Pillay Lynne: Courts and Criminal Matters Bill — In Committee 
Pillay Lynne: Courts and Criminal Matters Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:673;Page:19779] 
LYNNE PILLAY (Labour) 
: 
 In rising to take a call on Part 1 I acknowledge Rick Barker who did so much work on the Courts and Criminal Matters Bill whilst Labour was in Government. I know that his commitment to justice and to the court system is certainly second to none. It is a wonderful opportunity to acknowledge all the good work that he does. The fact that he is the chief whip has nothing to do with that and I look forward to seeing Rick Barker taking the call in the very near future. 
I want to talk about contempt proceedings. Just to recap very quickly when I last spoke I talked about how unfortunate it was that the Government did not bring all of the collections under one agency. That was Labour’s intention and I think that would have been much more efficient and effective. Having said that Labour still supports this bill. 
I also spoke about deputy bailiffs. I clarified that a person who is appointed as a deputy bailiff can exercise the powers and the functions of a deputy bailiff in any District Court not just in relation to the particular District Court. 
I now move to the contempt proceedings in Part 1. A debtor can be sentenced to community work or another penalty for non-payment of debts. The proposal is to amend the bill as introduced allowing a judgment creditor to apply to a District Court judge for the debtor to be sentenced to community work as a sanction for non-compliance with payment orders that have been made by the court—that is when the court has gone through that process. That allows the court to impose any of orders including ordering the judgment debtor to do community work. 
It also authorises judges to decline an application from a creditor for contempt proceedings on the papers if that judge is not satisfied that the debtor can afford to pay the debt and is refusing to do so. If there is a case where the debtor does not have the means to pay then that can be taken into account. 
Removing the requirement for an application for contempt proceedings to be supported by an affidavit setting out details of the debtor’s alleged disobedience and also authorising registrars to issue warrants to arrest judgment debtors who fail to appear at the hearing of the application or who cannot be served with the application will go some way to effectively ensuring that debts get paid. The bill makes provision for the sanctions that we spoke about before the ability of the orders to pay and also the driver licence stop orders which I will not speak about at length here because they are in Part 2. 
The purpose of the bill is to improve the process and address a general concern about the amount of overdue fines the satisfaction of victims when offenders do not comply with orders and make payments to those victims and the sheer frustration of creditors and debtors using the court’s civil debt enforcement process. Although this bill does not go as far as we would have liked it does go some way to improving the collection of fines in our court system. For that reason Labour is supporting this bill. 
The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 244 in the name of the Hon Georgina te Heuheu to the proposed amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 202 in her name to Part 1 be agreed to. 
Amendments to the amendments agreed to. 
The question was put that the amendments as amended set out on Supplementary Order Paper 202 in the name of the Hon Georgina te Heuheu to Part 1 be agreed to. 
Amendments as amended agreed to.