Chauvel Charles: Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Chauvel Charles: Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 15 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6721. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 One of the many problems with the previous contribution is that the Minister of Justice who herself was not a terribly successful lawyer in practice now seeks to educate the House about access to justice. She who is dismantling the legal aid system and making it harder for families to get access to the Family Court has the temerity to come into this House and talk about trying to make access to justice easier for New Zealanders. Well I say to you Mrs Collins that your true colours are on display today well and truly metaphorically as well as figuratively. 
 The reality of what the Minister said can be deconstructed very easily in this way. To somehow pretend that restoring the title of Queen’s Counsel to practitioners in New Zealand will make lawyers cheaper to access because they will not just have to go to big firms is patently ridiculous. The ability to charge for legal services at the Bar when one has the title Queen’s Counsel is absolutely superlative. It will not make one cent of saving to any consumer of legal services in New Zealand to see the title Queen’s Counsel restored and we should be very clear about that right up front. 
While I am on this point I think it is interesting that we have the legislative history of this bill the Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill before us. For the last 4 years the Government could have at any stage made appointments to senior rank in New Zealand for our legal profession. Under the existing legislation the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act there were very clear guidelines in place that lawyers could follow to apply to be appointed Senior Counsel and in order to do that the Attorney-General would have to agree to hold an appointments round. Well for the last 4 years the Attorney-General in that National Government has refused to do exactly that. 
Guess who has suffered as a result of that. Not the Government but actually the New Zealand legal profession. Every year that Chris Finlayson has spitefully refused to hold an appointments round just because he does not like the name that the previous Labour Government attached to our most senior lawyers—Senior Counsel rather than Queen’s Counsel—our legal profession has missed out. Its members are the ones who have suffered because every Australian state and territory for the last 4 years has held a Senior Counsel appointment round and those Australian lawyers are eligible to be admitted in New Zealand and to practise in our courts. We have seen the Canterbury earthquakes occur over that time. Well it is those Senior Counsel from Australia whom the big insurance companies have been instructing to give the big opinion work not our lawyers. They have been missing out because this Government has just spitefully and stubbornly refused to hold an appointments round under the existing legislation. 
That is how much the Government cares about the legal profession and about top-class access to justice in New Zealand and I hope no listener is fooled by the honeyed words that we heard from the previous speaker. There are a couple of major issues with what the Parliament is doing today—[ 
Interruption 
] I cannot quite hear the Minister for Social Development but the— 
Hon Paula Bennett 
: I said talk about showing true colours. 
CHARLES CHAUVEL 
: Well if that member were honest she would not have that hair colour but we will not even go into that. The issue here is threefold. The issue is threefold. Apart from the matters— 
Hon Paula Bennett 
: Get personal. 
CHARLES CHAUVEL 
: Well I am only following your lead Ms Bennett. I am only following your lead and that of the previous speaker. 
But the reality is that the problem of this legislation is threefold. First of all it is an archaic title. Every other common law jurisdiction apart from England has abolished reference to Queen’s Counsel. They have cut the apron strings they have gone ahead and they have said: “No we want to call our senior lawyers by an appropriate title that reflects the way in which our modern society functions.” It is true as was mentioned in one of the debates that the Queensland Government is thinking about going back to the title of Queen’s Counsel. Well what a great slogan it would be for this Government to say: “Where Queensland goes we go.” I mean I am not quite sure whether anybody is going to be inspired by that example. I am not quite sure why we would take the same leap backwards into the past that the conservative Queensland Government has taken and I hope that we do not see members opposite following it in other areas of retrograde social policy where it has actually been treading the boards. 
Apart from the title of Queen’s Counsel to which we object there are two other major reasons why this is a bad idea and they are these. First of all the move to restrict the appointment of Queen’s Counsel just to practitioners in independent barristerial practices is bad because it will shrink the diversity of our senior profession. It is a self-evident fact—and any lawyer will tell you this—that if you want to have a career and a life particularly if you are a woman practitioner it is much easier to try to do that in a law firm a Government department local government or a university than it is to go to the Bar and here is why. At the Bar you have to support yourself at all times. You cannot pool your risk you cannot join a partnership and you cannot be employed by anybody. So if you want to take parental leave or any other sort of leave you really need to either save to do that until you can afford to go off for say parental leave purposes or you just do not. That is the reason why despite the fact that we have had so many great female lawyers come out of our law schools over the last 25 years we have a senior profession that is basically still male-dominated. 
What this move will do is simply consolidate that because by saying that in order to be recognised as one of our most senior lawyers—i.e. as a Queen’s Counsel—you have to be only a barrister practising independently well essentially what you are saying is that the economics are going to be against women in practice. I just want the women on the Government benches to know that if they have not worked it out already because that is what women lawyers all over the profession are saying. The Minister may think she is doing a terribly clever thing here to curry favour with the senior ranks of the Bar but I can tell members opposite that it will be pretty drastic in terms of its consequences for diversity in our legal profession. 
The other reason why it is wrong is this. The appointments process that was set out in regulations made under the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act—which are still in force—for Senior Counsel was a very open one and it was well understood. It was set out in a set of regulations and then in guidelines that were published under regulation 5 of those regulations that were issued by the Solicitor-General. People knew what they had to do in order to be appointed. There was not an old boys’ network running. There was not some secret mysterious process as has occurred in the past. The great fear must be that with the ending of the title Senior Counsel the reversion to Queen’s Counsel and the repeal of the relevant legislation we will go back to that process shrouded in mystery where essentially it is people well known to the Attorney-General and only those people who can really hope to be appointed to that most senior role of Queen’s Counsel in our legal profession. That is the other great shame of this bill. 
I put forward an amendment at the Committee stage that would have fixed that up. It would have kept the open appointments procedure. But that was voted down by National and its allies. It is a great shame because that along with the requirement that lawyers practise not in firms but only at the Bar will again contribute to a great shrinking in diversity at the senior levels of our legal profession. If anybody thinks that is a good thing then I challenge them to get up and explain why. 
Part 2 of the legislation does do some worthwhile things. As we said at the Committee stage and at the Justice and Electoral Committee we are supportive of the changes that are made in Part 2 in terms of the way in which rules relate to incorporations of firms both of lawyers and of licensed conveyancers in terms of the disciplinary procedure and in terms of having the dean of the Auckland University of Technology law school represented on the Council of Legal Education. But because the provisions of Part 1 are so bad so retrograde such a backwards step and such a reversion to an old closed regime—the way that New Zealand used to do things in the 1950s; the great leap backwards taken by National today—this Labour Opposition will not be supporting this bill.