Bennett DavidDOG CONTROL (CATEGORY 1 OFFENCES) AMENDMENT BILLThird ReadingHon DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East) on behalf of Ian McKelvie: I move That the Dog Control (Category 1 Offences) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. Thank you Mr Speaker. It's great to have you in the House. We've got this bill on behalf of Ian McKelvie who is not in the Parliament this week because he's unable to be here so I'm shepherding this bill through for him in the great spirit of the Primary Production Committee. I just want to pay tribute to Mr Ian McKelvie first of all; he is the kaumātua of the House. He is a very well respected member of this Parliament and has always been wanting to make—SPEAKER: Did he do these notes?Hon DAVID BENNETT: I think that you need to do a point of order Mr Speaker if you interrupt. I know it's a technical process the Opposition use to interrupt great speeches but coming from the Speaker's Chair it's a little bit unusual to have him interrupting at an early stage in the speech. Normally I get sat down because the Speaker can't handle the ferocity of the debate. But in this case the Speaker had to resort to interrupting a very fine speech when I was talking about a very fine member of this House. The jovial nature of the speech is not because it should be at 9 o'clock at night like normally when we're doing a member's speech but in the support of Mr Ian McKelvie in this very important legislation around dog control. It's important that we take the time to pay respect to that fine member of the House who's not here today but surely would want to see this bill passed through the Parliament in a very fine fashion.Now Mr McKelvie is a rural representative in this House and takes a very active interest in rural issues. Dog control is a very big issue in many rural communities so he has found that this is an issue of some interest to his community and has decided that he would like to do a member's bill. We are now at the third reading of that member's bill. Now this bill is one that is effective and will make a big difference for Mr McKelvie in his community. When we look at the bill it effectively takes away the—now Mr Hamish Walker is beside me now. He's another fine member of the rural community and we're looking for his member's bills that will come forward to this House as well. I'm sure they'll have a slightly different focus coming from the South but he still will be a new Ian McKelvie in time to come.But when we look at this bill there were about 456 charges a year in the 2015 and 2016 year and of those 427 were category 1 offences. So what this bill effectively does is enable justices of the peace to hear those cases rather than them having to go through the court process. It's a very simple bill in that sense. It effectively frees up the court time to enable people to be able to make sure that we have the right use of our court processes for the right reasons and when we look at the number of cases 427 cases in 2015-16 that will make a significant difference in our court system. You may say Well why is that relevant?" and "Why do we need to do that?" Well everybody knows that the court system is a system that is highly used. It has waiting times for people wanting to get into court to hear their cases heard and that need to make it more efficient so that we can get the proper cases heard in the proper and timely manner is very important. I think there are three reasons why that's really important and the effects I think of this bill beyond the dog control are first around victims. The court process there is a very important part of victims being able to feel that they have had their case heard to get some justice for what they have experienced. Often victims have to wait too long in our system and anything we can do that speeds that system up so that victims do get the ability to have justice I think is a good thing and this bill does exactly that by taking these cases out of the District Court system and enabling JPs to hear the cases.The second thing I think is it's really important from the effect on the offenders in the court system. We've got so many people on remand now. If you look at the remand population in New Zealand it's gone up significantly under this Government. And that is a difficult time because those people aren't getting the support they need and also are not getting the ability to get on with their sentence—or even freedom if they're found to be not guilty. And so the essence of what Mr McKelvie's doing here is actually enabling the court processes to speed up for other people that would potentially have had to wait for something to have happened in this case. The other thing—the other unintended effect but what it does actually do for the court system—is that there are some people that might be found to be not guilty. To have a court case over their head when they are not guilty or able to demonstrate a way to deal with that issue in a constructive way quickly—this enables that potentially to happen a lot quicker because they don't have to wait around for the court case to happen because you know we're potentially going to have a much quicker and more efficient court system as a result of this.So the bill itself is a very short bill. If anyone's looking at it you'll see that it's only a matter of one page in its scope and it's probably one of the shortest bills that will go through this Parliament. The Primary Production Committee made some changes to it as well: if you look at clause 4 where we've got new section 66A "Jurisdiction for category 1 offences" the select committee took out "Community Magistrates" from that. It was proposed it was going to be JPs and community magistrates. It's just down to JPs now. So basically if there are two or more justices of the peace then they can make that decision. If you look at subsection (2) there it's got a deletion of one of the potential sections—or offences that could be covered. And that was just to reflect what was seen in the select committee when we had hearings and advice that that particular section there was not suitable to be in the bill. The select committee only had 13 submissions so it wasn't a great deal of submissions. But they reflect the nature of this bill as a bill that was fairly well represented in its first instance; there wasn't a lot of change needed. And members of the House will see that it has come through in a pretty clean fashion from what was initially put forward by Mr Ian McKelvie.So this bill may seem like a small bill on its face but in effect what it will do is make our court system more efficient. That leads to better justice for victims for potential offenders and also for those that are found to be in breach of the law. And so the effect of this bill is more wide ranging than the nature of its title. So we recommend this bill to the House. We thank Ian McKelvie for bringing it forward and we look forward to it passing through this House with no additions. Thank you."