Clendon David: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 29 April 2015. Volume:704;Page:3029. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green):Reading the reports of the Ministry of Justice one could be forgiven for thinking all was well. Certainly the ministry has not been idle. Nor has the Minister of Justice over the previous financial year. There has been legislative change. There have been new programmes implemented—a lot of change a lot of restructuring. What is not so apparent—and one has to dig a little deeper to discover—is that actually we have a very serious problem in New Zealand emerging in terms of people’s access to the justice sector and particularly to the courts.Largely one of the major barriers to access to justice is a financial barrier. That is becoming a very serious problem. The former Chief High Court Judge Justice Helen Winkelmann commented on this last year in the Ethel Benjamin Address when she talked about the justice gap that is emerging and indeed widening in New Zealand. She pointed to one of the primary symptoms of that which is a dramatic increase in the number of people self-representing to the courts—so-called self-litigants. People are endeavouring to navigate their way through the court system unaided by professional legal assistance. The ministry has only recently started to record the numbers of people self-litigating but it is evident anecdotally and from informed members of the judiciary and of the legal profession that the numbers are increasing dramatically. In the Wellington High Court last year some 20 percent of active appeals involved self-represented litigants. In the Auckland High Court the figure was around 30 percent. Something like 50 percent of applications for leave to appeal in civil cases in the Supreme Court last year were from people intending to endeavour to represent themselves. That is a symptom of something seriously wrong in our justice system.We live in a liberal democratic country. The people of this country expect to have access to the courts to resolve their differences to defend their rights or to assert their rights—whatever it might be. We are fast reaching a position where New Zealanders will be able to rely on one thing and that is that they can get the best justice that they can afford. That is not a situation we want. The cost of a simple straightforward 1-day hearing in the High Court is approaching $7000 simply for filing fees scheduling the cost of the hearing and the sealing of the judgment. It is almost $7000 before anybody gets anywhere near a lawyer. That is beyond the ability of most people to pay. Certainly the registrars can choose to waive and on occasion they do but nevertheless the barriers are mounting. The financial barriers are becoming serious.We have a legal aid funding system. Of course we do. As a member has previously commented the financial threshold for eligibility is set extraordinarily low—ridiculously low in fact. For a single person it is a gross annual income of $22000 or less before one can apply for legal aid. That is significantly below the minimum wage for a person working full time. For an applicant with a partner or one child it is $35000. Again that is a very low income by our current standards. Justice Winkelmann has commented on that and pointed out that that is simply inadequate to allow legal practitioners to do any useful work for their clients. In the event that a person is successful in getting legal aid they may be obliged to repay that money. If they are so obliged they have 6 months to pay it back or 8 percent interest is applied to that money getting people further into a financial hole if they have not had the money to come up with that.The dean of law at the University of Canterbury Dr Chris Gallavin wrote recently: “The deficit between eligibility for Legal Aid and the reality of paying for legal presentation oneself is large and likely places a significant number of ‘middle class’ in an intolerable situation.” It has been noted that a large number of lawyers and legal firms are simply withdrawing from legal aid because with the best will in the world they simply cannot afford to devote hours to that work given the cost the legal obligations placed on them and the associated cost of running a legal practice. They simply cannot afford to participate in legal aid work to the extent that they might wish to and that indeed we require. Some of the slack as we know has been taken up—