Cullen Michael: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Cullen Michael: Bail Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:651;Page:544] 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Labour) 
: 
 I am prepared to run sessions on closure motions if Government MPs would like to have them. As you have rightly pointed out Mr Chairman clause 3 Principal Act amended” is a narrow clause and simply states: “This Act amends the Bail Act 2000.”—for those who might have had any doubt about what the bill is doing. Of course that immediately raises the question of why we have a clause to amend the Bail Act 2000—why do we have that bill at all in that form? Presumably there are a number of reasons why one has a clause that states: “This Act amends the Bail Act 2000.” Presumably there was an assumption that something was wrong with the Bail Act 2000 in some way or another. That argument has not been made so the primary reason for including this clause has not been given in this debate at all so far. 
Nobody has been able to point to any significant issue with the current Bail Act that will be remedied by the amendment before the Committee. It is not a question of whether there have been difficulties with bail—clearly there have been. Clearly people on bail have committed serious offences. Does that necessarily point to problems with the law? Not necessarily so. Does it point to problems with judgments made by judges? One has always to be very careful about that. By the very nature of things judges are being asked to make extraordinarily difficult decisions and sometimes they will make mistakes in making those decisions. Nobody is going to not make a mistake. Anybody who has ever studied science or social sciences knows that there are two types of mistake: the mistake of rejecting a correct hypothesis and the mistake of accepting a false hypothesis. In fact life is a balance between those two and nobody ever gets each of them 100 percent right. 
There are two hypotheses here: should somebody who is a danger be kept inside and should somebody who is not a danger be let out? Given the fact that there are those two hypotheses and the judge has to judge between them that judge is going to make a mistake sometimes. The consequences of the judge making the error of letting out a dangerous person who then commits a murder are clearly much more serious in almost every case than the error of keeping somebody in jail who should not be there and indeed who may subsequently be found to be innocent. Nevertheless the right of the assumption of innocence must be there right from the beginning; otherwise our system would make no sense at all—we would simply change the whole nature of our justice system in that regard. So I do not think that case has been made. 
Is there a case that judges are lacking sufficient guidance? On this issue very significant statements have been made by judges. They have gone carefully into the differences between what is actually in this bill because it was the previous Act and what is in the current Act. They have simply said quite clearly that what is now in the legislation provides clarification of what was previously there but that this does not change the essential meaning of what was there. So there is no need to clarify the essential meaning; the judges have determined that they are clear about the essential meaning of what Parliament intends. I do not believe that anybody could make a case as one can sometimes make cases—and I have never argued this either when I was Attorney-General or now when I am not—that judges do not sometimes interpret what Parliament means in a very strange way indeed and require perhaps some correction in that regard. 
So in that respect I think this clause should not be in this bill. Quite simply because the bill does not need to be there there is no need to amend the Bail Act. I am quite happy now to hand over to Hekia Parata as I see her preparing herself with the Standing Orders in front of her. I think she is going to say: “I move That the question be now put.” and if she does that is the correct wording.