Logie Jan: Evidence Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Evidence Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 July 2015. Volume:706;Page:5096. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green):I rise to take a short call on this bill for the Green Party and we are supporting it. My colleague David Clendon spoke earlier more broadly about this bill but I would like to pay particular attention to the aspects of this bill that will impact on victims of sexual violence and on children. It is actually quite nice to follow on from my National Party colleague Chris Bishop and to mention and give respect to Elisabeth McDonald and Yvette Tinsley for their incredibly important work in this area as well as to all the other advocates in this country working in the community who have been working for decades to try to improve the absolutely appalling 1 percent conviction rate for perpetrators of sexual violence in this country. We do need to question whether it is in fact a justice system at all when gender-based crimes have such low conviction rates.Before I get into some of the details of this bill I do want to put it into a context of some action and inaction over time in relation to these legal and justice issues around sexual violence. We have had decades of challenge of being advocates and of legal academics drawing to our attention the need for substantive justice reform in this area. I think it came to most New Zealander’s attention how bad our system was when in 2006 we saw the acquittal of two former police officers and the then assistant commissioner of police who had been accused of the rape of Louise Nicholas in the 1980s. There was a very general and passionate response from most of this country in recognising the injustice of that decision and that that decision was an actual consequence of the way our legal system was set up where a woman who was incredibly brave to take a case to court was humiliated through the process and was not able to get justice.Out of that process the then Minister of Justice Mark Burton set up a task force for action—and I do emphasise that word “action”—on sexual violence which saw 2 years of ministries cross-ministries and advocates putting in thousands of hours probably of work to try to come up with solutions to be able to fix this terribly broken system. The then Minister of Justice in 2009 Simon Power described that work as the best road map that we had ever had for reducing sexual violence. Sadly we are still waiting to see the results of that.One of the key recommendations of that report was to refer options for fundamental change to the current justice system to the Law Commission. In 2011 I think the Law Commission was working on this and put out recommendations and ideas for consultation. It came back and the summary was produced in 2012. The then Minister of Justice Judith Collins took that work off the agenda of the Law Commission. So after decades of work of lost lives and of injustice that work was taken off the agenda. I do want to give credit to the new Minister of Justice Amy Adams for putting that work back on to the Law Commission’s agenda but I also want to register my absolute frustration that the time frame the Law Commission has been given of September this year means it has indicated that out of the 18 points for consideration in that consultation document it is probably going to be able to consider only two or three issues in substance.So that in actual fact is not a fundamental review of our justice system. It will be only a partial review and what this bill does is respond again to a partial part of the problem—one tiny aspect of a system that is so fundamentally broken we should all be in the streets complaining about it. When we have one in four women experiencing sexual violence in this country and a justice system that delivers justice in 1 percent of cases we have a bigger problem than this bill will solve.