Parker David: Legal Services Bill — In Committee 
Parker David: Legal Services Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:671;Page:17677] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 Following on from my colleague Charles Chauvel’s comments I want to address the issue of community law centres just a little further. Clause 94 which sits in Part 3 says the secretary may enter into contracts with community law centres. I presume that it is through those contracts that the Crown sets out the sort of work that it is willing to fund community law centres for. The Minister in the chair the Minister of Justice nods. That change is a good thing. I think I have said previously in another part of this debate that we do need to take care that the primary thing that we are funding through community law centres is actually legal advice—legal advice for people who need legal advice in respect of problems that they often could not get a lawyer to be interested in and might not be able to afford to get any legal advice on. 
Community law centres provide a very very valuable and low-cost service to our country when it comes to advice on those generally more minor issues that can be none the less important to the individuals involved. If issues of more significance come through a law centre’s door and they do periodically then the normal practice is for the law centre to say to those people that they need some really decent legal advice from a full-time lawyer rather than a community law centre. So the matter gets referred on to a lawyer. 
Where there can be a problem is when one crosses the line between what is appropriate advocacy by community law centres on matters of principle to advocacy in favour of political causes. I have on occasions seen that from law centres where I think they have been perhaps applying the money that they get from the Crown to political causes which they no doubt believe very strongly in but there is an opportunity cost in them applying their resources to those tasks. The opportunity cost is that they are actually not spending it on legal advice for the people who come into legal centres in respect of legal problems. That balance needs to be carefully preserved and one of my reasons for that is I believe strongly in the importance of law centres and I am concerned that if we do not protect their core functions then if we get a law centre that goes too far with political advocacy it could annoy a future Government. I am not saying there is currently such an intention by either law centres or the Government but one can see that a series of events could be set up that would lead to funding for law centres being reduced in a way that would be to the detriment of the people who need advice from law centres. That advice is far cheaper than any other means that we have of delivering legal advice to people in New Zealand. It is cheaper than any other form of legal service either privately funded or through legal aid. 
The other issue I would like to touch upon briefly relates to civil legal aid because although some of the rules that are being changed in respect of the Legal Services Bill will change the way in which legal aid is granted they do not change the efficiency of court processes. The problem that we have in New Zealand is that court processes in the civil arena have over the years become too complex. They have become so complex that a lot of people cannot afford to access justice any more. Whether or not they are eligible for legal aid often legal aid is a loan to them. It has to be repaid. It is a cost to the Crown. It is effectively a loan to the individual who gets legal aid and it has to be repaid in the future. 
Although legal aid is very important and I do not decry the importance of legal aid the more important thing in my opinion is that we reform our civil court processes. I was a civil litigator for many years and I saw the change in process during the couple of decades off and on that I was practising. I saw our civil court processes become more and more complex. I have no doubt that if we run the full gamut of a court process through all of the interlocutory that can be forced upon parties these days whether it is applications for further and better particulars of the statement of claim whether it is questions asked before trial which are called interrogatories or whether it is the proliferation of expert evidence that seems to be admitted to courts all of these things are driving the length and cost of proceedings. 
When we get an outcome from a court decision the outcome of it these days is near perfect. Not many of them are turned over on appeal but there is always a trade-off between perfection and cost. When the pursuit of perfection goes so far that the cost of those legal proceedings because the processes have become so tortured and long becomes so high that people do not go to court to settle their disputes then there is something wrong with the court system. That is where we have got to in New Zealand. 
Someone told me and I have not had the opportunity to check this yet that in the High Court last year some 350 civil judgments only were delivered. In the whole of New Zealand there were only 350 judgments in such cases. I think that is an indictment on our legal system. A hell of a lot more than 350 disputes should have had the benefit of being litigated in court. Despite the fact that the number of judgments is down the length of law reports is the same. When we read a judgment now that comes out of the High Court most of them look like they are auditioning to write a new academic treatise on one subject or another. They have become in my opinion too often too academic and are becoming a little bit rarefied. I yearn for the day when we have judges who are a bit more robust— 
Hon Simon Power 
: Denning. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: Yes Lord Justice Denning or judges like Justice Holland or retired Justice Hansen who keep control of their courts have a good sense of fairness give the parties a hearing then deliver a judgment. We now virtually have no judgments delivered orally in New Zealand. It is very rare for an oral judgment to be delivered. Everyone goes away and they prepare a written judgment. Often that involves time from the judge and also clerks of judges who assist but in both cases it causes delay. Again I am not sure whether judges are fearful that they are going to be overturned on appeal if they do not turn over every stone that has been pointed at by one of the parties in the litigation but for these reasons our civil processes have become so expensive that they are not being used. That means that our court system is not serving the function that it is meant to which is to provide people with a non-violent way of resolving their disputes. 
The quality of justice cannot be divorced from its accessibility. Accessibility is largely a function of cost and cost is not cured just through legal aid. We must minimise these costs. We should have legal aid in appropriate cases but we must simplify these processes. So I would be interested to hear from the Minister of Justice his views on that. I know that the court rules are actually the Attorney-General’s rules. The Attorney-General sets the rules and I think that it is time for the Attorney-General to take some control of those rules and to improve court processes so that the amount that people have to get be it from a loan by way of legal aid or through their own means is not disproportionate to the amounts of money that are at issue.