Clendon David: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 28 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:4143. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): The Minister of Justice recently in an article in LawTalk talked about the legal profession. She confirmed the National Government’s respect for the rule of law and in particular the principle that everyone is subject to the law and the law must be applied equally to all. I will quote briefly from that argument. The Minister said: “… we’d all agree it’s wrong for someone to receive preferential treatment in our courts. That is if you have more money or look a certain way that you might get a different outcome to someone else in your situation.” The Minister is dead right. That is not a situation we want in New Zealand but sadly that is the situation we are confronting in our justice system in New Zealand. We have academics judges legal professionals advocacy groups and people—just everyday members of the public—who are embroiled in the justice system. What they are seeing is a user-pays system emerging in justice. They are seeing large numbers of people going to quite desperate measures on occasion to endeavour to get justice. They are seeing people forgoing it all together because they simply cannot afford to enter the justice system. That is a failure of the rule of law by any measure.The National Government has ushered this in and sadly the opportunity in the Budget to reverse that trend and to properly fund the justice sector has been missed. It is one of the many missed opportunities in this Budget to restore some decent funding to the justice system. It is perhaps naïve to suggest that every New Zealander will gain equal access to justice and will get the outcomes they want but we should at least seek to ensure a minimum level and a fair expectation of reasonable access to justice regardless of circumstance. This Budget continues the trend of cuts for most of the agencies that might contribute to producing a more equitable outcome and a more just and decent outcome. Funding has remained static in many instances and in the context of inevitably rising costs they effectively are cuts. The agencies and the resources available to agencies are stretched to the limit which has inevitably resulted in more people being denied access to justice.Take the example of a person typically a woman who might be seeking a protection order in the context of a relationship that has become abusive or become violent. The likely cost of engaging a lawyer to prepare to do the affidavits to present the documents and to do the minimum necessary legal work is likely to sit at around $2000. That is often a sum that is well beyond the means of a person who is in that very unfortunate situation. Enter the legal aid system one would hope which is intended to provide financial support to people who cannot by their own means get access to justice. Unfortunately legal aid expenditure has been dropping in nominal terms since 2011 when it peaked at around $166 million. In the current Budget it sits around $112 million the lowest in nominal terms it has been since 2008. There is about a $5.5 million reduction in legal aid for criminal cases and a $5.4 million reduction in legal aid for Family Court cases.Access to legal aid is determined largely by income thresholds. A person earning annually the princely sum of $27540 is deemed to be too well off to be eligible for legal aid. A person working for 40 hours a week on the minimum wage of $14.75 an hour misses the cut by something like 10 percent. They are too well off earning the minimum wage and working a 40-hour week. The Legal Services Act has put an interest component on to legal aid which means there is something like a $6 million interest liability on some of our most vulnerable and least well-off people. Given time I could offer a list of other appropriations that effectively represent funding cuts to both governmental and community agencies non-governmental organisations that exist to support people’s well-being and access to judges—for example our community law centres Victim Support and the refuges have all seen real cuts often nominal cuts and certainly real cuts in spending power.We can do better than this. New Zealand is better than this. We can and we must do better. The National Government must realise that citizens deserve better. This Budget has let New Zealanders down.