Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): I am pleased to take a call on these cognate bills the Courts Matters Bill and the Tribunals Powers and Procedures Legislation Bill. I think we share a common position with the Labour Party. We will be supporting these bills to select committee but at the select committee we will be wanting to have a few matters resolved. There is some good content in these bills—they do some useful and positive things—but there are also some issues that we do take with some of the new provisions in the bills and indeed there are some matters we think could usefully be included in the bills. Given that they are omnibus bills there is an opportunity there to perhaps insert some further provisions into them.I think it is timely to be looking at the processes of the courts. We could regret I think that this legislation is somewhat incremental. It does make changes but given that if you talk to judges—perhaps off the record—and certainly lawyers and people engaged in the courts on a day-to-day basis such as court staff I think they would uniformly assure you that the operation of the courts could be a great deal better than it is. There are road blocks. There are issues of timeliness and of accuracy. There are a great many matters around our courts. There are serious issues about the broader matter of access to justice. There are too many people who for a variety of reasons are unable to access our courts and thereby to access justice. Some of those are funding issues and some of them are legislative or regulatory but I think we could really do well with an overall almost clean slate approach to the operations of our courts.I share again Mr Little's comments about some of his concerns about the language around efficiency. Certainly we do need to improve the efficiency of the courts and I am reminded a year or two ago there was a programme in place called the eBench which I understand was endeavouring to eliminate a great deal of the paperwork to enable a lot more day-to-day transmission of documents and the like electronically. That project failed I understand. Whether through hiccups in the software or for whatever reason it did not progress but I do think that would be certainly something that any Government ought to be addressing. I recall that the Justice and Electoral Committee I think or the Law and Order Committee was taken into the nether regions of the Wellington District Court and shown just few months' worth of paperwork and it was a very large room stacked to the ceiling with paper. I think we do have to consider in the broader scheme of efficiency in the courts that to the extent that we can get an electronic exchange of documents and the like providing they are secure and able to be validated and so on I think it would be a very useful step forward.In terms talking about efficiency however we have to be a little bit humble collectively in remembering that some of the previous reforms of the courts that were intended to increase efficiency have actually achieved the exact opposite. I am thinking of the centralisation of records particularly in some of the larger Auckland courts in Auckland in Manukau and in Waitakere where the centralisation of records and information has led to a really significant reversal in fact in terms of efficiency. I constantly hear from lawyers that having centralised documents in one or two places means that lawyers and court staff often no longer have the personal relationships that have actually facilitated the flow of the business of the courts in the past. It is unfortunate that that centralisation programme despite on paper being wonderfully apparent to drive efficiency actually has not done that and so as these bills work their way through the committees I think it is important that the recent experience of attempts to make courts more efficient should be fairly close to top of mind.One of these bills is focusing on tribunals and that is a good thing. Tribunals are often the unsung heroes of our justice system. People ordinary New Zealanders are more likely to engage with a tribunal I believe than they are with a District Court or a High Court or any other court. And so to the extent that this does look at matters affecting tribunals I think that is a very positive thing and a useful development. I think the idea of increasing the monetary threshold for the disputes tribunal from at most $20000 up to $30000 is sensible. In the passage of time $30000 is not worth as much as it was 5 or 10 years ago obviously. Inflation alone would suggest that a higher threshold would be appropriate and I think that is a useful step.I think there would be general support for imposing a little bit more of a monetary penalty on real estate agents who run amok. There have been too many instances where agents have not performed professionally and that can come at extraordinary cost to people who are seeking to buy homes or people who have sold homes and discover that in fact they have been cheated when those homes get sold on often in a matter of hours to significant advantage to the agent rather than to the vendor. So I think that will win some support. Similarly being able to get some more structure around the private security personnel and private investigators—I can say having for my sins been a private security person for some 3 years or so as a part-time occupation as a student that that sector was not in a particularly happy state. I do think that as it has become increasingly professional and as training requirements have come up the additional disciplinary authority given to the oversight body will be a useful and positive thing.I would have to say the Greens are slightly less happy about the increased powers that are intended to be given to court security officers (CSOs). The power to detain effectively the power to arrest for a range of matters and actions—these are powers that we associate with police more readily. Our police force is highly trained very professional and 99.9 percent of the time it gets it right. While it is very simple to give more power to court security officers we would like to be reassured through the course of these proceedings as the bills go through that in parallel with giving these individuals more powers they will also be given more training and more capability. I think of simple things like being able to detain a person for carrying drugs or associated paraphernalia. It is a pretty straightforward comment but what actually constitutes associated paraphernalia"? I suspect a police officer could give you a pretty comprehensive description but I am equally sure that most court security officers could not.Similarly I get a little bit concerned about the language that a person can be detained potentially if they refuse to obey a direction from a CSO to do or not to do anything "that is reasonably necessary to protect the safety and security" of people around the court precinct. That language of "reasonably necessary" implies a fairly high level of judgment a good understanding of the law a good understanding of what is appropriate behaviour and a good understanding of what is just posing or grandstanding and what actually does genuinely represent a threat. I guess the key point for me would be to say that as we give these officers more powers we need to be very very sure that they will also have the capacity and the training to be able to meet those powers.Equally we have some concerns—and these may well be resolved; I mean these are matters for debate at the committee rather than hard and fast positions—about the giving of more authority to registrars and judicial officers to do things like issue arrest warrants. These again are powers that are more commonly associated with judges. I do think that as we allow people more power more responsibility and more authority we need to be convinced that the training that the accountability and that the associated responsibility placed on them to get it right will be applied and implemented alongside these bills as they are enacted.So having in those few words indicated that the Greens will support this legislation we will be looking for some changes and some clarity around some of the provisions at the select committee but on balance they do seem to do some useful things and we can support them at least that far. Thank you."