SpeechVANUSHI WALTERS (Labour—Upper Harbour): Thank you Madam Speaker for the opportunity to stand and take a call on the Lawyers and Conveyancers (Employed Lawyers Providing Free Legal Services) Amendment Bill. I was and am a member of the Justice Committee so I had the opportunity to hear from submitters and also to hear from Mr Bishop who brought the bill to us. I won't be supporting the bill to progress today and I'll outline the reasons why but I did want to first commend Mr Bishop for the spirit in which he engaged with the committee. As a member of the committee I can tell you we worked sincerely on the bill and did recognise that there were underlying themes of access to justice which it contained. But the issues here are complex and weren't able to be resolvable within this bill.I just wanted to reflect on a few comments Mr Bishop made in his submission today. He talked about—I think he recognised that the bill itself wasn't in a perfect state. But then he said It's better to get something than nothing." Now that might be the case if you're thirsty and heading down to the dairy to get a drink of something but if you're drafting legislation—particularly in an area like this—you need to take the time to ensure that it's fit for purpose. The other issue I had with Mr Bishop's statement is that he failed to define the problem statement as it is. He said that 8000 lawyers were disenfranchised and couldn't offer those services freely to communities—that is simply not the case. Community law centres currently have an exemption under the Act so if an employed lawyer wished to do so at any stage under the supervision of a community law centre they could provide those voluntary services.Mr Goldsmith I was—yeah expressed that he was perplexed about the current legislative scheme but the reason why some lawyers are able to provide those services is because there's regulation around exactly who can do it to ensure that an appropriate skill level is in place. This is really about ensuring we protect consumers because at present the Act doesn't distinguish between services that are paid for and services that are given for free. There is a very valid reason and I would recommend to the member that he reviews the rules under which lawyers practice.But I want to talk about the big reason that to my mind the bill wasn't fit for purpose and why we need to do further more robust work in this area. That is that my sense was that there was an underlying access to justice theme an underlying unmet legal needs theme but it was never the principal purpose of this bill to meet true unmet legal needs. I want to spend some time talking about what that is.I spent almost a decade working in the community justice space for Youth Law Aotearoa and it's part of the movement that is truly about addressing that access to justice gap. We had volunteer lawyers volunteer law students who would come and work on those cases where individuals otherwise couldn't access legal help. That is the key part of the definition. It was also a period of time where access to justice was acutely vulnerable because the National Government froze our core funding for these centres and it really left us—at the time—to struggle. For me as a general manager of Youth Law we moved premises in part so I could retain the total staff cohort. For many staff who stayed because they were passionate about access to justice—true access to justice—it meant stagnant wages for almost a decade. After this Government came into power we lifted that community law centre funding by 20 percent initially and then we made that funding permanent in 2019. As my colleague Ginny Andersen mentioned in 2020 we supported community law centres with an extra $7.7 million over four years of boosted funding to do a number of things: establish a new case management system across the 24 law centres also the establishment of Te Ara Ture the pro bono clearing house that we've heard about and finally—an important point—better wages so that community law centres can recruit and retain staff and reward those many many staff who stayed on those static wages over that 10 year period.Following the Budget in 2020 the Government has announced a further $3.5 million over three years and that's an injection announced in August last year to help meet the increased needs that COVID has prevented as well. That investment into pro bono law in particular the bridge to law has showed our commitment to investing in access to justice. Yes there absolutely will need to be next steps but they're not next steps that this bill has set out clearly. We were missing several things as we tried to nut through the bill at select committee stage. What we quickly got our heads around was that there was an un-appreciation of the gaps in access to justice more broadly and where we ought to be directing limited capacity to address the most significant needs. I think you heard that in Mr Bishop's speech tonight that he just—still—hasn't quite got his head around the fact that that is the core principle of addressing access to justice needs. There was a failure when the bill came to us to look at how other jurisdictions approach this—including Australia who have some very useful points to reflect on in terms of the definition of pro bono for example. There was little thought about the need for regulation and the protection for the consumer. But when there was thought through our discussions I think there wasn't quite the appreciation that the member had about what that would take the work it would mean for the Law Society the implications for lawyers themselves as well in terms of costs that are passed on. So I want to speak a bit about that.The Law Commission made a submission to us where they talked about the need to establish new processes and new rules and the way in which they communicated that to us was that it would be an extremely robust exercise and so much so that the time lines they gave us were extremely broad. They also spoke to us about passing on additional costs to lawyers themselves so increasing the levy. On those two points I would just say while the member might think those are easy decisions to make they're not. There are serious consequences of how the legal profession might receive that there are things to think through about whether we want the Law Society to regulate in detail in the rules or whether that more appropriately sits with Parliament whether we should be regulating for that within a bill itself. Finally they talked about a balance needing to be struck between having necessary protections in place but not overly burdening the Law Society with administrative burdens as well.I'd also speak to the fact that the definition of pro bono wasn't contained within the bill that the member brought to us. Now again for me this is foundational in terms of determining how we're meeting that access to justice gap. If you look at comparable jurisdictions for example in Australia they're very clear that you ought to be considering factors of access to justice so whether or not people can afford legal services is one of the criteria you look at. Whether it's a charity or a not-for-profit institution might be another. But that definition needs to sit soundly within any reform in this area and in this bill the question of whether we could include that was deemed out of scope. Robust work needs to be done in the access to justice space and this Government is a Government who demonstrated that we have a commitment to access to justice and we will continue to going forward. I do not commend this bill to the House."