Borrows Chester: Disputes Tribunals Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Borrows Chester: Disputes Tribunals Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:653;Page:2261] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 I rise in support of the Disputes Tribunal Amendment Bill of course. It is interesting to note the words of the previous speaker Charles Chauvel. It is a bit of a worry for me that he made so much sense I found myself agreeing with him so maybe I should change my point of view! But a number of the points he made are very valid and one of them is the need to continually reflect on the tariffs and tenures of the various courts and tribunals we operate in. The disputes tribunals are ones that allow easy access to justice because people are allowed to come before the tribunals without the presence of lawyers. It is not that lawyers are all bad; it is just that most lawyers are quite expensive. So a couple of parties that have a dispute are allowed to argue that dispute in front of an adjudicator and one of the rules of course is that there is no legal counsel in the room as those parties argue before the adjudicator. The only real contest is that there must be a dispute. 
The tribunal is not a facility for instance for the collection of bad debts. It is not somewhere a person can go to obtain a summary judgment on the fact that money has not been paid or that money is owed. There must be a dispute to put before the tribunal. Obviously the use of the tribunal comes at a very low cost. I think that for the sum of $40 an action can be started. A person can go to the court and fill out the forms in triplicate. The forms are then served on the other party and the parties end up with their day in court. But over time the upper threshold has been so low that any real dispute that is causing angst has not been able to find its place for a hearing within the disputes tribunal process. If that ceiling is too low people are forced to go before the District Court and all of a sudden one tends to find an inequity of arms. The person with the dispute—for instance against the house builder the garage mechanic or the provider of goods and services—has far less financial grunt than the person on the other side of the contest and before the District Court the business owner usually has access to counsel. The person in dispute does not have access to legal aid for that particular argument and its cost and charges can then be put over his or her house property for instance in recognition of the cost of legal aid at that time. 
The cost of the dispute before the court may well be taken against the person on the sale of that property some years down the track. So it is good to see that the Government is taking the opportunity here to raise the ceiling to $15000 or to $20000 by consent of all parties. The point made by the previous speaker was that maybe there should be no lid or ceiling on it. The problem with that would be I guess the skill level the history or the legal experience of the adjudicator. For instance if the sum was $150000 then some serious jurisprudence might be made there and that is a bit of a concern for the people who would look at the adjudicator and ask where the skill base was and whether it was appropriate to have a person not legally qualified and judicially recognised sitting on a case involving those sorts of figures. 
Disputes tribunals provide cheap simple and fast access to justice. In Hawera where I live people who have filed papers in the local court can appear before the disputes tribunal within a couple of months. That is very speedy justice when compared with appearing in a courthouse and as I said earlier the filing fees are significantly lower. Therefore raising the ceiling will close the gap between claims that fall within the jurisdiction of the disputes tribunal and claims that are financially viable to bring before the District Court. I guess it would be fair to say that even a relatively straightforward dispute before the District Court could cost someone in the vicinity of $8000 to $10000 and that would be seen as relatively cheap comparatively. If there was a $15000 debt a person could spend a heck of a lot of whatever satisfaction that person may have received on trying to satisfy legal costs. Whatever costs are awarded through the District Court are never sufficient to meet the actual bill sent by legal counsel. 
National campaigned quite heavily in the area of raising the ceiling in respect of disputes tribunals so it was obviously something that anyone working within the justice system had recognised as being needed for quite some time. There is significant backing for this move right across the justice system. National is working to increase the cash flow and make the enforcement of debts easier for small and medium sized businesses. We often find the ability within the disputes tribunal mechanism for businesses to be able to enforce a debt that is in dispute as well as the means by which a dissatisfied customer can exercise his or her right to argue the dispute in front of an adjudicator. 
This legislation has been required for some time. Access to justice in this country frequently boils down to access to the financial wherewithal to be able to bring a cause of action. It is very important in the interests of justice that access to an adjudicator and to justice is provided as cheaply and speedily as possible. It is interesting to note that the previous Government did not increase the jurisdiction during its entire 9-year term and the last increase was made by a National Government in 1998 just a year before it left office. It is a shame that the previous Government did not see as a priority the need to have a check and to see how things were progressing. For instance we can look at the rate of inflation over time and see that that ceiling is creeping down all the time. As we are now moving into a time of recession it is important to note that there has to be a way to bring these matters before an adjudicator quite quickly. 
A former colleague of mine who works in the document service business in South Taranaki has brought to my attention the fact that in 1999 he served 90 default notices and through to August 2005 that number had grown to 247. If we looked at last year we could see that the number was well over 350. That means that more and more people have been enticed into debt and although the disputes tribunal is not a mechanism for satisfying unpaid debts where a dispute arises there is a real need for people to be able to come before an arbitrator to state their case to do it cheaply and to do it in a timely fashion. Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker.