Andersen GinnyGINNY ANDERSEN (Labour—Hutt South): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. That was a good potted history of the bill but here's my version. It's a bit different.So we had a good go. It is a reasonable intent in this bill to provide increased access to legal services in New Zealand and we know that there is a need there. So I would like to make it clear that the Justice Committee had a number of attempts of trying to amend this bill in order for the areas that it was deficient in for it to be met. Really it came down to submissions from two key submitters and that was the Law Society and also the Law Commission—both were very important. We went to such detail to try and get this right that we actually called them back. I think they were called back twice—and maybe even a third time for the Law Society—to seek additional information. So I would like to thank both Community Law and the Law Society for the time and the effort they put in to try and make this work.So in a nutshell we needed to be making sure that that there were a number of measures in place for supervision. So if you've got a lawyer who's providing pro bono or free legal services there still is a requirement for supervision because what we wouldn't want to happen is for someone who is getting a free legal services getting a lower standard of legal advice. To make sure that that was working it's a requirement for the Law Society to provide a level of supervision and potentially even insurance—that's another side issue.So what the Law Society told us is that if the bill was to continue in its current form without any policy analysis there could be a real risk of channelling free legal services away from those who needed them the most. They were supportive of the bill's intent of access to justice but the real need was for further policy analysis to understand how that in fact would play out.So at a minimum the Law Society said—at a minimum—it would like to see the bill amended to assure that actual unmet legal needs are addressed and it proposed doing this through the inclusion of a more narrow definition of pro bono". So the member in charge of the bill Chris Bishop took that away and made amendments to the bill—I think that was once—in order to try and get it. So we looked at that again. Then after additional advice that we received from Community Law which I will go over in a while the member sought to widen the scope of the bill because at this stage once we'd identified some of the issues around providing free legal services the form of the bill was actually quite different to the one that the committee initially received.So because of the additional policy work the understanding of the costs and the requirements placed on organisations like Community Law and also the Law Society we need to do all of that work before we pass a bill. It's important to know what those implications are exactly. So it's for these reasons that the committee regrettably cannot support a bill which has a good intent which has a good idea at its heart but how that's executed and how that is delivered has not been fully thought through and has not been fully considered—the impact and the implementation costs are unclear.This sentiment was echoed by a number of submitters. While the majority supported the purpose of the bill there were mixed views on the best way to improve access to free legal services. One of the interesting points that was made is that if you just enable lawyers to do some work that's pro bono—how you define that. It's difficult to find out whether it's meeting that unmet legal need. The member in charge of the bill who just spoke gave the example of I think a Scouts club or a tramping club which is great and there might be the opera society down the road who needs some free legal work done and a local lawyer would be able to do that. But the point made by the Law Society was that how can we be sure that by enabling pro bono services to be made available that this will actually be directed to the unmet legal need? That's where the problem came that the solution that the member was proposing to the identified problem wasn't necessarily connecting in the right places.So the important part to note is also to look at the work that Community Law put in in terms of their submission. They recommended that the bill be amended to formally place pro bono legal services provided by employed lawyers into the remit of Te Ara Ture. Now Te Ara Ture is a new online tool that enables lawyers to provide advice online. Essentially by placing Te Ara Ture in a similar regulatory level as community law centres it could employ lawyers to hold indemnity insurance and it could also provide supervision to employed lawyers who provide free legal services. So this is a really good idea that we should be taking a greater look at. It provides an opportunity to increase access to justice and also to meet those unmet needs.Community Law also told us that the solution to the issue would ensure that any additional pro bono resources could be allocated to access justice and it told us that this would also increase the options for employed lawyers to do pro bono work. So this seems like a better pathway to take.Community Law told us that this solution would require an additional Government funding of approximately $300000. It noted however though that the funding from Government would reduce the financial responsibility on the legal profession. So really interesting to see both of those different ways being applied. Of course if the Law Society was required to be the supervising body then that would incur a cost on lawyers no doubt as a way of sourcing that funding for administering it.So the majority of us considered that although there was a clear problem with access to justice as it has been identified the bill was not the appropriate way to adequately plug this gap. After quite a good amount of sessions of debate on the bill we considered two potential means of tackling the issue. Those are the ones that have been laid out from both the Law Society and also the Law Commission.Using the clearing house approach through Te Ara Ture I think has real merit and I'd be interested to see further work done in that space and also costing of how that would work out. I think that having free legal services provided by employed lawyers through a clearing house supported by Community Law is an idea with real merit. But I would point out that that is a very different solution to the problem than the original member's bill that the committee received. If we could enable free legal services to be provided by employed lawyers through a clearing house that is a good idea and it would be one that would address the unmet legal need.I would like to acknowledge the member in charge of the bill who did a significant amount of work—not only just listening to the issues that submitters provided but engaging with those issues and trying to resolve them in a way that enabled the bill to proceed. I think that it's important to note that there was support right across the committee on the problem of improving access to justice. That is an important fact.I would like to note that in Budget 2020 Community Law has received an additional $7.7 million worth of funding over the past year—funding that I would like to note was completely cut under the previous National Government. National froze the core funding of these centres when they were in Government leaving them to struggle so it's nice that we're looking for solutions now. So after coming initially into Government there was a 20 percent increase for Community Law in the 2018 and 2019 Budget and then as I mentioned the subsequent injection which is a funding of $8.72 million over the following four years. So that is to provide new case management across the country in 24 new community law centres and also the establishment of Te Ara Ture as well.So this is a good bill in principle but the work needed to be done on the changed bill that we came to needs to be done before we can step forward and make changes to the way pro bono legal services work currently. So we will not be supporting the bill further."