Goff Phil: Judicature Modernisation Bill — First ReadingText is subject to correctionGoff Phil: Judicature Modernisation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 05 December 2013. Volume:695;Page:15315. Text is subject to correction.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): I have been trumped by Grant Bamfield but I would like to personally wish Grant every best wish for the future and thank him for his many years of service in this place. It is always sad to—I was going to say “see an old face go”—I mean it is sad to see a face that has been around for a long time leave this establishment. But to you and to all of your fellow workers who make this Parliament function as it can thank you very much for your dedication your commitment and your service.I was interested in Scott Simpson saying that he was going to take this Judicature Modernisation Bill home to read over Christmas. Good luck! We will give you a test on 25 January and see whether you have thoroughly absorbed it.It has been my habit in this House when talking about justice bills to describe the National Party’s bills as lightweight political flimflam. Well I cannot really sustain that particular argument on this piece of legislation. This is not a party political pamphlet as so much of the National Government’s justice legislation has been. In fact it is based on two very serious reports by the Law Commission. My experience of the Law Commission is that it does its homework that it does its work well and that we can be confident that the basis of this legislation will be sound.The debate on the short title will be fairly easy because—unlike other bills I think—we could agree that this is a judicature modernisation bill. It amends a bill passed in 1908. That is 105 years ago. That is not to say that the Judicature Act has not been modified many times—it has been—but when you modify and you make ad hoc changes you lose some of the coherence to the piece of legislation. So it is good to have this piece of legislation and I am so sad that I will not be on the Justice and Electoral Committee and be required to read it page by page. Of course Geoffrey Palmer would have already absorbed this before breakfast and would have given you a scholarly account of what is in it but I fear that some of my colleagues on the Justice and Electoral Committee might be hard pressed to treat it as it ought to be treated. It is 1182 pages long. It could be called the “Forestry Destruction Bill” by its pure weight.I want to say that although the bill has been I am sure thoroughly drafted through the Law Commission I have taken the time to read some of the regulatory impact statements. The regulatory impact statements suggest that the select committee cannot simply take this as a given and that it will have work to do. I am looking for example at the regulatory impact statement on the Judicature Modernisation Bill—the second paper—and it has caveats on the work that the Ministry of Justice has been able to do on it: “Limited consultation has been undertaken in relation to the options in this paper …We do not have reliable data to assist in considering a number of the proposals in this paper. … We have not been able to model the operational impacts of the proposals …”.So although the base and the work that the Law Commission has done are sound the ministry constantly complains through the regulatory impact statements that it has had to be rushed in the work that it has done on it. Indeed if I look at one of the other regulatory impact statements on the Judicature Act and the consolidation of courts legislation it says: “limited consultation has been taken in relation to the options which go further than the Commission’s recommendations”. The work that the ministry has done on this by its own admission has not been fully consulted and has been a bit rushed in the time available and the select committee will therefore need to consider carefully the proposals in it.I want to begin my discussion on the substance of the bill with Part 5. I am taking it out of order because Part 5 of this bill stands out like a sore thumb. Let me read what Part 5 does. It “sets out legislation to enable and govern the use of electronic technology in court and tribunal proceedings” including all current paper-based requirements to be replaced with electronic processes. I read that with some degree of amazement because last Friday the Minister for Courts stood up and said that an $18 million project on producing a paperless court which he had earlier boasted would mean that processing would be 70 percent faster and save 93000 man hours—this wonderful paperless court and the eBench proposals that the Government had invested $18 million in—has been scrapped. It has been scrapped. This from the Government that brought us the electronic wonder of Novopay and whose predecessor the less than illustrious National Government before we came to power had brought us INCIS which wasted $100 million.Well I have got some questions to ask of the hapless Minister who introduces a bill promising that this will be an electronic miracle and that it will save all of this money and all of these hours and who had to admit just days before this bill was introduced that everything that the Government had done on eBench had come to nothing that the promises had not been delivered upon and that actually Part 5 of this bill is therefore meaningless and does not do what it promises to do.I think that in the course of debating this bill and for Scott Simpson and the select committee looking at it some hard questions have to be asked. How did the Government stuff up converting the paper-based bench to an e-bench in such a way that it spent millions of dollars and failed to deliver? I want to know how the Government got it wrong. I want to know how it intends to fix it. I want to know what the timetable is before Part 5 of this bill will have any meaning at all. And I want to know exactly what it cost the taxpayer in wasted funding because this Government once again stuffed up and failed to deliver on what it promised. So that certainly is a very controversial part of the bill.We were promised that the judges could open digital files in court. They could input changes including future appearance dates. They could input bail conditions—and you and I Mr Assistant Speaker sat in the court and watched the laborious way the papers appeared on the judge’s bench. All of this was going to be digitalised and it has come to nothing. What is the explanation for that? Can anybody on the National bench act as an apologist for their Minister and say why the Government stuffed this up? It is a serious matter. The taxpayer does not mind paying their taxes if the money is spent wisely. But when you spend $18 million you make big promises and you fail to deliver then this House deserves an explanation for why the Government got it as badly wrong as it did.That leaves me with 2 minutes to deal with the other five parts of the bill. I want to say that there is some quite sound stuff in the rest of the bill. Part 1 repeals the SupremeCourt Act which is not that old—2003—and the Judicature Act of 1908 and it creates a Senior Courts Bill. This brings together the High Court the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court under one system. I think that is sensible. It streamlines the appointment of non-permanent judges. It establishes a judicial panel under clause 18 of the bill to hear certain types of commercial cases. These are incredibly complex and specialised cases and I think we should be developing the specialist expertise of judges and panels to deal with them properly. They can take a lot of time. They can be very expensive. They can be very complex. I think this is a move in the right direction.I note that there are more powers given in this part and in the second part to restrict vexatious civil litigants. If it is indeed vexatious I am quite relaxed about that. But we must also honour the right of people to have their time in court and we should not use that power lightly. Part 2 creates a unitary District Court system. We have got 59 separately mandated District Courts at the moment. This brings them together. The Family Court the Youth Court and dispute tribunals will all become divisions of that court. It also increases the threshold of the claims that can be heard from $200000 to $350000. I think that is sensible. I will not go into the details of the award of interest on money claims but it is sensible to preserve the real value of those claims. We will support this bill but the Government must give an explanation of how it managed to so monumentally stuff up the digitalisation of the courts system.