Clendon David: Coroners Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Coroners Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 20 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7406. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): Thank you. I am pleased to take this call on the Coroners Amendment Bill. I sat in on the Justice and Electoral Committee and it was an interesting committee. I think we did some good work there. It was challenging. Not having had any background in this area at all I had a lot of misconceptions I discovered about what coroners do and I suspect they might be shared by a lot of other people. But over the course of the bill I certainly and I am sure others found out a great deal about the day-to-day work of coroners the demands that are placed on them and their roles and functions. As was just noted the last significant amendment to the legislation was in 2006. That was a considerable change not least of all I think in making coroners full-time judicial officers which prior to that they had not necessarily been. But it certainly seems timely to have another look at this.The committee was at times very difficult. We dug fairly deeply into the whole issue of suicide in New Zealand and that is obviously a major serious problem for us as New Zealanders. We heard from people again as has been mentioned who had lost family members in the most tragic possible conditions—accidents with multiple victims those sorts of things. So it was somewhat gruelling and I just reflected on that—that the coroners are confronting these sort of issues every day of the week literally. It is a 24-hours-a-day 7-days-a-week 365-days-a-year service.There are 16 of them spread around the country and I suspect that that is not sufficient. I had a conversation with a couple of coroners and what came through was a sense that maybe we are stretching them rather too thinly that we ought to appoint another two or three and certainly that the coroners who are there could usefully be given more administrative support. I do not think that the budget implications would be massive. I am sure they would not be but it might just take some of the pressure off what is a very demanding difficult job. Coroners hear something like 3500 cases a year. That can get to around something like seven eight or nine reported cases a day that the coroners need to deal with at some level. So I do think there is a case to be made to increase the capacity there to make sure that it is an effective—and critically that it is a sustainable—service.In the course of the committee process we looked at some of the key relationships that the coroners have—initially with pathologists. There was some debate about whether or not pathologists had sufficient leeway to engage with families of people whose loved ones had passed away in whatever circumstances. The outcome was that they will still be required to go through the coroners in terms of engaging with families. I think to me it highlighted that it is a very strong and a very professional relationship that exists between coroners and pathologists. But I think others on the committee shared the view that maybe at the collective level—at the association level—there seems to be some tension between those two groups and maybe that is something that could usefully be addressed and perhaps resolved.We talked and discussed and found out a bit about the relationship between coroners and the police. Coroners of course do not have any independent investigative resource; they do rely on police to do the investigations obviously. There was a little bit of a consideration of the boundaries if you like or the limits to the coroner’s ability or rights to direct police to undertake an investigation. There was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing on that. I think the outcome was quite good: that the coroner can and undoubtedly will direct police to undertake investigations. If the police believe that is unreasonable or unnecessary—if they are not happy with it—they may appeal to their commissioner who in turn will engage in a dialogue with the Chief Coroner. I think again that is quite a positive outcome. Sadly I suspect we might see more of that. I say that with the utmost respect for the New Zealand Police but sadly Police is being underfunded it is being stretched beyond breaking point. That matter alone—that reality alone—could cause it on occasion to start perhaps questioning whether it wanted to pursue particular cases on behalf of the coroner. One would hope that would remedied sooner rather than later.The issue of deaths in custody was one that we had serious concerns about going into the conversation at the select committee. Again as has been said and as you know currently any death in custody must be subject to a full inquest—an inquest is mandatory in those circumstances. The proposition that there could be some discretion around that raised some serious alarm bells for us. Frankly we do not have sufficient confidence particularly in corrections to get it right and we thought that it was important that the coroner would as a matter of course always conduct an inquest.We were sort of discouraged from that point of view in part by the submission from the Chief Coroner herself and conversations with coroners. In part because of some unfortunate changes over time to sentencing law the reality is that we are going to get more prisoners older prisoners and people who are in prison who suffer diseases—cancers or whatever it might be. Prisoners as a group have very poor health. A 60-year-old inmate who has been in and out of prison for a lot of their life is a very old person in terms of their general health and well-being. So we accept that on balance the coroner’s discretion is appropriate. They saw no point in imposing an inquest where there was a history of ill health and we accepted that.We did get considerable change in the language. Initially I think the wording of the original draft of the bill said that the coroner could only demand an inquest in those circumstances if they were satisfied there had been some negligence or some misconduct contributing to the death. It seemed odd—almost that you would need to do the inquest to discover that even in itself. So that has now been turned around to say that there will be an inquest or rather that the coroner’s judgment will turn on the question of would a medical practitioner reasonably have expected the death of that person given knowledge about their health status and health records? That seems to us to have landed in a pretty good place. My own view is that the coroners will if there is the least doubt about the cause of the death go to an inquest. I think we have to have some confidence in them but at the same time it is something we will continue to monitor to see if these cases do arise where perhaps there is that much grey area that inquests ought to be carried out that have not been.The point has been made that there is another safeguard: that any other interested party to an inquiry can initiate a full inquest by request if they have concerns that something is not coming to light that ought to come to light. I think that issue particularly is pertinent at the minute to deaths in custody as we see the phenomenon of private operators of prisons coming into the landscape. There are just too many perverse incentives around the issue of deaths in custody for us to have any particular comfort around what happens. I think we cannot but be alert to the possibility that deaths in custody are something that we need a lot of transparency a lot of accountability on. As I say I think this bill has landed in around the right place given that we can have significant faith in the coroners themselves to pursue this matter.So we spent a fair bit of time delving into issues around suicide and suicide reporting particularly. We had one very animated—I would describe it—submission that proposed that there should be no restrictions on the media in terms of reporting on suicides. That did not win any favour. I do not believe frankly that the media has earned the right to be trusted about issues of reporting suicides. There would be simply too much temptation I think to glamourise to make celebrities to simply make reporting that was unhelpful. So again the proposition that the media can now make comment that a death is a suspected suicide in advance of a finding to that effect I think is reasonable. We all know there are certain codes and meanings within meanings that legitimate reporting can use to indicate that it was a suicide. The absolute prohibition on describing place of suicide if the place could indicate the method or indeed the method itself—I do think those are useful and necessary restrictions on the media. I think that that will present about the right outcome.I mean I must comment—living in Northland youth suicide in particular has reached what has correctly been described as epidemic proportions. It is a very real very serious and very troublesome matter and I think that we have to constrain the role of the media in that very carefully frankly. And I think this bill does get to that place. So I will leave it there and look forward to the Committee stage of this bill.