Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Well of course it was very interesting to hear. The Minister came up with a lot of reasons or excuses as to why there's been an increase in violent crime but not much in the way of solution other than spending more money. I suppose a question I have is: is the money going to be more usefully spent—or actually spent? If we look at a couple of examples from previous Budgets the 2020 Budget which announced with great fanfare a $20 million fund for helping strangulation victims and to aid with prosecutions two years on has delivered very little: fewer than 70 cases where they've helped people rather than 800 a year. Big announcement no follow through. If we think of the $3 million victim support fund announced in the 2021 Budget: big announcement no follow through; nobody collecting from the fund more than 10 months after it was announced. So we just look forward to—rather than announcements of spending and announcements of good intentions what are the actual outcomes? The second issue that I'm very keen to get a clear sense of from the Minister is what his plan is to deal with the massive backlog in courts across the country where we are seeing people's access to justice denied lives on hold as people wait for years and years. We're seeing the 238 percent increase in time since 2000 of cases taking more than 16 months for serious offences to be heard in the court: gone from 922 to nearly 3500 cases waiting for more than 16 months to work their way through the system. We've seen the District Court times for criminal cases increase from 100 to 159 days on average—lives on hold. We've seen the High Court period extend from 340 days to 404 days. We're seeing coronial matters taking a long time to be reported we're seeing the Environment Court—everything has ground down. Now COVID has aided to that no question about it but these court delays were building up before COVID and continue to build up. As a result you've got a very large increase of prisoners on remand which is they've gone to prison often in Auckland in Mt Eden Prison where they are not able to get any kind of rehabilitation around drug and alcohol abuse. They wait for the trial. It takes so long for the trial to occur that by the time they actually have the trial and they are sentenced the sentence has already been served because they've been in remand the whole time waiting for their court case to come up. They get no rehabilitation. They're put back out onto the streets. And what this Minister actually achieved in terms of trying to get on top of those delays in the court system? What is the plan and why given all the $60 billion or more spent on the COVID response was so little of it put in the way of actually getting better audiovisual facilities in our courts so that more of the work could have been done during these long periods of lockdown? That's one set of questions I'll be very keen to hear from the Minister.Secondly I want to get some clarity around our constitutional position. We heard in the House—the Minister said today that he was all in favour of equal suffrage that every New Zealander should have equal voting rights. And yet his Government the Labour Government with the Greens voted for the Rotorua District Council (Representation Arrangements) Bill which undermines and deviates from the idea of equal suffrage. So no wonder people are confused. He says he's for it; his party votes against it and then the sponsor of the bill Tāmati Coffey even after the Attorney-General comes along and says it breaches the Bill of Rights and it is discriminatory today says he still hasn't withdrawn the bill. He thinks he can change it somehow. But the only purpose of the Rotorua bill is to drop or deviate away from the idea of equal suffrage otherwise there would be no point for the bill. So I tried to get some clarity from the Minister on actually whether he genuinely does support equal voting rights for all New Zealanders. The third question that I want him to look at and perhaps give us some guidance from is his responsibility for the Independent Police Conduct Authority to which his Government has allocated $3.5 million to do an investigation into the riots that took over Parliament and disrupted central Wellington for more than 20 days trashed Parliament buildings and led to a violent melee at the end. Now how does he justify spending allocating $3.5 million to a study that only does half the job because it doesn't look into the actions of the Speaker and Government Ministers; it only looks at the actions of the police. And as we've seen from the actions today of the Speaker where he's seen fit to ban a former Deputy Prime Minister of this country from the House—CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Order! E noho. The member well knows that if there is an issue about the Speaker that there is a correct way of addressing it. Doing it during this debate is not the way to do it. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Thank you Mr Chair. I am just asking the Minister to justify $3.5 million for an—CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): No you commented on an earlier procedure during the House and that is out of order. Hon Kris Faafoi: Mr Chair?CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): No the—oh no your time's run out. The Hon Kris Faafoi.