Graham Kennedy: Judicature Modernisation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGraham Kennedy: Judicature Modernisation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 18 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1742. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green): I do not plan to take up too much of the time of the House with my input on this bill. I will just pick up on one or two comments from the previous speaker in his critique of the Labour Party minority view.This perhaps is not the most auspicious day for the Green Party to be defending the Labour Party corner and perhaps I will leave it Phil Goff who is splitting the call with me. But no let me rush in and assist. The critique of Labour here was I think a little bit over the top from the Government. It was hugely unfair and churlish. It was effectively a criticism that Labour in its minority view is looking to have as a purpose a commitment and that this was judiciously injudicious. If in fact one reads the minority view it says that the first omission from the purposes clause is any reference to a commitment to parliamentary sovereignty. So as I understand it the intent would be to express a commitment to parliamentary sovereignty and other values which are exactly the same terms that seem to appear in the Supreme Court Act 2003. So from our viewpoint it seems entirely valid and proper that one of the purposes of the bill would be to have such an expression of a commitment to certain values. But hey we can argue the toss or Labour can. I will leave it to the Hon Phil Goff.I just reaffirm what my colleague David Clendon said. It is our intent to support the bill. It is a massive piece of work and I think that especially officials should be commended for this work. It is 1226 pages—arguably the biggest piece of work in my time in this House. The previous speaker Simon O’Connor wondered whether anybody had read the bill. I tend to agree that that is probably the case. I doubt that anybody has thereby proving that there is such a thing as the group mind. These things these products become the product of a group mind. We got to the moon that way. Neil Armstrong had sufficient faith in the group mind to step out on to the moon’s surface and back and I would enjoin all of us to have equal faith in the group mind to produce something useful here.My one serious comment tonight on this is that when it comes to one particular clause it is our view that that clause could still stand some improvement and that is clause 168 pertaining to recusal. It refers back to some interest the Green Party had in developing a register of pecuniary interests for judges. That bill which was a member’s bill in my name ran its natural course of life in the 50th and 51st Parliaments and rests in the heavens in the sublime belief that it may yet have some constructive if not to say angelic influence on the current incarnation in the form of 1226 pages of the Judicature Modernisation Bill.Clause 168 does refer to recusal and it imposes an obligation on judges to develop through the Chief Justice and the President of the Court of Appeal I think ways in which they can recuse themselves from judging a trial. We of course endorse that. We think it could go a little further. We think there could be assistance in terms of using the guidelines that come from the Guidelines for Judicial Conduct in making the statements a little more specific. There could be a register of pecuniary interests; it does not have to be made public which was in our own member’s bill. It could simply be confined to the judiciary to avoid the critique that it becomes public and judges might become vulnerable. It could also contain statements to the chief judges reflecting those guidelines: no close relationship to litigants; any public statement of firm opinion if it had been made; and a close relative. There are three criteria and when the time comes we will consider putting forward a Supplementary Order Paper on that subject in a constructive spirit.