Wall LouisaLOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Thank you my colleague David Bennett. We are having a split call and I do appreciate you allowing me to go first.As a member of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee we have considered the Military Justice Legislation Amendment Bill. I just wanted to start with the purpose of the bill which is essentially to bring efficiency transparency and consistency to both the military justice system and our criminal justice system because currently they're separate. The objective has been to align military justice with criminal justice because at the end of the day the people who are part of our society whom our criminal justice system serves and the people in the military are actually equal citizens of our country. The whole objective of this bill is to ensure fairness and equality of justice and also to ensure that victims of serious crime actually have the same rights and receive the same support.We really need to look at where I guess the context of this change came from and it was actually a review of the military justice system that took place between 2002 and 2006. It was to look at whether or not the military justice system was robust and fair and to align it with our criminal justice system. I do want to note that the review was a collaboration between the New Zealand Defence Force the Ministry of Justice and the Chief Judge of the Court Martial and specifically in consultation with the New Zealand Law Society and victims' support. It did make amendments in the following four areas and this is what this bill will do.The first—and one of the foci of this piece of legislation—was around victims' rights. It is to ensure that it conferred the same rights to military victims of serious offences including sexual or violent offences as those rights afforded to victims in the civilian criminal justice system. I think we've all become a lot more aware of the sensitivities in those situations in making sure that victims have access immediately to counselling and other support services given the trauma of being a victim of sexual violence.It was also about judicial appointments and ensuring that judicial appointments were fit for purpose and that purpose was to ensure that there were no conflicts of interest and also to separate what interestingly had been a kind of situation within the military system where military commanding officers essentially had all the power and could do whatever they wanted. I will talk about a case from the UK which kind of highlights all the flaws in the military justice system.It was also about court martial procedure and whether an accused was in the first instance unfit to stand trial because what you had in the military justice system was a trial and then there was an assessment about whether or not that person was incapacitated and actually should have stood trial in the first place. So if people are unfit to stand trial because they have a mental illness or they are deemed by a psychiatrist to be in a state of insanity and they shouldn't be held accountable for their actions then in fact why would we go through an entire court process?And then the other major focus has been on shifting the onus of proof. In the criminal justice system if someone like the police takes a charge against you they have to prove that you've committed a crime. In the military justice system actually by mere virtue of you being charged there's an assumption that you're guilty and so again that was probably a big highlight.What I wanted to share was that these things have been driven because of precedents and there was a case in the European Court of Human Rights. Essentially it was because a soldier had fought in the Falklands. He'd witnessed horrific things and he actually had a mental breakdown while he was still working for the military. He tried to kill himself—shot a television—and he went right through the court martial process. That shouldn't happen and this bill will stop that in the future. Kia ora.