Adams AmyHon AMY ADAMS (Minister of Justice): I am just going to take a brief call. I have spoken already in this debate but I wanted to touch on a couple of the Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) that have been filed since we last debated the Committee stage of the Judicature Modernisation Bill. Two in particular I think are new to the debate. The first is a tabled amendment—Jacinda Ardern is seeking to effectively reinstitute the requirement for the mandatory publication of District Court decisions. I just wanted to talk to that very specifically because there is very good reason why we have not carried on with that obligation which is that the District Court is of course the workhorse of the New Zealand court system. Over the course of the year it puts out something like 15500 judgments of which only a couple of hundred are written considered detailed judgments. The vast majority around 15000 judgments every year are oral quick sentencing-type decisions—simply a record of proceedings. To put this requirement in law would be a requirement right across the system for every one of those to be transcribed checked formatted gone through peer reviewing and put online. This of course could be done but as a question of resourcing within the justice system you have to question what the value of that is. When you are simply recording and transcribing straight sentencing notes that frankly are not of any precedential value do not bind the higher courts do not really inform the knowledge of law in our society and are for the matter of public record the very clear view that we have reached is that that simply is not a good use of the time and the resources we have in the justice system which could be far better spent in much more productive ways. If we were to do this let me make it very clear to the Committee that those are important resources that are not available for supporting for example better access to justice and more information for litigants and self-represented litigants and all of the other things that this House I know is very concerned to do. I would also point out to the Committee that the District Courts now have a website—districtcourts.govt.nz—where they are publishing the decisions of relevance. So the decisions that this Committee has talked about the necessity to access absolutely are being published online and are accessible. I think that is the right balance. We are getting the decisions up that are of use and are of information to the system. We are not requiring as a mandatory blunt tool every single utterance of a judge at the end of a process to be treated with the same cost implication. So the Government will not be supporting that amendment to the SOP. The second SOP that I want to touch on that is new is Louisa Wall's Supplementary Order Paper 217 which she has just spoken about around the appointment of judges and the desire to reflect in legislation the need to represent a gender and ethnicity balance in our judges. Although I absolutely agree that it is important that our judiciary make up a mixture of our society I want to say two things. First of all there are already very clear protocols that ensure that in appointing judges there has to be attention paid to ensuring they represent a reflection of New Zealand society. That is already in the matrix of the decision making that has gone through when judges are appointed. The second point that I would want to make is that actually if you look at the track record particularly under the current Attorney-General in the last few years we have been extremely successful in seeing very good women judges appointed—not because of any quota system or making up the numbers but because very good senior women lawyers are being recognised as excellent judges. Of the last three High Court judges appointed two of them were women. Just very recently we have had the head of every single judicial bench as a woman. The number of women being appointed under this Government—I do not have the numbers in front of me; I would be very surprised if they were not very heavily weighted in favour of women being appointed. So actually I would challenge that there is a demonstrable problem in this area. Yes in terms of percentages the member is right but then look at the percentage of senior women in the legal profession. Having been in it for years myself the problem starts there. We know that there are not enough women moving through to senior levels of the profession and that of course means that there is a smaller pool available for judges to be appointed. But I think in actual fact the actions of the Attorney-General over recent years have shown very well that the protocols are in place and are working to ensure that the best judges are appointed and that they do reflect modern New Zealand society. I do not think it is necessary to codify that in a fixated way which suggests some sort of quota making up the numbers assessment. I know that as a woman when I am promoted I want it to be on merit and not because there is some requirement for the numbers to be met. I think as I said the existing system that we have absolutely reflects the need to ensure that judges make up a cross-section of society. That is working very well and so the Government will not be supporting that SOP either.