Webb DuncanLAWYERS AND CONVEYANCERS (EMPLOYED LAWYERS PROVIDING FREE LEGAL SERVICES) AMENDMENT BILLFirst ReadingDebate resumed.Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Thank you Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak on this lawyers and conveyancers amendment bill. It is an important point that Mr Bishop picks up here and that is the ability of lawyers to offer their services to the community for free. Some would think it's not but in fact whilst lawyers when paid get paid well many lawyers do a large amount of work for free. In so far as this bill supports that it's a good thing. I'm pleased to say that on this side of the House we'll be supporting this bill to select committee where I hope it will be improved in a number of respects. I do however want to say that on this side of the House we also recognise the really important place that the provision of legal services and effective dispute resolution services play and the role that the State has to play in that. I find it somewhat ironic that Mr Bishop is bringing to this House a bill which is essentially about access to justice when between 2010 and 2014 a third—$50 million—was cut from the legal aid budget. I took some time earlier in the House actually to do some research and saw the legal aid budget over time. In 2011 it was $154 million a goodly sum of money. In 2012 it was $148 million—dropping. In 2013 it was $130 million—dropping again—and in 2014 $124 million and in 2015 it tweaked up slightly to $130 million. In 2016 it was $134 million. We are still nowhere near where we were in 2011. Can you imagine over those arid National years there was a drop in legal need? I think not. What there was was a massive unmet legal need and now Mr Bishop is coming to patch it up by saying Well you should offer more free legal services." Well lawyers do offer free legal services and I'm happy to support him in that. But it wasn't until this Government got in that we really started working on appropriate low-cost and free legal services to those in genuine legal need. In 2018 $158 million was spent. In 2019 $179 million was spent. You will see massive increases in the legal aid budget there and importantly I do want to mention the fantastic work done by our many community law centres. That's free work offered into the community across the board—all kinds of legal need whether it be a consumer issue whether it be a family law issue it really is first responders of legal need. I want to give a big shout-out especially to the Canterbury Community Law Centre which does fantastic work. I was proud to serve on the board of that organisation for many years.This bill irons out something of a wrinkle in the law. Whilst lawyers generally can offer free legal services the fact is that any lawyer needs either to be entitled to practise on their own account—that is to be a senior lawyer approved by the Law Society—or be supervised. And in being supervised they must be supervised by someone entitled to practise on their own account.So an employed lawyer a lawyer who is employed by a law firm or employed by another organisation as a lawyer can only provide their services within the organisation they're employed by. So if they happen to belong to a rugby club or if someone they know is in need and has a consumer dispute is having difficulty of a family law nature they can't actually within their own professional rules offer those services because they lack the supervision. Now I do want to say that supervision is important and poor legal advice is sometimes worse than no legal advice because you might miss some important matter some important procedural point some important point of law and in fact that person will be put in a worse position than they were before they received their advice.So one thing that the bill does do is it makes it clear that the provision of this advice should be regulated by the Law Society and I hope that the Law Society when it comes to make those rules—and an excellent set of rules they are—those additional rules thinks very carefully about the need to have come checks.I know from raw experience that a 21-year-old thrown into the hurly-burly of legal practice knows very little about what's going on around him. That was me and I must say that if I had been unleashed giving pro bono work at that age in complex legal situations I would've done more harm than good. So we do need a degree of supervision to make sure that those legal services are appropriate.The other reason I'm looking forward to this bill going to select committee—a very ably chaired select committee if I may say so—is because there is an additional thing we need in there and I hope it's picked up and that is that the current bill says that the Law Society may make those rules or the services must be delivered by rules which may be made by the Law Society. I think we need to direct the Law Society to make those rules so they don't have an option of not making the rules and by default suspending this piece of legislation. So we do need to go in there and make sure that the Law Society promptly makes appropriate rules and the way it works is those rules are ultimately approved by the Minister of Justice. They are in fact a form of delegated legislation under the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act and for those who find the Regulations Review Committee exciting Mr Penk you can go and disallow those rules if you want. So do do that.When I first saw this bill I will admit to a little bit of an eye-roll—saying "Well this has never cropped up." We know that lawyers offer legal advice pretty frequently sometimes informally sometimes a little more formally and they don't get disciplined for it. In many cases it's permissible. If it's just giving a view on the law it's actually not a regulated legal service. Believe it or not you don't actually need to be a lawyer to give legal advice. Many other professions do that: immigration advisers; employment advocates; God forbid accountants; and many others. So it's not that aspect. It's really some of those more technical aspects such as drafting court documents—that's probably one of the main ones. But again lawyers do assist with that in an unsupervised way but they're very rarely pulled up for it. But I do note that the client care rules which are essentially the ethics code for lawyers have tucked away in rule 2.1.1 the provision that if one lawyer discovers that another lawyer is offering these services outside of the professional rules providing reserved areas of work when they don't have the requisite qualification they're actually obliged to report that person.Now mandatory reporting is always a little bit tricky right? We always feel a little bit uneasy about it but here's an instance—lawyers have significant mandatory reporting obligations and this is one of them. So you get into a little conundrum here because someone's doing something wrong and you're obliged to report them but it's not as wrong as perhaps we might think. We kind of approve of the theme of what they're doing what they're trying to achieve. But if you don't report them you yourself are doing something wrong and are in breach of your ethics code. So that's one of the reasons we need this rule and it may well be that that rule is in turn examined again.I think this is good in theory. It's a pity that we really over the past term have been picking up the pieces of the chaos and destruction that the National Party wreaked on our justice system over the nine years—Maureen Pugh: Oh what rubbish.Dr DUNCAN WEBB: Maureen Pugh you say it's absolute rubbish. You go down to the Family Court and see what goes on there. You see the backlog that they're still trying to clear. You see the families that have been split up and are still trying to pick up the pieces parents still trying to get access to their children because of the absolute carnage that Judith Collins wreaked on our justice system when she was in charge.If this is the best that your members can come up with—a little pro bono bill—we're not going to be small-minded. We're not going to vote it down. We're going to let it go to select committee but for you to suggest that National did a good job of justice is absolutely fatuous and it just goes to show you the quality of what goes on on the other side.This is a Government that's committed to good justice. It's committed to supporting things like community law centres and thinks pro bono work is a great part of what our best lawyers do and that's why we're supporting this bill tonight."