Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's quite a thrill for me to stand in support of this bill on its third reading and I do want to congratulate and acknowledge the Minister of Justice as well as the coalition partner who very wisely included this as part of their agreement and brought it to us in the House. So thanking everyone on this side of the House I do so as a member of the Bar and as a member of the executive of the New Zealand Criminal Bar Association: an organisation that lobbied for this for many years an organisation that represents defence lawyers prosecutors judges members of the police force justice sector experts and professionals and academics—people at the front lines. We knew that this Criminal Cases Review Commission was something that was needed. We based that lobbying on the success that commissions like this have had elsewhere in the world like the UK but also on the ever-increasing heartbreaking deterioration of New Zealand's own justice system—and we are a country who prides ourselves in having a system of justice that's not only fair not only transparent but also accessible equally to everyone that isn't being bought and sold on the free market. Part of that is the right to access justice when a miscarriage of justice has occurred. Part of the right to fair process—and most people know the right to fair trial the right to counsel; all of those things. But here in New Zealand we also recognise the fundamental right to an appeal a right that was eroded so—I'll say heartbreaking" again and I'll refer the National Party to the Court of Appeal judgment that said their legal aid policy was not just unfair but unlawful. Imagine that. Imagine a Minister of Justice adopting policy that the Court of Appeal told her was unlawful and maintaining that in a system of justice.Hon David Bennett: You pass legal bills every day. You're part of the coalition.GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: You did it. You did it and the judgment stands. Imagine how embarrassing it must be and that's why they're so loud tonight.An appeal is a complex thing. An appeal is something that needs to be dealt with by senior lawyers because a miscarriage of justice isn't just that a finding of facts may have been wrong. It's not just that a jury could have found differently than a different jury or a judge could have found differently on a matter of fact or law; it's that something went so fundamentally wrong that the—Chris Bishop: Well appeal it.GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: Well people can't appeal actually because you cut legal aid so much that only the wealthy can appeal and that's shameful.Hon David Bennett: Oh no shame on me. Shame on me.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): I'm sorry to interrupt the member. Could the Hon David Bennett make a higher standard of contribution or resist making one at all.GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: That's uncertain at this point. But the point is that an appeal requires a senior lawyer and with the cuts to legal aid—the cuts that were found to be unlawful by the Court of Appeal—that hasn't been possible in New Zealand in the majority of cases for a very long time. We haven't been able to assess whether a judge made a ruling that was so wrong in law that a miscarriage occurred. We haven't been able to figure out whether witnesses should have been interviewed and weren't by counsel who made an error because it is a high-level thing. But the other thing is that we know people are litigious. Criminal appellants can be litigious so the courts do also get a lot of cases—and people have raised this point—that are superfluous. Well this commission—this bill once it's passed—will protect our system of justice from both of those things. Our courts are overworked. They do have to deal with a lot and this means that the bar is met at a different level: that we know—experts have told us—that a case has merit. The commission is not deciding the case; it's deciding whether there is merit enough for the Court of Appeal to consider it. At that point the court considers it so the courts' workload comes down. It's much more efficient and you know what? It saves victims the trauma of coming to court in cases that are superfluous appeals. It actually protects victims so high-level expert decisions are made about whether or not something went wrong in the law went wrong in terms of the factual findings before a victim has to be dragged into court. That's the protection that this bill actually will provide.And what's more that I would like to celebrate is the commission's mandate to actually launch its own inquiries and tell the Government based on what it's seeing in terms of the appeals that are coming to it what might be going wrong in our system of justice. That is invaluable. If we know that we are falling over in certain ways if judges are making certain mistakes across the nation in the same way if we know that police are falling short in different ways that's invaluable to us. For the first time in our system we're going to have an independent commission telling us that. And what's more there is the recommendation of the inclusion in the committee of tikanga Māori expertise and we know that that has been a huge shortfall for our system of justice for a very long time. We know that miscarriages of justice are much more likely to affect Māori. We know that our system of justice at every level targets Māori unfairly whether it's in arrests in convictions in sentences. That's what miscarriages of justice are about and we're going to have experts on this commission making those findings launching their own inquiries and saving the courts. So I do commend this bill to the House but before I do I would like to acknowledge past presidents of the Criminal Bar Association of New Zealand Tony Bouchier and the present one Noel Sainsbury. I'd like to acknowledge the whole executive committee of the Criminal Bar Association—everyone who fought for this—for being activists as well as lawyers for suing the Government and winning when it did something unfair and unlawful for standing up for access to justice and for equality and today we've made a little bit of that into law. So I do commend this bill to the House."