Borrows Chester: Legal Services Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Borrows Chester: Legal Services Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:658;Page:7392] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call on the Legal Services Amendment Bill. I thank members of the Justice and Electoral Committee for their work on consideration of the bill and the way in which submissions were heard and submitters were engaged. It is certainly a bill that acts to work for the assistance of victims whose costs in relation to coronial inquests and Parole Board hearings are very real and very practical and are not easily dealt with within the ambit of the legal services that are available today. 
We heard from a large number of submitters. I think their anecdotes weighed heavily on the committee as far as fairness goes. These people did not ask to be victims and did not ask to be drawn into the situation that they found themselves in. It is often the case that the people who are involved in these crimes as victims are overrepresented by demography and by a lack of resources and an inability to meet the costs of attendance at tribunal hearings and coronial inquests. For instance I bear in mind the situation that the mother of Michael Choy found herself in. Her son was murdered by six young teenagers who were sentenced to various relatively short periods of imprisonment for their crime. But then they all became eligible for parole in the same year for about 3 years. She felt a duty in memory of her son to attend each of those Parole Board hearings in order to represent the interests of other families of murder victims and to do her duty as the mother of somebody who was murdered. The cost of having to attend those Parole Board hearings around the country was exhaustive—not only in financial terms but also in terms of the emotional cost of having to go through the processes find the energy to be able to make submissions respond to things said by the other side and things said within the media and also come under scrutiny during that process. 
I was also reminded of some experiences that I was aware of through previous lives. For instance I refer to the family whose young son was killed in a car accident. There was an allegation from the person whom the police believed was the driver that some of the cause of the accident fell on the family’s dead son. The family felt a need to be part of that process and to be represented. Of course any interested party is able to be involved in and represented at a coronial inquest and is able to ask questions there. That is not something that people find it within themselves to do bearing in mind the emotion of the circumstances and also the fact that a courtroom is a foreign environment for a lot of people who are dragged into these circumstances. This particular family engaged a solicitor in order to firstly receive the police file from the police in order to view the investigation of the sudden death in a motor accident and then to represent the family over a 2-day hearing. The cost of the hearing was probably well below market rates but was still very high for the family. The cost approached $2000 for that one particular hearing. 
There needs to be the ability for a society that has care and concern about victims to mitigate the costs the financial costs at least of appearing before coronial inquests and Parole Board hearings. Clause 5 removes the financial eligibility test for victims of crime where representation is needed at coronial inquests and Parole Board hearings. It has been a long time coming. I am pleased that there was very strong cross-party support for it. In fact all the committee hearings were conducted with very good will. I am pleased that the outcome extends across as far as that. 
Clause 6 provides that repayment conditions cannot be applied to those grants. However such an application can still be declined if it does not meet the merits test. That means that sometimes when a situation blows up and people get hurt not only the bystanders but also the players are dragged in. Members may wonder what the circumstances might be in order for the Legal Services Agency to decide that it will decline an application on a merits-based test. It may well be because of the actions of the victim how that victim found himself or herself to be present at the scene and how he or she came to be injured hurt or killed. For instance it could well be that a criminal enterprise was going on at the time and the person was party to that criminal enterprise. For whatever reason things went wrong and people were hurt or killed. The Legal Services Agency can then quite rightly look at those circumstances as they are alleged to be and decide whether it will decline or accept the claim in respect of attendance at either of those two tribunal hearings. I think the public quite easily can get their heads around those circumstances and see that it will be valid on some occasions for the Legal Services Agency to decline an application for a fees waiver. 
Clause 7 gives the Legal Services Agency discretion on a case by case basis to write off a debt owed to it by a victim of a crime. This also applies to other types of proceedings. Under current law the Legal Services Agency must wait until the final cost of proceedings is known. The result is that there is a stressful period of uncertainty for victims. This occurs at a time we should remember when not long before a coronial inquest the family quite probably had to make funeral arrangements and deal with all the emotions and costs that are tied up with that. So there needs to be some certainty as to what the costs will be for the family in the future. They need to have some answers so they can put it out of their heads for that particular period. I think this is a very compassionate clause. 
Of course clause 7 also amends the Legal Services Act to allow the debt to be written off at any time. A decision maker within the Legal Services Agency can decide very early in the piece whether the costs will be written off so the family can know from quite an early stage exactly where they are going. 
The regulation power under the Act provided in clause 8(1) is extended to allow the exemption of any specified class or classes of person or proceeding from financial eligibility criteria. Those matters will be decided in the public interest—whether it facilitates the access to justice and whether the exemption is just and equitable in the circumstances. It allows the Minister of Justice to have some flexibility to account for the large number of foreseen and unforeseen circumstances where this legislation may apply. 
I am very pleased with the work of the Justice and Electoral Committee and with the support across the House for the bill. I commend the bill to the House.