Goff Phil: Criminal Procedure Legislation Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Goff Phil: Criminal Procedure Legislation Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 04 December 2012. Volume:686;Page:7074. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) 
: 
 As previous Labour speakers have indicated we will be supporting this piece of legislation the Criminal Procedure Legislation Bill. It is a small technical bill. It is not controversial. It is not contentious. It does remedy technical deficiencies in the Criminal Procedure (Reform and Modernisation) Bill which went through just last year. I tend to agree with the Minister who introduced it Chester Borrows. We are not going to make a big deal about those deficiencies. It was a substantial bill. It was 520 pages. Sometimes Governments get those things wrong or draftspeople get those things wrong. 
But what I want to say is that this is also a bill that does not address some of the huge problems that we are seeing in criminal justice procedure at the present time. This bill for example does nothing to remedy the disastrous situation in Auckland with the new system of processing Family Court cases. That system is a system that lawyers and judges alike have said is an absolute shambles. The quote in the media was that affidavits were going missing judges were not being given complete files there were delays of several months in hearing dates sealed orders were not being sent and emails and voice messages were going unanswered. That—as Mr Borrows knows well because he was the Minister in charge of that failed experiment—has proven to be an absolute disaster. There is nothing in this bill that remedies that mess which is a mess of the Minister’s and the Government’s own making. 
Sadly there is nothing in this bill that remedies another serious problem that the Minister alluded to before about justice delayed being justice denied. The Minister will know that there is a backlog of 900 jury court cases in Auckland—900. I want to know from the Minister when he is going to bring in a piece of substantive legislation or put the resources in or make the changes necessary to address that other disaster in Auckland. So we have got a disaster in the Family Court system where procedures simply are not working because the Government has botched it. We have got a disaster in a growing backlog of jury cases in Auckland where we are denying justice. 
We had a near-disaster caused by the Government introducing legal aid legislation that would have stripped the system completely of equity. Because the other way of denying justice is not simply delaying it Minister; it is making justice inaccessible to people because of a user-pays system. The Minister knows that the threshold level for income that the Government was intending to introduce would have stripped access to justice from a whole cross-section of New Zealanders. New Zealanders regardless of whether they are rich or poor are entitled to have access to the justice system. What sort of justice system is it that is based on ability to pay? Sadly in an earlier bill today we saw more of that coming in with a proposed $1000 fee for people to have access to family dispute resolution processes. That access used to be free. It will not be free now. 
So we have this little piece of legislation it does make technical amendments but it leaves untouched the disaster that is happening across our justice system in each of the four areas that I have just talked about. 
I want to pick up some of the points that Lianne Dalziel made because I thought they were well made and one is that in a proper Parliament justice issues should be handled wherever possible in a bipartisan way. They should be evidence-driven. They should be well researched. Changes being made should be properly trialled. But sadly once again earlier this afternoon we saw a piece of legislation that did none of those things—that did none of those things. I think the Law Society—the President of the Law Society Jonathan Temm—was right in saying it is incumbent upon Parliament to pick up these issues and work to try to find a resolution to problems that are afflicting our justice system rather than being dog whistle as too much of the legislation in this Parliament has been. It has not been actually about improving the justice system. It has been about trying to scratch an electoral itch appealing to a concern in the community and that is inherently dishonest because what the Government is doing is pretending to implement a solution quite cynically that it knows will not be a solution to the problem at all. That leaves the safety and the well-being of New Zealanders at risk. 
The other part of what the Government has done wrong is that too often it has rushed stuff through. I cannot say that about the original criminal procedure legislation. That actually had its origins under Labour in 2007 in the simplification project. It was a good concept. We needed to make the procedure more efficient. We needed to make it more effective. We worked on that. The legislation was ultimately carried through by the National Government but even then it brought in things that were inherently controversial and unacceptable. We all wanted a more efficient system but too much in terms of longstanding human rights was under threat in the original criminal procedure legislation. 
I have got to pay tribute to Charles Chauvel and what the Labour Opposition did in bringing in a minority report that was persuasive to other members of the Opposition but also persuasive to the Government’s support parties the Maori Party and the ACT Party. The Government had to reverse some of the controversial measures that it was putting up there. It had to bring back the threshold for a jury trial for example from the 3 years that it was proposing to 2 years. It had to reverse its proposal that a person could be tried in their absence. God since the Magna Carta that has not been allowed anywhere else in the world and this Government was trying to do it. 
So a lot of mistakes have been made by the National Government yet the Labour Party stands ready as a constructive party of opposition not only to exercise proper scrutiny over what the Government is doing but also prepared to assist and to help to improve the legislation as we did with that Criminal Procedure Act. Without the Labour Party and the stand that Labour took it would not have been improved in the way that it was. So we certainly lifted the Government’s game in that respect. 
The amendments that we are looking at in this bill are essentially technical. It provides cross-referencing and other minor technical fixes. It ensures that processes and procedures that are necessary to implement the Criminal Procedure Act 2011 are actually in place. It deals with the repeal of the definition of crime in the Crimes Act and makes consequential amendments there. It gives effect to changes in the jurisdiction of community magistrates. There is nothing in this bill that we are opposed to inherently. 
I want to use this bill as an example that where a Government brings in a piece of legislation that does the right thing we are not going to oppose for the sake of opposing. But the Government itself needs to show the same sort of flexibility. It is sad that we are going to be looking at an Alcohol Reform Bill in 2 days’ time where National members of Parliament will be forced to vote against their own preference and their own best instincts because they are being forced to toe the party line. A little thing like having proper regulation for ready-to-drinks is something that is cross-partisan. I have talked to my colleagues across the other side of the House and they think it is necessary but they are being prevented from voting for it and that is wrong. I mention that because it is an example of a Government that is ideologically driven driven by the power of vested interest groups and does not take a sufficiently bipartisan approach to get the best out of this House to get the best legislation for New Zealand. Labour will be supporting this piece of legislation because it does the right thing. It opposed the legislation earlier today because it was ill-thought-out half-baked and bound to be a disaster in terms of its implementation and we have a requirement on us to expose the deficiencies of the Government in that regard. 
This bill will pass. It will pass with our cooperation. But the lesson that the National Government should learn is to make sure its legislation is evidence-driven make sure it is not driven by the power of vested interests make sure it is not simply ideological and make sure most of all that it is not dog whistle. Far too much of the legislation in the justice area before Parliament has been all of those things and that will be the legacy of this Government when it goes in a couple of years’ time. It will be a large percentage of justice legislation that changes nothing and does nothing. This bill however is technical. It is non-controversial. We will be supporting it.