Clendon David: Criminal Procedure Legislation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Criminal Procedure Legislation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 08 May 2013. Volume:689;Page:9716. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): Tēnā koe. I am pleased to speak to this bill the Criminal Procedure Legislation Bill and to confirm the Greens’ continued support for this legislation. It is a necessary piece of legislation. It is practical. It seeks to ensure the integrity and indeed the utility of the primary legislation—the legislation as passed in 2011 or was 2012 the final passing? As highlighted by the Minister introducing the bill the Associate Minister of Justice the 2011 legislation intended to make the criminal justice system more transparent more understandable and more efficient. Those are clearly admirable goals and appropriate goals and it would be perverse not to support them. It is worth recalling that at the time the legislation was being put through the House in 2011 there were elements of the original drafting that were not admirable and did not win the support of this House particularly in the proposals to change the practice of trial by jury and to change the practice and policy around the presumption of innocence. In the event of course the Minister at the time lost the majority in the House due to those two critical elements of the original drafting. It required him to recant and indeed to redraft the bill into a form that was acceptable and it ultimately did get passed through the House.I think the necessity to ensure that our criminal justice system does move speedily and smoothly and that it is streamlined and efficient has been highlighted recently in the context of conversations around the bail laws and the perceived necessity of amendment to those. We are seeing reports of increased offending by people on bail and clearly one of the drivers of that is simply that people are on bail for much longer than is desirable. In part that is due to the fact that the courts are not able to put cases through. Hearings are taking too long and the process is slower than it ought to be and than it ideally would be. Anything we can do to amend that has got to be a desirable thing and something we will support.However there is some disconnect I have to say between the intention of this bill—the efficiency and the streamlining of the justice process and of the court process—and other policies other legislation and other practices of this Government where it seems almost deliberately to be setting out to slow the functioning of the courts and to make the courts less effective and less efficient than they ought and need to be. I think of issues like the numbers of support staff. As with elsewhere in the Public Service we are seeing a reduction in numbers. We are hearing from lawyers from people working in the justice sector that we are seeing a loss of experienced staff in the courts. As a result of that we are not seeing the courts operating as effectively and as efficiently as they might. That is clearly not a desirable thing. We should be at least ensuring we have sufficient well-trained well-qualified and experienced staff in our courts to ensure the prompt and the effective delivery of justice to people going through the court system.Similarly it seems perverse at a time when we are seeking to improve the functioning of the court system that we are closing courthouses in some of our provincial areas and reducing services available at other courts. This is not helpful clearly to the public.