Penk Chris; Allan KiritapuCHRIS PENK (National—Kaipara ki Mahurangi): Thank you Madam Chair. I think the Minister Hon Kiritapu Allan is fair to point out that it wouldn't be a complete Hobson's choice in terms of an advocate being imposed—and I didn't meant to use that word perhaps as bluntly as I did—but nevertheless a person must choose from the panel. So it's still a limited choice so I think the Minister's allowing me to make that point with that reasonable characterisation that there's an element of choice—not quite any colour you like as long as it's black" but nevertheless we are limiting rights. So you know to acknowledge the importance of the advocate role and the desirability of having sufficient of them—apart from anything else that's encouraging to hear that the Government's turned its collective mind to that.I did have at least one other question in relation to Part 2 and it's to do with clause 12. So this is the "Obligation to give [the] court special advocate and special adviser access to security information". So this is a scenario where the Crown is obliged to give the authorised court "access to any security information at issue in the specified proceeding." So more or less there's an obligation of disclosure. Of course the Crown which is the party that's effectively going to be making a case against the non-Crown party has got to provide access to that security information. My question is: what's the consequence if that doesn't happen or probably in more real terms if it happens quite late in proceedings?The reason I ask is it's not just a hypothetical theoretical point for the sake of filling in a committee of the whole House stage my understanding or certainly my knowledge—based on discussions with defence lawyers at the moment in general proceedings so outside the security realm—is that it can be the case that the Crown can—for example police prosecutors—disclose quite late in the piece information that they hold that's relevant to which the defendant or accused is entitled. And if the lawyer for that person gets the information very much last minute but the trial proceeds anyway then that can put them at quite a disadvantage actually. So notwithstanding that the technical obligation—yes the information has been disclosed and you know let's have the trial now.I guess what I'm really sort of angling for is some sort of indication from the Minister to the extent she can give it yes—and we're talking about the court procedures and the executive doesn't run those rightly so—that she can provide some comfort or some direction about how she envisages the policy to play out if it's the case that the Crown provides the information that they're required to provide but quite late in the piece—I would like to think that the non-Crown party wouldn't be disadvantaged by that.Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN (Minister of Justice): Oh this is actually a very interesting question which goes to some of the broader issues that are occurring within the courts right now which the member rightly raises. It's outside the scope of this bill but I note that the work that's been done through the Criminal Process Improvement Programme (CPIP) at the moment is directly targeted at looking at these types of issues around disclosure and when non-Crown parties are getting the relevant information etc. And I think that there's a bit of room to run there and there's some learnings that will be taken from the CPIP trial if you will that will probably address and align I think with some of the observations you've heard from some of your defence legal colleagues. Those issues to the side for the second with respect to clause 12 of the bill and the obligations that it imposes you're right: the Crown must provide access to the information. So where the information is relevant the Crown must always disclose to a non-Crown party. I know that your question was more around the timeliness and others but as I think we're all collectively aware there are no hard-wired time frames for disclosure currently across these types of proceedings. But I do think as I've sort of alluded to there is some scope there and some learnings that we're taking from the CPIP process which I think may have an impact here as well."