Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. The National Party is not supporting this bill and it reminds me of and it sort of has all the look and feel of a member's bill actually. It's five pages long and it's the sort of thing that you would expect a backbencher to throw into the ballot and it might come up. But this has been apparently the focus of Government officials and the previous Minister of Justice Kiritapu Allan and before that Kris Faafoi and now currently Ginny Anderson.Look it's not a newsflash: this Government has a clear majority and they will pass this legislation and that will be that. We are in the second to last week of this term and this is one of many bills that they're passing through. The point we make ultimately is that it's just emblematic of the failure to deal with the big issues effectively under six years as Minister of Justice—or six years of Government—and a kind of a flick right at the very end as if to say Aren't we clever? This is what we've done." Meantime the inflation adjustments for the basic sort of work has only gone some way as the Minister said to dealing with inflation and so it's a question of choices.So when we look at the challenges facing the justice system as a whole we identify three major issues round the increase in violent crime increase of youth crime and having to have a more effective response to that. But the third big issue—fundamental issue—is this broader context of access to justice being denied by an incredibly slow cumbersome and expensive system where people's lives are kept on hold for years waiting to grind their way through the Family Court processes or the Employment Court processes or the Criminal Court processes or any other process. In fact in the civil courts it basically just doesn't work at all. If somebody steals $100000 from your business the whole process is so expensive and so cumbersome and so untimely and so uncertain that it's basically not worth doing anything about it which is unbelievable that we can't design a system that works for those sorts of things. So this grinding slow process of the Family Court and all those other courts year in and year out is what creates this massive cost and problem because every time that the lawyers go off to some meeting in the Family Court and at the last moment it's cancelled for some reason because somebody's not ready and there's no consequences for not being ready—it just rumbles on. There's no discipline in the whole process. Some judges will use AV material and some won't. They don't like it for some reason but I don't know why—there is a whole heap of issues as to why the court processes are slow. Our primary critique is that instead of focusing on dealing with that issue effectively they've done all sorts of other things. They've started a plethora of projects and programmes that are under way. We just heard that finally after six years they've led a project to upgrade the IT systems for the court processes—well that's good finally—and there's things on various other rules. There are projects under way but it has been very slow haphazard and it hasn't been anywhere nearly a bigger priority as it should have been.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well let's put a priority on going to the bill now. You've had a pretty good five minutes. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well that is the important context. That's the context—it's just the context of the bill. The Government has had six years to get around to it and I've only had five minutes and I still haven't. I'm just warming up—DEPUTY SPEAKER: And you still haven't got to the bill. Everything is proportional Mr Goldsmith.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Six years they've had and so what we've got instead is this bill which does two things as the Minister did point out—two things. First it does away with the $50 administrative fee. Frankly if people are desperate for justice and they want to achieve justice and they're looking to solve a horrendous problem in their life in some way $50 doesn't seem to me to be an insurmountable barrier for New Zealanders. So it's all a matter of priorities for where the Government puts its money. You can choose between changing the thresholds further for which people have access to legal aid—you could do that—or you could do what is being proposed by this bill which is do away with that payment and then take away the interest payments for the loans.It's pretty simple really. If you don't have to pay any interest on the loan then there's no incentive to pay it back at all or in any hurry. So the rest of the community ends up picking up that bill. The point of the process is that those who are really desperately in need get legal aid as a grant. This is the second category of people who would get it as a loan who have more resources and more ability to pay. They've been considered by the system as able to repay that debt but if we do away with the interest then that's very unlikely that they'll do so. That has a cost and so the question is whether this is a good use of that money or whether it would be of better use with higher thresholds higher payments to legal aid people or other areas of the justice system and we're not convinced by the argument of this. Then secondly we would have preferred like I say that the Government—because these bills even though this one is like I say five pages and looks sort of like a member's bill it still takes the focus and energy of the Ministry of Justice and the officials. We've been through the process in the select committee and we've listened to all the submissions and I do want to thank the chair of the Justice Committee Vanushi Walters who has conducted herself I think very well and in good spirits. We've heard from many—well we didn't hear from many submitters but we heard 10 submissions through the process and we were well advised by the Ministry of Justice people. So it's all just a question of what you focus on. So the Ministry of Justice was working on this and they were doing that and we all had this group together while they were also doing other things like the hate speech and reducing the voting age and all those sorts of things when I would argue that they would have been far better to have had a laserlike focus—which the Prime Minister talks about from time to time—on dealing with the big issue in the justice sector which is how we get a much quicker resolution to the cases and a speedier application of justice. Ultimately we look at it very much from the perspective of the consumers of justice which is the people who want to get (a) justice for something that's been done to them or (b) the dispute or the thing that they've been accused of resolved in a timely matter so that they can get on with their lives. They can take the punishment if they need to but then being able to get on with their lives or get the payment that they need to or get the resolution to the problem that they have dealt with so they can get on with their lives. That needs to be the No. 1 focus of the Government in this space and we've gone backwards badly backwards over the last few years. COVID didn't help and in fact I think some of the reactions to it went too far and slowed us down further than it should have. But the response has been too slow and given insufficient attention by the Government and the officials under their direction. So that is why we think this is tinkering at the edges when there's so much more important work that should have been done."