Flavell Te Ururoa: Legal Services Bill — Second Reading 
Flavell Te Ururoa: Legal Services Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:670;Page:16764] 
TE URUROA FLAVELL (Maori Party—Waiariki) 
: 
 Kia ora ano tatou katoa. In talking to the Legal Services Bill I say that the Maori Party is pretty proud of our stand in placing the constitution firmly in front of our coalition arrangement with the National Party and hopefully standing strong in our determination to support human rights of all people by ensuring their access to justice. The call for justice after all was what motivated our work to reverse the previous Government’s decision not to sign up to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Access to justice specifically through restoring access to the courts has been pretty pivotal in our role with the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill that will be heading to the House in the next week or so. 
We come to the Legal Services Bill with a view to understanding how this bill in replacing the current Legal Services Act 2000 will improve the situation for all New Zealanders. There is no denying that reform needed to happen. Dame Margaret Bazley as others have mentioned tonight left no room for doubt when her review highlighted a range of deficiencies within the legal aid system. These included the variable quality of legal aid services as well as some serious service delivery issues. 
A key recommendation from the Bazley report was that “stronger coordination between community law centres and central government” is needed to ensure community law centres are able to help the greatest number of people for the funding that is available. We have taken a particular interest in the potential of this bill to ensure much-needed services for Maori can continue to be delivered. As Dame Margaret said “if the legal aid system fails Maori it fails altogether.” 
As electorate MPs each of us will have had experiences of clients who have alleged that their lawyers are incompetent or corrupt. We have heard too many stories of legal aid lawyers dragging the legal process on for long periods of time indefinitely to get repeated chances at fees. It is what Dame Margaret reported as milking the system. There are plenty of other stories of legal aid lawyers who have recommended guilty pleas rather than actively taking up the interests and rights of many of their Maori clients. 
Of course the stories of delays and deferrals are fairly legendary. We all remember the situation of 18 defendants caught in the spotlight of 15 October raids on Ruatoki. Their applications for legal aid were lodged more than 4 months before they began to be processed by the Legal Services Agency. I remember that at the time the day that Dame Margaret Bazley’s recommendations were released Annette Sykes shared her view on  
Te Karere 
 that she approved of the changes to invest in the competency of legal aid lawyers. It was her view that too many Maori were frustrated by the poor quality of the work undertaken by those lawyers. 
Dame Margaret Bazley’s report revealed that there was a small but significant group of lawyers who were abusing the system. We welcome the move in the Legal Services Bill to the effect that lawyers will now have to sit competency tests before going on the legal aid roster. But we also hope that the brush is applied more widely not just targeted at a particular court or a particular region as was discussed by the member for the Green Party. 
Our key focus in looking at this bill is to assess exactly how it will support the specific needs of Maori. These are all-important steps and we hope that along the way the Minister will see fit to reinstate funding for the Maori Legal Service. We have a particular interest in the Maori Legal Service and believe that it would be an improvement to have Maori legal services under the scrutiny of Parliament. We want to see that legal aid will address the needs of peoples with insufficient means in Aotearoa. 
I want to raise a particular matter around the intention of the bill which is to clarify that legal aid is available for Waitangi Tribunal proceedings but not negotiations with the Crown to achieve the settlement of a claim. I recall that at the end of 2009 the late Sir Atawhai Taiaroa Sir Taihakurei Eddie Durie Matanuku Mahuika and other representatives met with the Minister of Justice Simon Power to express concerns about the number of lawyers appearing before the Waitangi Tribunal and the consequential loss of tribal control over their claims. It was proposed that a small group should meet with the Legal Services Agency and the Waitangi Tribunal to search for alternative proposals that would retain the benefit of legal aid but place controls on the number of lawyers and the consequential expenditure for that. 
The Ngai Tahu Maori Law Centre brought a particular insight to the issue. It is a community law centre based in Dunedin that specialises in Maori land law. It was its view that “Moving the funding of negotiations between claimants and the Crown from the Legal Aid system to be funded solely by the Office of Treaty Settlements leaves open the potential for the funding of negotiations to be unduly influenced by those who negotiate with claimants on behalf of the Crown.” I will be interested to hear from the Minister about how the views of Maori leaders and the submission from Ngai Tahu have been taken into account in the bill as it emerges from the select committee process. We will be interested to know what the nature of the tests will be that are put in place for Maori to apply for such funding. 
I am aware that the challenge was issued by Dame Margaret Bazley that there be incentives in place to support the specific needs of Maori. Some of the comments from Annette Sykes give me reason to believe that the changes around the competency of lawyers will be positive. But there are some real concerns also around the removal of the public advisory committee which is something that both the Ngai Tahu Maori Law Centre and the Coalition of Community Law Centres of Aotearoa both spoke against. We want to see community input and consultation retained in the administration of legal aid and we want to know how the Legal Services Commissioner and the new quality assurance framework will take this into account. 
Let us be clear: our preference would have been to retain the Public Advisory Committee to ensure the involvement of the community. We do support disestablishing the Legal Services Agency and shifting responsibility to the Secretary for Justice and we also support the approach of all legal aid lawyers having to demonstrate competency. But we remain concerned about the removal of a specific community input and our vote at the final reading will be determined by discussions that we have over the successive stages to assess whether Dame Margaret’s warning has been addressed. As I said the warning was that if the legal aid system fails Maori the system will fail altogether. I will leave that for the consideration of the House. The Maori Party will be supporting this bill at its second reading.