Webb DuncanDr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Thank you Mr Speaker. Well that was a display of ignorance if anything. Having said that there's a—Simeon Brown: Help us out. Give us some help. Dr DUNCAN WEBB: No I'm really disappointed Mr Brown that you took no time gave us no reasons and couldn't even tell us what it was. It's a commission. It's not an agency it's not a working group; it's an independent Crown entity called a commission. So if you're going to stand on your feet at least make it accurate Mr Brown. Now the National Party minority view does make a couple of points that I want to touch on: one which I find absolutely flabbergasting and the other one has a germ of truth in it. The first is that the National Party says that they'd like to see the court system sort of fixed up a bit to address this problem. Now all that shows to me is that there is a real lack of understanding on the part of the National Party about both the court system and the criminal defendants who find themselves in it. The criminal justice system is incredibly complex and incredibly expensive and if you are a person who is wrongfully convicted languishing in prison the idea that we can tweak the appeals system in some way to make it workable just beggars belief. I want to make the point that people who are wrongfully convicted are not all high-profile people. It's not all the Sounds murders and David Bain and these glamorous books and articles. There are people in there who no one cares about who really have no one fighting in their corner. If they haven't got some gory murder or some salacious sex offence they simply get left there no matter how meritorious their appeal is. The fact of the matter is that our criminal justice system right from the moment the 111 call is made through to the final appeal has flaws. It has weaknesses. It has gaps. We've heard of the terrible cellmate confession problems that have existed. Only two weeks ago I was at a one-day conference on wrongful convictions and one of the points that was made there was that whilst media can have a good part to play sometimes the pressure that it puts our police under in terms of coming up with a defendant is intense. When they get to day three and there's a dead young tourist the public are baying for an offender and the police feel that pressure. It may be bad policing but we have to recognise that these flaws exist and so the suggestion that this is just a problem with our court system is wrong. What this does is this is a board of inquiry. It is something which has inquisitorial powers and that is fundamentally different from a court process which is adversarial and which is procedurally rigorous. So the benefit of this commission—the benefit which the Labour Party and its coalition partners recognise—is that it is active. It can actually inquire and investigate and when something isn't right it can ask another question and another question. It can commission experts and so on and so forth. But the one germ of useful information in the minority view is something which I think bears noting and that is that the rights of victims do need to be taken into account and earlier on Mr Huo referred to the Ellis case. The fact of the matter is that in many of these instances wrongful conviction or not there are still people who are victims. They have been deeply wronged and we need to be very cautious because an appeal or a retrial does traverse the evidence again and often requires evidence to be given again and that is very very difficult indeed. Having said that this commission is by far and away the better way to address that by an inquiry which asks the first question of whether the threshold of the interests of justice is crossed or not rather than having a full-blown appeal which will hit the media headlines. So this is by far the better more sensitive approach than simply running an appeal all over again. So look this is an excellent piece of legislation. As was noted it's been wanted for some time. We're following other well-established jurisdictions in doing it. It will be a robust and rigorous process but more importantly it will be a genuine avenue for redress and justice for those who we know are indeed wrongfully convicted. I commend this bill to the House.