O'Connor GregGREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): Arthur Conan Doyle Agatha Christie John Grisham Stieg Larsson Jack Reacher—all crime writers. The world loves a good mystery. The world loves a good criminal case. What's happened of course is that in a world which is a very digital world a world where many people receive their entertainment receive in fact their information on the world they get it from the television they get it from the movies and they get from the books. What that means is that everybody becomes an expert on law and order. You can be a photocopier salesman and still stand up in the House and talk about being an expert on law and order because you've watched a few mysteries on the telly. Well in reality it's not like that in the real world.In the real world when a crime is committed when the detectives are called in—and yes I trained detectives but it's not like it is on the telly. It's a matter of rebuilding what's happened. The art of a good detective is to reproduce what happened at the time of the crime so that everything you learn every single fact you learn—obviously you start with the body what did we learn? So we interrogate every fact we learn so we understand. So it's a building process to make sure that we fully understand what exactly has happened to reconstruct continually reconstruct continually reconstruct so by the time you have that case before the court you can answer the questions. There will always be those parts that you can't reconstruct without. The best form of evidence is always a properly obtained confession from the suspect or the offender but under various changes in the law that's a relatively rare thing these days. So we compensate with DNA. We compensate with fingerprints. We compensate with other forms of evidence which make up the case and often in the absence of a confession do help make the case.There are certainly people who are in prison who are innocent. Most of them are a little bit further down the food chain of offending. Many of them are there because they've been forced by their gang leader to confess. They're there because they may have confessed for different reasons and they end up in court. They're not the ones that generally get captured. They are not the ones that end up in North & South magazine. They're not the ones that end up in television documentaries. They are not the ones that end up the most talked about cases. In fact several speakers tonight have mentioned Teina Pora. The reason it took the Teina Pora case to come to court to get the justice that he rightly got was because he didn't represent one of those popular cases. He didn't represent someone that was immediately an attractive proposition for a magazine article. He didn't actually attract those types whereas with many of the cases that did generally where and almost invariably the offender was someone who the people who wrote the book shall I say could relate to that's generally what happened. Someone who was probably from the same socioeconomic class that was what the type of people—that's where a lot of the cases that were heard.So in the time that's left to me how does this relate to this bill? And you might ask—I did perhaps because I've been speaking for a while. Where it becomes very pertinent is that the justices—we as legislators here we play a very important part to ensure that people have faith in the system. It's about ensuring that as much as people have an understanding of the system it's more important—and they think they have an understanding but actually what they really do need is actually to have faith in our system. New Zealand does have a very good justice system many people have spoken about it here tonight. I've been lucky enough to have spent time with justice systems and examined justice systems around the world. We are pretty good. Like we do many things in New Zealand we benefit from being one single jurisdiction. We benefit from being very efficient. Unlike the Americans who have at last count something like 19000 different police forces—even our Australian colleagues have eight—we're very rare round the world as there is one jurisdiction and that makes us very very efficient.But even within that even in that digital age that I've spoken about it is important there'll be those cases that because of people's ability to grab hold of the airwaves because of people's ability—good writers good self-promoters just good promoters—to actually get the airwaves to have a good proportion of New Zealand's population actually believing that an injustice may have been done then it actually is necessary to have another system. That's why while I may have been a little bit sceptical when I first came to this I now do understand that this is not actually another level. We still have the Supreme Court we still have a Court of Appeal we still have the High Court and they are the courts that will actually look at the legalities. They'll look at it whether evidence was properly obtained; that's through that system. They will ensure that they test the legality of the evidence because anyone that's been on a jury will understand that a lot of the evidence that comes before court is tested. The jury are kicked out of that room for some time because they can't hear the arguments as to whether they can actually hear that evidence at all.What I like about this is that actually there is going to be the opportunity that much of that evidence that doesn't get heard—in fact once the court case is gone through it doesn't actually get held by others who are going to be actually looking at the case—will actually get to be seen.I think for every time there will be doubts raised—actually anyone who understands that it's just about putting the right people on this Criminal Cases Review Commission will actually see that yes if it's looked at properly the correct conclusion was reached: the jury did get it right the judge did get it right and the right decisions were made. Unfortunately because of the way the separation—because of as I said before the preponderance of crime stories the preponderance of documentaries and now all sorts of social media and those who have no right to be commenting those experts on law and order—with the preponderance of them out there actually they will look. What I'd like to see is someone with an investigative background also on this. I see there's the opportunity for that to ensure that that actually does happen. So this is a piece of legislation whose time has come. I like to think we've now entered the digital age. We've entered the age where so much of our information that we get—we don't get it from a newspaper that obeys the rules: the good old rules. There will be journalists here who will know that when we began in journalism if you're going to allege something you go to the person you're making the allegations against to ensure there's some semblance of balance in that newspaper story. That was what reporters that was what the newspapers that was what the media used to be like. It's not like that anymore. We now know with the preponderance of websites—most of which are very partisan—this is really a result of that partisanship. This is the result of the need to ensure that with that partisanship that is so much a part of the modern way in which people receive their information that there is now another method to test that.So again having been on the journey through this bill beginning with it as something of a sceptic I've seen it. I've looked about it objectively and I think this is a piece of legislation whose day has come and I'm happy to commend it to the House. Thank you Madam Speaker.