and clarity has not always been at the front. 
Plain English is one thing. Imagine if the first language is not English imagine if the person before the court is from the Pacific which happens a lot in Aotearoa New Zealand and imagine if the first language is from another part of the world. Not only do you have a language barrier but also you have two language barriers: you have legalese that special language that disempowers many people and then you have the barrier of English. So it is not only about plain English reporting. We would like to see legislation translated and made available to all cultures and languages in our country which is going to be a big task given the diversity of our culture. 
It is really really important that the law belongs to the people. The law does not just belong to the lawyers and it does not belong to MPs. It belongs to the people and if people are going to use this thing we create in this House they have to be able to understand it. 
So we support this bill. We think that the clarifications are important. We also think that the progress in terms of electronic access is really important because many people now rely on electronics for all of their communication. Therefore to have actual copies of the law available electronically as well as some of the commentary would be really really helpful. The consolidation of access is another part of the importance of the democracy. So this bill is really about as I said housekeeping and access to democracy. It takes us forward and we are very happy to support it.