Clendon David: Judicature Modernisation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Judicature Modernisation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 18 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1736. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): Could I begin just by acknowledging the contribution from Mr David Parker. I think it was an interesting speech in that he talked mostly about what is not in the bill but I think one of his key points was that we are coming perilously close to being a country where people get the best justice they can afford. I think that is something we need to attend to be alert to and seek to wind back. In returning to this bill the key number is 1908. It is over 100 years since there was a sort of clean sheet a substantive approach to reconfiguring our justice system. It is a good piece of work that has been done. It has followed on from a number of key inquiries and some substantive drafting work obviously by the Minister of Justice and indeed by the Justice and Electoral Committee. But I still think there is a bit of work that can be done and I dare say that indeed at the Committee of the whole House stage I think we can tweak this bill further to make it an even better bill than it is.The Greens of course are supporting this bill. I sat in on some of the select committee process. I sort of played a tag team with my then colleague Holly Walker. I enjoyed getting some insight into some of the challenges confronting this overhaul of the legislation. It has been done I think in a spirit of considerable good will and I would hope that continues. It does some practical things that have been mentioned like the establishment of a Senior Courts Act bringing together the High Court the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. As the point was just made it brings together the district courts. I think it is not well known that in a sense each district court is currently its own fiefdom with its own legislation and the like and that is neither desirable nor sensible in a modern age.It establishes panels of judges—of High Court judges for example to deal with commercial cases—and indeed other panels. The world has become more complex. The law is complex. The legal challenges and situations are complex. I think the idea of getting specialist panels of judges to build experience and familiarity with particular areas of law is a very positive one and I think that will pay off to our mutual advantage. A provision in the legislation that caused considerable concern to a number of submitters and that I think was responded to reasonably positively by the committee was in clause 401. This was this business of the proposition that written judgments ought to be published on the internet. In the original drafting it said simply: “Every final written judgment of the court must be published on the Internet unless there is good reason not to publish.” That sat there and the point was made that that was completely inadequate. It did not adequately define what is actually meant by a “final written judgment”. It gave no guidance as to what might or might not constitute good reason to publish. There was significant and well-justified concern about that. The committee has now put some definition around it and some more substance around the clause.The key proposition that unless there is a reason otherwise the judgment should be published on the face of it is not a bad idea but we do have a concern in the Greens—and I recall that we did express this—that there is a possibility that it runs up against the Criminal Records (Clean Slate) Act which is 2004 legislation for which we owe some—Hon Phil Goff: Very good legislation.DAVID CLENDON: —yes thank you—acknowledgment to my former colleague Nandor Tanczos who helped shepherd that through the House. The proposition of it is that people who commit crimes and are convicted early in life or at some point in their life and then come out the other side can go on to lead good honest decent lives and they should be able to leave that criminal record behind them. That was the intention and the effect of the clean slate Act. So the notion of publication on the internet is problematic. The conversation of the committee did acknowledge that that of course goes beyond the provisions of any one piece of legislation. The reality of anything that is reported in the news these days is that if something is put online it is incredibly difficult to remove it. I think that is a challenge we are going to have to confront and try to work around and just find some solutions to that that are not immediately obvious to us perhaps.It raises the whole question of justice in the age of the internet in fact and that although the digital regime obviously does offer some significant advantages it also creates new challenges and new difficulties for us. I did accompany the select committee on a tour of the District Court just across the road here. In the course of the tour they took us down into the basement and showed us some of the store of paper. I forget what period of time it had taken that paper to accumulate but it was not very long and it is quite daunting when one considers the sheer volume of paper that is of necessity stored now to meet the requirements of legislation. It is a very significant problem and the move towards electronic storage clearly is one solution to the question of volume.Perhaps I am showing my age a bit but I do have some residual concern as do others about the nature of the storage medium that we choose. Even in the last 20 years we have moved from floppy disks to 3¼ inch disks to external hard drives to data sticks of ever-increasing capacity and now to the cloud. Where does it end and how secure is that information? What are its vulnerabilities? It has been mentioned today that for the last 24 hours or so the work of Parliament has been impeded in some important ways because of a hiccup in the IT system. We do not want a situation where our justice system becomes so reliant on electronics and technology that the progress of that justice system could be impeded for shorter or longer periods. I do think that is something we are going to have to confront manage and be alert to. Again I offer no solutions I am afraid to say but I do think we must not simply allow any complacency to sneak in—the idea that “OK yeah we’ll let the technical people sort that one out.” We do have to think of the social cultural and of course judicial consequences of some of the decisions that are made around this stuff.As an aside to that I would mention that I do have some continuing concerns about the media reporting of court processes. Cameras are allowed in our courts—that is a relatively new phenomenon—and I am aware that there is a review process in train as we speak to measure the success and the appropriateness of the existing regime and about the use of recording devices in our courts. Although I absolutely support the notion of our courts being public domain and that people should and must be able to see what is happening in our courts—that is entirely appropriate with the obvious exceptions—I do think we need to be aware that the presence of cameras and of media in the courts can have a negative effect on the outcome of the courts and critically on the public perception of crime of offending and of punishment. That is a bundle of issues I think we need to more overtly and quite swiftly address. I do think that the administration of justice is somewhat impeded by the sensationalisation of the court processes and crime and offending issues generally. Although that does not appear specifically in this legislation I do think that we run the danger of turning our courts into a circus quite frankly. One small example is this tendency to identify people by nicknames—the “Beast of Blenheim” and the “Black Widow”. I think this is degrading and utterly unacceptable and it is unfortunately commonplace in the media.Just to close on a few points I would just like to acknowledge the Labour minority review where it highlights quite correctly that what is missing from this legislation is reference to a commitment to parliamentary sovereignty the rule of law judicial independence and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. It would seem entirely appropriate that such a fundamental and—we hope—long-lasting piece of legislation does embed those commitments into statute into the documents. I did sit in on this particular day on the select committee when there was mention of the rather fraught issue of the retirement age of judges. It went round and round. There are arguments on all sides that there should be a limit an age restriction. The point was also very soundly made that people can be in full charge of their faculties and very acute into their 80s and 90s and some people lack that capacity shall we say at much younger ages. So to be age-prescriptive actually is a problem and I think it is something we need to attend to a little more.We have a couple more stages. We have got the Committee stage and the third reading ahead of us. I think as I said at the beginning that there is still some work to be done on this bill and we look forward to being part of that. Thank you.