Naylor Jono: Judicature Modernisation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNaylor Jono: Judicature Modernisation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 18 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1733. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JONO NAYLOR (National): It is with great pleasure that I rise to take a call on this bill. It is interesting actually—I was just talking to one of the members opposite in the lift on the way here. I thought I was bound to get the name of the bill wrong this Judicature Modernisation Bill. We had a little debate in the lift chamber as to how to pronounce it. Thankfully the member was able to set me straight as I got my tongue twisted around it.It is certainly a substantive bill. There is a lot of reading in this thing—1226 pages. It is a little slow to start off with but I found that by about page 473 it really had you hooked.Jacqui Dean: Oh stop it.JONO NAYLOR: Well I guess I was fibbing perhaps just a little bit. It is certainly very weighty. As the chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee said it takes a little while to get through it. Although I have not read all of it I have certainly paid very close attention to some aspects of it.I think it is very aptly named as the Judicature Modernisation Bill because when we have an Act that has been around since 1908—despite the fact that it has had a few amendments along the way—it seems most appropriate that we have something like this to modernise it. The existing Act has stood the test of time for some 107 years but now it is time to just I guess joosh things up a little bit and for us to move on and have a look at what is happening.It has been great for me to see this Government’s reforms in the justice area. We have been working very hard at putting victims first in the legislation that we have been drafting. I think this is incredibly appropriate because although it is not necessarily directly related to this I know certainly that whenever we have things that make things better for victims to me that it is incredibly important. Some 6 or 7 years ago my brother-in-law was killed in a motorcycle accident. The driver there was up on charges. It meant that we had to travel to the court hearingsfrom time to time. I know that my wife went and supported her sister a number of times travelling up to Taupō and Rotorua from Palmerston North only to find when they got there that the lawyer was not going to be available and the case was not going to be proceeding that day. At that time I could not help but think actually that we really need to ensure that our justice system becomes more victim-focused and takes into account the needs of those people. And that is exactly what this Government is working on doing with the justice legislation that we have been working on for the past 6 or so years.So I guess really that what we are looking for and what this bill is aiming to do is ensure that our justice system is more flexible more responsive and more transparentbe it in the criminal field or in the civil field. It is not just the victims who will benefit from that; our society will most certainly benefit when our justice system is more flexible is more responsive and is more transparent. That is exactly what these 1226 pages are aiming to do—to modernise our justice system and bring it in to the 21st century and to ensure that those principles are adhered to.I want to focus initially on the technological advances that are being taken throughout this bill. I think it is really great to see things moving along and getting into something that is more appropriate to this day and age. We do live in a world of Facebook and Twitter and people living online. So I think the provision that says that there is a presumption that all written judgments will be published online unless there is a good reason not to is a very good provision for us to have in the bill. Of course there need to be limits on this. I think it might perhaps be inappropriate if every judge had a Twitter account and just after making a judgment they fired it up on Twitter and said: “Just locked that guy up for 5 years. That was awesome.” I do not know that that would necessarily be quite appropriate in terms of technological advances. I guess we do not necessarily want judges sitting in their chair with selfie sticks and posting photos up on Facebook either. So I think there are clearly some boundaries that we would want to have in terms of technology and how it is moving forward. But there are some very good provisions in the bill. As I said publishing written judgments online unless there is a good reason not to is a very good place to start.The other technological advance that I really do support is the idea of there being audiovisual links in particular at certain types of hearings. The member opposite said that we should not necessarily be having them for the full hearing part of it but I think when we are talking about remand court appearances that this is going to make a significant saving in terms of time effort and money. Someone said to me—and I have not verified this amount but it would not surprise me if this were the case—that every time we transfer a prisoner from remand to court and back to prison again it costs the taxpayer about $5000. I guess that seems really ridiculous but if you think of the fact that you have to take two prison guards and a vehicle and their time associated with that and then perhaps you have to have somebody providing cover to fulfil the duties they would otherwise have been doing—even if it is only half that amount it is significant. What we know is that there are approximately 40000 remand court appearances made each year.Brett Hudson: How many remand court appearances?JONO NAYLOR: 40000. So if that was in fact $5000 that is a $200 million saving for taxpayers right there if we can have those—Brett Hudson: How much was the saving?JONO NAYLOR: $200 million Mr Hudson—listen up and I will help you out. Listen the first time and we will get it right. But there are significant savings to be made. If we are going to have 40000—Carmel Sepuloni: He can’t hear.JONO NAYLOR: Well it is hard because he cannot read my lips. He is behind me you see so he cannot read my lips. I may have eyes in the back of my head; I just do not have lips in the back of my head for him to read.Anyway we have got as I say 40000 remand court appearances being made. If we can start to introduce those audiovisual links for more and more of those there are significant savings to be made. There will be significant benefits to our whole system when we do that.There are so many things to say—I could go on for hoursif I went through this page by page. Although I know the members opposite would just love me to climb into it and take them through the bill page by page clause by clause I do not want to do that to you because it would just not be fair. But I do want to touch on Part 4 of the billa little bit which provides for interest to be paid as compensation for delays to repayments of debts. I think we would all agree that there is nothing more frustrating than when somebody owes you money and has not paid you that money—in fact it is actually fair and reasonable to be able to start incurring interest on that money. At the moment thankfully we are in a low-inflation environment and that is exceptionally good but if things were to change at some point in the future and inflation were to run through the roof then of course the amount of money that people might be owed in terms of a monetary claim would diminish at a great rate of knots.So I think it is incredibly important again to protect through the court system victims or people who are owed money whether it be through reparation damages or other moneys and to enable them to reclaim that cost of interest. I think it is a really fair and reasonable thing to expect. As I said there is nothing worse than when you are owed money by somebody and they have not got around to repaying it for whatever reason and you are worse off because there is no interest accruing against it.I just want to conclude by talking about the provision to reconstitute all District Courts as one. At the end of the day I think there is no need for us going forward to have completely separate entities as District Courts right around New Zealand. It might have made sense I guess back in 1908 when to transfer documents between one court and the other would have taken however long by horseback—or whatever the mode was for delivering information back in 1908—and there certainly was not the possibility of audiovisual links that is for sure. But I think it is incredibly important that we actually get some joined-up thinking right across the country and that we take advantage of the ability of those District Courts to be able to work togethermore closely. Of course we will have branches in different places because work will obviously need to be done—we are not just going to have one centralised court—but I think it is incredibly important that as we bring these things together we will be able to work in a far more efficient and effective manner.So there has been a great deal of work for the Justice and Electoral Committee to work its way through. There has been a lot of work for the people who have worked on drafting this legislation. But it seems that there is agreement on both sides of the House that it was certainly timely for us to do this. With that I would like to endorse this bill to the House. Thank you.