Mitchell MarkHon MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to take a call on this the Administration of Justice (Reform of Contempt of Court) Bill. I had a brief chat with the Minister of Justice the Hon Andrew little to say that the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that he spoke about we'll receive that and have a look at that in the spirit of the work that's been done on this bill through the Justice Committee and also in the spirit of the fact that the justice Minister did pick up this as a member's bill and make it a Government bill and bring it into the House—a very brave and valiant effort there by Mr McAnulty to get us to number two. I've done some checking—I think this is the first time that that's ever happened. I could be corrected but it could be a first for this Parliament.Can I just acknowledge the Hon Christopher Finlayson. I see we have the Attorney-General in the House with us tonight as well. Can I acknowledge him and I wish that he actually was still in the House to see the progress and the passage of this bill because he did enough work on it—and of course picking it up from the Hon Amy Adams—that it was a good enough bill to be picked up by the Government. I'm not sure how much the Government actually had on their worksheet—so maybe that might have had something to do with it—but regardless they've picked it up and the bill is in the House. I'm very pleased to be able to stand tonight and speak to it. Can I acknowledge the chair—well the chair of the select committee was here—and the other select committee members who have worked on it.I'm going to be fairly brief Mr Speaker. First of all I'm just going to say can we acknowledge everyone involved with running our courts because obviously the public need to have confidence in our judicial system and our courts they have to feel safe when they go there and they have to know that they are going to be treated fairly. Although you could argue that yes our court security officers our court staff and our judges aren't necessarily on the first line in terms of first responders they're having to deal with the same people as they come through the court and often they're put in very difficult situations themselves. Often they are the subject of abuse and unfortunately at times physical assault. So it's important that we as a Parliament send a very clear message that we're aware of that and we're going to support them and make sure that they've got legislation that allows them to do their job and insulate them as much as we can from those types of threat.Can I just say that one thing I thought was very important was around dealing with disruptive behaviour in the courts and that is the fact that we've made a change to Schedule 2 of the bill where we give the following courts jurisdiction to enforce their own orders and those were the High Court the District Court the Family Court the Environment Court and the Māori Land Court. The change that we wanted to make was that we felt very strongly that the Employment Court should have the ability to be able to enforce their own rules as well and so that was one of the recommendations that went through.Just very quickly the other thing that I wanted to quickly touch on is the fact that it's important that judges have the freedom to do their job and they should be free from abuse but actually they can't be free from criticism. One of the things that we talked about a lot on the committee was making sure that we didn't dampen free speech as long as it was constructive and that people still had the ability to be able to speak out and make comments on judges and judgments and the process in the courts. There was a lot of debate around that and we fell on the side of making sure that we needed to preserve that right and therefore we made sure that was captured in the bill. So I'm very happy to have taken a call and recommend this bill to the House and look forward to its final reading. Thank you.