Barker Rick: New Zealand Council of Law Reporting Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Barker Rick: New Zealand Council of Law Reporting Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:630;Page:2472] 
Hon RICK BARKER (Minister for Courts) 
: 
 I want to cover some of the ground that has been traversed by Mr Finlayson because he makes an interesting point in respect of the amendment he has moved. I accept from the outset his contention that judgments of the Maori Land Court and Maori Appellate Court should be published and accessible. Having seen the amendment I spoke with my officials and was advised that the subject has a very chequered history. 
A royal commission in 1980 recommended that the decisions of the Maori Land Court and the Maori Appellate Court should be made available on an ongoing basis and be published continuously. It seems that from there the matter was picked up by the Department of Maori Affairs. It published a document called  
Tai Whati 
 which covered selected decisions. This publication carried on for some time and was eventually picked up by LexisNexis. If anybody wanted to go back prior to this they had to go to the work of Chief Judge Morrison who compiled a 1960 digest going all the way back to 1958. So there have been several attempts to do something about the publication of these decisions. 
I am pleased to advise the Committee that the Ministry of Justice has serious work under way in this area. I am advised that within 6 months we should have completed some work for the publication of Maori Appellate Court decisions. They are currently being formatted and collated and will be forwarded to the judges for vetting. So we will have an ongoing process there. 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: Does that cover historical cases? 
Hon RICK BARKER 
: Some of them will be historical yes. We will have a series and a sequence that we can build on. We take the issue that Mr Finlayson raises very seriously and we will make sure that these decisions are available. 
With regard to the Maori Land Court the situation is not quite as simple as that. I am advised that work is under way but it is not quite as well advanced because of some differing issues. One of the issues that needs to be resolved is that the Maori Land Court deals with a number of matters relating to whakapapa. A lot of that information is available from other sources as well but the Maori Land Court makes other comments in its decisions about relationships and so on. There are concerns that if those comments are published on the Internet then people will feel a bit more concerned about them. So we want to make sure that the way in which the decisions are published is respectful of the issues being dealt with but that the decisions are also accessible in terms of the information they provide. I hope to have a time frame on that of about 12 to 18 months away. 
I make the point to Mr Finlayson and to the Committee that work on the issue he has raised is under way and that we have a suitable format. We think this format will be better than simply having these decisions published by the New Zealand Council of Law Reporting because of a range of other factors. The first point Mr Finlayson contends—and I accept—is that the decisions should be accessible. We will do that; I just think that the Ministry of Justice’s vehicle for doing that will be preferable. I have spoken to a number of parties in the House and have explained to them that I will be recommending voting against Mr Finlayson’s amendment—not because I am opposed to the substance of it but because we already have work under way to do the same job and that seems to be generally acceptable. 
The last point I would make is that this Government has been very concerned to ensure that people have access to information. We have put a lot of Maori Land Court information online for people to look at in terms of the court’s decisions. I announced that move last year and I can tell members that that resource has been used quite extensively. 
I am well aware that there is a great deal of interest in this area—in decisions and information—and that the Ministry of Justice needs to do its job better. We are making it do its job better by ensuring that the information is accessible and we are doing a good job on that. I hope to be able to demonstrate within the next 12 to 18 months that we have made a significant leap forward again in terms of accessibility of information about the Maori Land Court.