Curran ClareCLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I am pleased to take a call in the third reading of what was the Judicature Modernisation Bill which has now been divided into 23 bills. This legislation I think we all agree is very out of date. It is 100 years old—long overdue for an overhaul and for modernisation. I do not want to cover the ground that has been dealt with by others. I will confine my comments and my contribution to some concerns that I have about what we have ended up with and also with some pointers really to the way forward if we are really serious about modernisation of the courts system modernisation of our justice system and some of the work that is being done in that area for which unfortunately this legislation did not go nearly as far as it could have. That being said there is a lot of important work that is being put into this legislation as no doubt it has been held up in the House. It is a huge piece of legislation. It has been through an extensive select committee process.The main point of concern is around the late deletion of those clauses 167 401 544 565 and 571 which would have required online publishing of all final written judgments. The fact that this was included in the bill as it originally went to the Justice and Electoral Committee was important. It was actually quite radical and really did show that there were steps being made towards true modernisation. Unfortunately the Minister of Justice was spooked during the process of the bill going through the House and unfortunately also would not support the Supplementary Order Paper by my colleague Jacinda Ardern at the Committee stage which would have phased this in over time and would have perhaps addressed those issues around the enormity of the publishing of online decisions and the cost that that would involve. Instead the Minister was guided by the advice that the 15300 final decisions that would fall within the scope of the requirement of this legislation would require around a million dollars and 10 fulltime-equivalent publication staff. I think that was at the point where probably there were words had with the Minister—you know: There's no way that this could be afforded. You'll have to back away from this."Unfortunately it was backed away from. The impact of this though is that this is therefore not a true modernisation piece of legislation if we are not moving towards a system where there is accessibility of judgments for the public and for people who are doing research in different areas and who do not have access to the legal systems where you can access judgments. If they are not online if they are not accessible then we are not truly modernising our system and we are not making it more accessible to the public and more accessible as a system using the technology that we have available. I think that is a great shame and I am hoping that we can revisit and redress this at some point in the near future.I would also like to remind the Government of its obligations under the Open Government Partnership which it is a signatory to for easy digital interaction with Government. Access to the justice system and access to the decisions made through the justice system is part of that easy digital interaction with Government and I say that this Government should not be paying lip service to these treaties to these weighty documents that it signs up to that give commitments to being true open government. It is a multilateral initiative between dozens of Governments and civil society to create a more transparent Government regime. This is one of the things that it could be doing more work on. It also as my colleague Jacinda Ardern said runs counter to the quite strong comments made by the former Minister of Justice Judith Collins on this where we must be able to access it. She said that New Zealanders are paying for this justice; they should be able to access it—unfortunately that has been wound back.I also want to touch on in thinking about the way forward the fact that there is new thinking in this area. I would like to hear from the Minister of Justice at some point soon given that we are moving into modernisation of the justice system that we could be looking at the concept of online courts—an online court system. There is work being done at the moment in New Zealand by our only true cyber law expert former District Court justice Judge David Harvey who has just set up the institute of cyber law in Auckland into the means for more people to get justice faster and cheaper which would help to narrow a civil justice gap and fulfil the State's democratic duty to ensure citizens can have their disputes resolved fairly. This is true modernisation. It is a move looking at how we could move to an online court system where more people can access justice faster and quicker. He points to the fact that currently civil claims of up to $15000 can be dealt with cheaply in a disputes tribunal but delays and costs of taking a case to the higher courts are prohibitive for a dispute over less than $75000. He also believes that the judiciary is unlikely to propel us towards an online court system; it is a revolution that only politicians can make happen.There is a considerable amount of work going on at the moment around this. There have been some reports of the Civil Justice Council chaired by Professor Richard Susskind about an online dispute resolution for low-value civil claims. A second report has recently been released by an organisation called JUSTICE entitled Delivering Justice in an Age of Austerity and these are processes that are about the resolution of low-value civil disputes up to £25000—this came from the UK. These are ideas that are really worth thinking about and are worth pursuing and I hope that following on from the judicature modernisation legislation when it passes this will be one of the next steps that as a country we can take towards truly accessible justice.I do want to finally just raise some caution around another part of this legislation which is around moving to an electronic system for the registry of courts which of course is a sensible idea but where there are precedents—particularly in Auckland in the Family Court where this was attempted a few years ago and where it has created more problems than it has actually solved. There have been serious delays and huge backlogs within the Family Court by moving to an electronic system the point here being that whenever these moves are made they have to be done well and they have to be done properly. Taking Novopay as an example where you turn off one system that has been working in order to bring in a new one and you do not keep the old system going for a while just in case the new one falls over—this is one of the lessons that we really have to learn within the justice system as well. If we are moving to an electronic system then we do have to make sure that we are doing it carefully that we are doing it properly that we are doing our due diligence and that we do not turn it into another Novopay."