Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Mr Speaker thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on the COVID-19 Response (Courts Safety) Legislation Bill. Now this is an omnibus bill that removes legal barriers to the judiciary—or seeks to remove legal barriers to the judiciary—and the Ministry of Justice in addressing health and safety issues in relation to COVID-19 and the safety risks in courts and in some tribunals. So that's what everybody of course has been very much concerned about over these past two years as we have battled with COVID-19 and the restrictions imposed by Government which they see as in the best interests of New Zealanders in order to reduce the harmful public health effects of COVID-19. This legislation is what we believe to be a rather belated attempt to try and deal with the complications of those rules in the legal setting. And I suppose it reflects the broad theme that was seen in relation to COVID-19 in this Government which is one of scrambling to pass laws urgently to try and fix problems that were very easily foreseeable. So the genesis of this bill starts with the legislation in November for the traffic light regulations as they might be called which we're all sort of trying to grapple with now being in orange and wondering what that means for ourselves and our families. Now this was brought in in haste under urgency—the traffic light measures back in November—to bring in all these rules and regulations about when to wear a mask who was to come and what mandates to have there and all these issues raised in preparation for the inevitable arrival of COVID-19 in some form in the country. Now the point we made at the time was we started this back in March 2020 and the Government's strategy—in so far as it can be determined—on COVID-19 was to buy time; that is to put boundaries up around the country and to lock down parts of the economy and to basically encircle the country with a very strict border control with enormous economic cost and to do that so that we could vaccinate the population when vaccines became available and prepare our health system to respond to the inevitable subsequent arrival of COVID in New Zealand which would be mollified by high levels of vaccination. Now of course in 2021 what we saw in the first half of the year was a very slow vaccine roll-out and a missed opportunity there that contributed to the requirement to lock the whole of Auckland down for such an extended period in the second half of the year. Nevertheless in the second half of the year we did get on finally and got cracking on the vaccination and New Zealanders as a whole have done a remarkable job there. Nevertheless still eventually we have to open up; we have to re-engage with the world. We can't just stay isolated as a hermit kingdom forever. At some point COVID is going to get into the country that was obvious to everybody—that was obvious to everybody—and so some sort of mechanism to deal with that burst of activity that was going to occur when COVID came into New Zealand was going to be required. Now the Government finally got round in November to coming up with what they term this traffic light framework" through some legislation through the House. And at the time we thought "Well what are the consequences for the court system and access to justice for people who are compelled to go to the courts and where does that all fit in?" We're very conscious of the broader context of the justice sector which is very slow; it's a trite thing to say that "justice delayed is justice denied" but it's true. You know there are sort of three elements around justice that have to be considered: one is getting the judgment right; but also it is how long it takes to get that judgment; and thirdly whether it is an affordable thing for the people involved. If you don't pay enough attention to the time it takes and the cost then you still don't really get justice particularly in the civil setting and in many other areas and families' lives are on hold and we're seeing that right across the country at the moment. That access to justice and the efficient movement of the courts is a critically important issue. So having scrambled in November to introduce the traffic light setting nothing was done on the court side. Then we heard last night in a revelation from the Minister that the officials got on to it in the new year after Christmas—when he says the "new year" my hunch is that it's probably the last week of January that they got on to it and started the policy work on this bill. And as a result what we have is a bill that makes amendments to the Courts Security Act 1999 which clarifies that the heads of bench—the senior members of courts—set requirements relating to COVID-19 that people must enter and remain in court and some tribunals. It applies safeguards where people are compelled—it sets out a bunch of things that make it in essence easier for the court system to be able to clarify how the court system can deal with COVID restrictions in a way that is legal and that works.Then secondly it amends the criminal procedure—well thirdly I won't work about the second one in the interest of time but thirdly—arrangements around the Juries Act and allows people to decline jury service if they have been affected by COVID-19 and particularly if their family has even been economically affected by COVID-19. The problem is of course that being so slow to get around to doing this and waiting for the new year to start the policy process and introducing it into the House it now has been made redundant largely because most of the restrictions have been removed; the mandates are drifting off into the sunset. We are now sort of working our way down the traffic light—we were red for a very long time and now it's blazing amber and we're hoping that like the traffic lights the amber will be short and we'll be in green before we know it. In fact we don't do that in New Zealand but in the United States they do that. It's usually the other way around here so that metaphor doesn't work. And so the outcome of it all is that this bill is redundant largely. The point I was trying to make in the committee stage last night was: what is astounding in this whole process is that if the Government wanted to do one thing to deal with the broader issue of the slowness of access to justice and the big backlog that we see in court cases and the years that people are waiting to get resolution to justice issues and cases that put their lives on hold you would think that any Government worth its salt would have thrown resources and if necessary legal changes into ensuring much more effective audiovisual responses and technological responses to keeping those parts of the court system running that can run in that setting. Not everything can of course—not everything can—but there is a substantial volume of work that can be dealt with audiovisually. And as we've all learnt everyone through this pandemic there is this thing called Zoom and there are these options where things that were unthinkable two or three years ago that could be done over the phone or online can be done over the phone and online and things can actually happen; people can get on with life. Now there's been an element of that in the court system but nowhere near as much as we would have liked. As I pointed out to the Minister there were 27 courts or tribunals throughout the country—it might have been 29—that don't have any—any—audiovisual facilities. You would think that in the context of a Government that has spent something around $60 billion on the COVID response and a Minister of Finance that's opened the chequebook for all sorts of mad job-creation schemes at a time when there's no workers such as Jobs for Nature—all that sort of stuff—that he would have found some resources to really advance the audiovisual capabilities. So on that basis this is a bill that has missed the boat and we won't be supporting it."