Chauvel Charles: Third Readings — 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Chauvel Charles: Third Readings — 
[Sitting date: 04 October 2011. Volume:676;Page:21638. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 I do not disagree—I do not think anybody disagrees—with the Minister of Justice’s contention that criminal proceedings need to be sped up. To that extent it is appropriate to welcome the legislation arising from the Criminal Procedure (Reform and Modernisation) Bill as it is read a third time in the House because it is true that many of its provisions will lead to an expedition of criminal proceedings. 
The legislation is better as the Minister said for the amendments that have been made to it. In particular the amendments I want to mention are those that flow from the minority report which was written after the Justice and Electoral Committee process and tabled in the House on behalf of Labour. In particular we insisted on recording our objection to the proposal to severely curtail the right to silence. We also objected greatly to the proposal in the bill that would have made it easier to try people in absentia. Both of these proposals are foreign to our tradition and our freedoms and I am very proud to be a member of a party that stood against those proposals from the outset. 
The legislation would also have been better if we had seen some of the Supplementary Order Papers that were moved in the Committee of the whole House not ignored by the Minister. For example I put up a proposal that would have created a statutory basis for the current judicial practice of giving sentencing indications—something that in itself does save time but does not introduce as far as I am aware any great unfairness. Similarly I put up a proposal that would have codified the practice of giving the defence 21 days to respond to disclosure on the part of the Crown. As I explained during the Committee stage at the moment there is no such time limit so that when the defence gets disclosure from the Crown in order to buy time to respond to it the general practice is to enter a pro forma not guilty plea. Guess what this means? It means delay; it means more time and more expense in the court system; it means all of the things that the Minister says that this legislation is designed to prevent. 
I do not think there is anybody in the House who does not like the Minister or who wishes him anything but the best in his retirement but he has shown a closed mind on criminal law reform. He vetoed the Supplementary Order Paper I have just referred to on the basis of its effect on the Government’s fiscal position. He agreed to the further amendments that I referred to in my speech which were contained in the Labour Party minority report only because of raw politics. That raw politics is that the Maori Party and the ACT Party took a long hard look at the legislation as it came back from the Justice and Electoral Committee and very properly decided that the objections that had been recorded by Labour were right and that they should also join in with those objections and deprive the Minister of Justice of his numbers to pass the legislation. I should say that the Green Party to its credit opposed the bill from the outset because that was those members’ way of recording their objections to the matters that I have outlined. 
Instead of what should have happened according to our parliamentary rules and procedures—instead of the changes that were proposed being carefully considered in the select committee and advised on by officials and the assistance with drafting that might be required being offered through an agreed process—we saw a closed negotiation process occurring between the parties. As it happens I think the outcome has produced better legislation as I have said. But I do deplore the process and the process stems from the fact that the Minister countenanced amendments to what he had decided to do on the basis of his officials’ advice only because he lost the numbers to ram through his proposal. 
I could compare that approach with other approaches that have been taken in the Minister’s portfolio area. I recall the evidence given by the New Zealand Law Society at the select committee about the best way to deal with criminal procedure reform. The Law Society reminded us that the right place to start was with the drivers of crime. We have just lost a major opportunity to deal with a big driver of crime—alcohol—by failing to take a comprehensive approach to reform in that area. We have a drivers of crime project going on apparently but it is a closed process. Not many parties in this House and not many of the general public would know much about it. It is not the sort of process that one would expect to be occurring if we were serious about taking a long hard look at what causes crime in our society. 
Then the Law Society said one should look at the substantive statutes. The Crimes Act dates from 1961 and the Summary Proceedings Act dates from 1957. They need to be overhauled. Only then once one has dealt with the fundamental drivers and then the substantive law might one turn to the issues of evidence and procedure that this legislation tinkers with. 
That is my criticism of what we are doing today and of what the Minister has achieved in his time in the role of Minister of Justice. He has been distracted. He has not followed a coherent and attractive reform agenda. He has allowed us to be diverted on to questions like the three-strikes legislation boot camps and depriving inmates of the right to vote which are all things that will not make a jot of difference to the public safety of our fellow New Zealanders while the most important statute on the Order Paper—the one that gives the police powers and controls over how they deal with surveillance warrants—was allowed to languish for more than a year despite the fact that my colleague David Parker wrote to the Minister and offered him support with a couple of tweaks to pass that bill. 
I do commend the legislation to the House as I said. It is better than it could have been it is not as good as it might be and it is not comprehensive reform. We must not kid ourselves about what we are doing here. We will be back in this House in the next term trying to deal with inefficiencies in the criminal justice system because of the failure of the Minister to follow the Law Society’s advice and to start at the beginning with root and branch reform rather than in the middle by looking at procedure. We could have had a great Minister of Justice in Simon Power despite his short tenure in the role if he had just listened and put together a comprehensive reform agenda rather than a piecemeal one such as the one that we have seen over the past 3 years. That is the great regret I have about the Minister’s term in the job.