Curran ClareHon CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Thank you. Gosh you know I've listened really hard through this debate to try and really understand the logic of the argument being put across by the other side of the House and I'm still not there yet. I've heard cost" and "complexity" said numerous times and never once have I heard "justice" or "fairness". So I went and looked for that quote that starts "The measure of a society" or "A society can be judged" and I found a whole lot of different versions of it as we know from people like Dostoevsky. He said "A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals". Nelson Mandela said that "no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones." You know there was Gandhi there was Truman—variations on the theme. Basically the point is that I guess the divide that exists between the National Party and the Government is around values. It is around a values-based system that actually puts a value on justice and on trying to strive for something that is better to ensure that what we are trying to strive for is a justice system that doesn't settle for miscarriages of justice when they occur. So I went and had a bit of a look through as to what was being said during the debate around this bill and I only came on to the Justice Committee towards the end of this when it was almost being reported back to the House. But I wanted to read what some of the legal minds were saying about the concept of the Criminal Cases Review Commission and what sat behind it. There's this chap who I understand is recently deceased—Sir Thomas Thorp a former High Court judge—who spoke a few years ago saying that it was inevitable that a criminal cases review commission would be established in this part of the world. His comments were influenced by a review that he conducted in 2005 comparing New Zealand's system of dealing with claimed miscarriages of justice with those in Scotland and England. I know that they were dismissed by the other side of the House but based on those experiences Sir Thomas estimated that there were likely to be at least 20 innocent people in jail here and he concluded that we should establish something akin to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. Referrals by that commission had resulted in around four wrongful convictions being corrected each year compared to New Zealand's rate of one to two every two years under the royal prerogative of mercy system. I guess that maybe what it comes down to is what the National Party is saying tonight about cost and complexity. It's too high a cost in their view to improve our system so that there is a better system for miscarriages of justice. I think that Meka Whaitiri referred before to the safety valve system—a better safety valve system. Actually when Andrew Little was speaking about the justification for this piece of legislation he talked about the intent of keeping the commission at arm's length from the judiciary. He said that "miscarriages are currently handled through the Ministry of Justice but the new commission will be independent of the ministry as a way of keeping it free from the perception of undue influence." He said that "There will be people in prison who should not be there. The benefit of the commission is that it will use a more methodical and systematic approach to dealing with claims of miscarriages of justice." Could we not aim to be better? Could we not aim to be a better country in this regard? Is that not worth something—to strive to be better where people feel that if there is a miscarriage where they are imprisoned there is somewhere to go that is better where there are better outcomes? Nigel Hampton QC said a couple of things about this. He said that "the royal prerogative of mercy process is long out-dated and too constrained." and according to him two of its principal defects are "that the 'handling' of petitions for its exercise rests with 'insiders' within the very system under critical scrutiny rather than with a separate body of independent objective observers based and acting outside the mainstream criminal justice system; and that no proper re-investigation of the facts occurs—instead reliance [rests] on the 'fresh' materials put before the officials by the petitioner rather than having a body with an uncluttered mind prepared to reinvestigate (whether fully or in discrete areas) the matter at issue." I don't know about you—not you Madam Speaker or it might include you—but isn't that something we could aspire to? To be better at this and to be a country where we could actually hold our heads up high and say that the measure of our society is that we want to make sure that we treat our most vulnerable in the best way possible so that they have better access to justice and that that justice can be seen to be served."