Salesa Jenny; Penk ChrisPart 2 Procedures to protect security information in proceedingsCHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Members we come now to Part 2 which is the debate on clauses 8 to 28 Procedures to protect security information in proceedings". The question is that Part 2 stand part.CHRIS PENK (National—Kaipara ki Mahurangi): Thank you very much Madam Chair. Just a couple within this part from me at least. I know Todd Muller is looking forward to taking a couple of calls on it as well. He's told me how interesting he's found the debate so far. I think the only thing that could possibly make it more interesting was if he were to join in. Hon Member: Go Todd!Arena Williams: Come on Todd. Let's go woohoo!CHRIS PENK: Well members of the Justice Committee are encouraging. I think they should look in the mirror. But anyway seeing as I've currently got the dubious honour of being on my feet to talk about Part 2 of this Security Information in Proceedings Legislation Bill I am interested to know about the role of the special advocate. It's a key feature of the legislation that a person is going to be appointed as a "special advocate" and there are ways that that takes place and the legislation sets out certain things about what the special advocates will do of course and a little bit about what kind of person they should be. My concern is that it's quite a specialised kind of role. We're going to need people who are knowledgeable in the law generally because a wide range of kinds of matters could come up for the person who happens to have some sort of interesting security situation in their background. Ideally special advocates will be quite experienced. In any given matter it will be important that they don't have a conflict of interest; that's always the case for lawyers. Obviously you don't want someone standing up and appearing who went to law school with the judge or has some other kind of you know—I was going to say cosy relationship. That's probably not only disgracefully informal but also probably understates the seriousness of this idea that we have to have people who in this particular instance aren't actually even appointed by the person who's the subject of the proceedings as their lawyer. This person is imposed. And I don't mean that rudely but they'll be imposed on the person. This is your person who's going to make sure that your legal rights are not derogated from they're the champion they're the trusted adviser and they're the legal representative and that's a very serious thing. So we need to have good people people who are appropriate for the role of special advocate appointed to such.I just really hope that we have enough such people in our justice system in our legal profession who haven't been burnt out or found another area of practice that they want to hold and so on such that they're not available for this important task to the extent that it's possible. I know the Minister doesn't have a magic wand to wave over the profession but you know it is a challenging time at the moment for the legal profession particularly with courts under a huge amount of strain generally huge amount of stress burnout—all these issues are familiar to us as people who take an interest in the justice system in general. Particularly with relation to the special advocate then I ask the Minister: is she confident that we will have enough such people available to fill these roles to be on the panel and so forth?"