Barry MaggieHon MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. I rise to speak to the second reading of the Arbitration Amendment Bill.As others have said this has had a long gestation. If I could commend the sponsor of this bill Andrew Bayly for his hard work tenacity and not inconsiderable political skills in guiding this through a rather fraught process and also to acknowledge the architect of this bill Paul Foster-Bell who is in the Chamber with us tonight.As a relatively recent person coming onto the Justice Committee and following on from our chair I would have to say that this was full of technical complexities. We were dealing with the Trusts Bill at the same time and if members would like to look this is a small amount of the paperwork that the arbitration bill generated. This is not to say that whole forests were chopped down in this bill coming to where it is tonight but I would have to say that there were a number of technical disagreements around the way that this bill was originally conceived and its interaction with the Trusts Bill.I absolutely agree with what the chair has just said that we needed the influence and intervention and understanding of Minister Andrew Little. So I'm very grateful that that occurred. We also had bringing with him a great degree of intellectual rigor and legal experience the Hon Christopher Finlayson QC who also brought a lot of wisdom to this process which was a long and involved one.It was a very pivotal turning point I think when the retired High Court judge the honourable Paul Heath QC came in to really pull this together. We could've got bogged down and we did actually in the international arbitration area. And I'm not surprised. As somebody who didn't know very much about this area before I came into the committee I'd have to say we were fully lawyered up. We found out a lot about arbitration how important it is as an effective resolution for commercial and other disputes but also that there's not a great deal known about this in the world. Many nations have established arbitration centres and apparently Hong Kong and Singapore are the best at that. But many other nations perhaps a little bit like ours are scrambling to establish themselves as arbitration hubs of one sort or another. So it was timely but complex and needed to be done.Arbitration is a very good thing on a whole lot of levels one of which is that it reduces the caseload in the courts therefore making it a more cost-effective method of resolution and the mediation of the international commercial disputes without jurisdictional issues so I guess the least complex ones. International arbitration which is the determination around cross-border disputes is one of those areas that really has developed significantly and the issue of confidentiality was one of the most crucial ones that needed to be negotiated. There were indeed some very choppy waters that this particular bill had to circumnavigate.As well as international we've also done regional conflict resolution which is something that successive New Zealand Governments have really come around to acknowledging that it needs more support. So I think for example the model law that we adopted in 1996 which was to encourage the use of arbitration as an agreed method of resolving commercial and other disputes;" was something that has long been on the minds of lawmakers and legislators and we as Andrew Bayly has indicated had a number of very high-powered and high-level QCs and others who came in to give their wisdom. There was not always agreement. That was why it was very important to argue it through very carefully.I was interested to find out that every arbitration case that's heard in New Zealand is worth on average $1 million dollars to the local economy. So there are incentives and perhaps perverse disincentives that can come to clash here. But such things as international conference venue hires accommodation food travel legal and secretariat support is yet another industry if you like around this arbitration area that will also benefit from this legislation going through.So it is complicated. There are a number of issues that we will examine in more detail as we go through to the third reading and the committee of the whole House. But I would have to say as an exercise in discussion which sought to get the best possible outcome for New Zealanders and for people who wanted to argue arbitration not before the full courts but to try and achieve some resolution this is a bill that is very much needed in this country. So I commend its authors and I commend this bill to the House."