Ardern Shane: Legal Services Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Ardern Shane: Legal Services Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:653;Page:2396] 
SHANE ARDERN (National—Taranaki - King Country) 
: 
 It is an unusual thing about our Westminster Parliament that someone who is a farmer who has no knowledge of the legal aspects of debate in regard to something like legal aid and who is not on the Law and Order Committee ends up having to speak in debate on that subject on a bill such as the Legal Services Amendment Bill. I acknowledge Mr Deputy Speaker that I am not speaking about you. 
To that end I start my speech by saying that an old statement in Parliament is that bad cases make bad law. When I first became aware that I was going to have to speak in this debate I thought I would go back and look at a bit of the history of the bill. I realised that it came about primarily as a result of a dreadful set of circumstances: the murder of Karl Kuchenbecker by Graeme Burton and the fact that his family was then left having to potentially fund its own legal representation in the coronial inquest and the investigations that took place. I notice that the bill had its genesis in the last Parliament under Annette King who of course was the Minister of Justice at the time. National supported the bill then having given it some consideration. 
Having said that bad cases make bad law looking at this bill I suspect that that statement was taken into consideration and it appears that what is being attempted here in fact probably should have been addressed some time ago. We have in this country unfortunately some very bad cases against people and often those people are left out of pocket or unable to support themselves legally to the extent they would like to because of the rules as they stand. This bill is designed to do something about that situation. 
The bill aims to remove eligibility testing requirements for legal aid for victims who are to attend a coronial inquest or a Parole Board hearing or who make victims’ claims. Obviously that sounds like a sensible suggestion and a sensible move forward. The legislation is also intended to grant the Legal Services Agency the discretion to waiver its right to recover legal aid debt where individual circumstances mean that enforcement would cause serious hardship or be uneconomic or where the agency would find itself in a position that was inequitable or unenforceable. The bill also gives the Governor-General the power to make regulations that exempt specific classes of people or proceedings from eligibility restrictions or repayment obligations. Those amendments are pretty basic and fundamental and obviously the group of National members looking at this bill concluded that it is a sensible way forward. 
The bill’s purpose of course is to exempt victims from suffering the indignity that was found concerning the family in the tragic Graeme Burton case; I do not know whether anybody could speak against that purpose. The former Associate Minister of Justice Lianne Dalziel who spoke earlier in the debate highlighted a number of other issues. There have been quite horrendous examples of in particular child sex abuse cases where families had been subjected to almost a second trial as it were. They became victims twice—I guess that is the way to put it—because they were required but unable to properly represent themselves. The former Minister stated that in some cases they even asked the local member of Parliament to make a representation on their behalf because they did not have access to sufficient legal aid to employ people who would properly represent them. You know it does not take Einstein to figure out that those changes are very very good. 
The Act will come into force 2 months after the bill receives the Royal assent and the bill’s changes will apply only to applications for legal aid made after the date the Act comes into force. In other words there is no retrospective aspect to the bill and that is the reason I presume that the House is applying its mind to it at the moment—so that there are no more cases where people are subjected to the things we have mentioned before. 
The bill is yet another example of the long long 9 years that we had of the Labour Government not delivering on some of the key comments it made early in its time in office and it was not until the horrendous case that we spoke of that it actually decided to do something about it. But the question still remains given the campaign pledges that took place over three elections as to why the bill was introduced in the dying hours of the forty-eighth Parliament; here in the forty-ninth Parliament under a National Government the bill is finally proceeding through Parliament. I guess that the only explanation we can give is that the Labour Government did not place the priority on it that it said it was going to as we can see if we go back through some of its comments early in its time in office. 
Decisions not to recover legal aid obviously have to be made at a reasonably senior level and the bill gives jurisdiction to make those decisions to those who would be described in that way. If that could not be done then those decisions could not be made and people would then be subjected to a long period of painful repayment for something they never wanted did not want to be involved in and really only got involved in because they were victims themselves and thought it was in their best interests and the best interests of justice to be part of the process that would get to the nub of what exactly happened to one of their family members. 
I think this is excellent legislation that has been brought to Parliament today and it is my intention also to support it in my comments.