Franks Stephen: General Debates 
Franks Stephen: General Debates 
[Volume:607;Page:4206] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT NZ) 
: 
 I want to review the illustrious recent career of a major non-producer on the Government benches the “Minister of Justice Announcements” the Hon Mr Goff who announces and then reannounces and reannounces programmes instead of dealing with issues. We heard today about a pilot legal aid programme. That programme is an absolute trifle compared with the eligibility for legal aid review and report that we were supposed to have had 2 years ago. If we had had that report we might not have some of the unfairness that we have at the moment to middle-income earners some of the rorts in the Resource Management Act and some of the scandals like the $1.3 million spent on the Tukuafus. We might if this Minister was not a non-producer have had the official victimisation survey that was due on 29 March last year and we might have had a little earlier than 2 weeks ago the bill for the Independent Police Complaints Authority. The only thing that bill does is to put “Independent” in front of the name of the authority; it does nothing else that a little increase in budget would not have done. 
How can we take Mr Goff’s vein-throbbing anger and his trembling passion as anything more than manufactured feeling? It is just a political performance given that he dithers or does nothing to live up to his title—Minister of Justice—in one of the few areas where he cannot blame others for the miscarriage of justice. Mr Goff is the gatekeeper for the exercise of the prerogative of mercy. That prerogative of course protects one of our most precious heritages: the concept of innocence until proven guilty and the concern that says it is better that 10 guilty people go free than one innocent person be convicted. 
There is a worrying conviction growing in this community that something sinister is happening in our justice system. There is a fear that we are getting more miscarriages of justice than one can just attribute to the random accidents that any justice system must have because resources are not infinite. There is reliance on secret witnesses uncorroborated evidence and astonishing confessions to paid cellmates. Those are all signs of a political pressure for results a sort of panic perhaps or perhaps an understandable reaction to frustration on the part of the police that the courts and corrections department are losing criminals faster than they can put them in prison. It may be that there is a fear that the police’s frustration is sending us down that dark path of mysterious beatings of people in cells or of the sort of cynicism and corruption known in Australia. 
Why do the high-profile cases now almost automatically attract offender support groups? David Bain’s case is just the most recent example of that but we have had many others since we lost our innocence over Arthur Allan Thomas. Members will remember the Donnellys Peter Ellis in the Christchurch crèche case and a number of rape cases—they go on. In all of that Mr Goff is our present fail-safe back-up. But he is sitting on his hands. In the middle of last year he announced that his favourite justice official Professor Warren Young would produce a report on how to review such cases. That report was due before the end of last year and it is still not available. There is no sign of it. Perhaps it is available but just not to the public. Perhaps it is undergoing the same process as the youth justice report from which Professor Young is cutting out the bits that the Minister does not want to hear. Perhaps it is undergoing a reworking of the data like the official victimisation survey due nearly a year ago. 
I draw the attention of the House to two cases that could be our equivalent of those terrible British cases concerning the Guilford and Bradford defendants where public confidence in justice took such a terrible hit. In one case Mr Peter Hartley has satisfied me that there is a strongly arguable case that three men have spent the best part of a decade in prison on the basis of false complaints from a woman who has since been convicted for attempting to have two more men falsely charged on similar fantasy evidence. Mr Hartley had to bring the prosecution of the woman privately because the police refused to do it. Eventually the Crown solicitor took over the case and secured two convictions. That is a startling success. It is certainly startling that the Minister urged me to ignore that case on the basis that the man was just a scumbag. If those three men are the victims of similar perjury Mr Goff’s indifference for a year will have exposed the Crown to huge sums of avoidable compensation.