Clendon David: Coroners Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Coroners Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 19 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1785. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green):I would have to say that I am genuinely looking forward to the debate on this bill. I think it is an important bill. It is challenging. It will cover some very sensitive topics and I think there is some space for controversy within some of the proposed provisions in this. Having said that I would hope that we are able to avoid a political contest over this bill. Yes I think we should politicise things like taxes but death I think we should endeavour to simply come to the best outcome and put our evidence-based hats on our serious debating hats. I have to say that I am reassured by the quality of some of the contributions we have heard already from Jacqui Dean from Mr Borrows from my whanaunga Peeni Henare. People are engaging at a very serious level with this and that is a very positive beginning I think to this piece of legislation.I think there is a popular view that coroners are people who are to be found in morgues wearing white coats and waving scalpels about. I think that is due to the influence of television programmes and the like. That is completely false of course. The Chief Coroner is a District Court judge. The coroners are all typically lawyers or have some legal training. And their task of course is to discover the cause and circumstances of sudden or unexplained deaths with a key focus on seeking to prevent or at least reduce the likelihood of similar deaths occurring be they by accident or by whatever means that the death occurred.In just doing some background reading about this stuff it seems that the Budget of the coronial service is rather modest and this might reflect the comments we heard about the Kaitāia coroner and his or her difficulty in meeting the workload demands. The last figure I saw was something to the tune of $17 million. About half of that was devoted to paying for specialty services pathological services lab tests—those sorts of things. So it seems it is a service that may be under some financial pressure and no doubt that is something we will hear about in the submissions if that be the case. I do not think I have ever made the point actually that the Greens are intending to support this legislation; just to put that out there.What we are amending is legislation that is not particularly old. It was from 2006. It saw a fairly major overhaul of the coronial services and the establishment of the Office of the Chief Coroner. The intention and the purpose of that change at that time were to streamline services. It created a network of full-time coroners with legal qualifications whereas I understand that earlier there were perhaps more people. It was a sort of a hodgepodge of part-time positions or part-time services which were found to be unsatisfactory. So it is fair to say I think that 8 years down the track we are looking at the outcome and clearly the results—or the anecdotal evidence at least which is presented in the regulatory impact statement—would indicate that the system is still far from perfect.Some of the perceived problems have been touched on already. Particularly in procedural delays processes that are not delivering swift resolution is obviously significant and very damaging potentially when it is around issues of the return of bodies. Allowing families to reclaim their loved ones after their sudden deaths is enough stress enough grief without the clumsy legal processes layering another level of concern and stress on to that. So I think we need to bend our minds to anything we can do to resolve those procedural and process issues and make some significant effort to ensure we are streamlining the processes to the extent that we can. I think the point has already been made—and again this is evidence or at least anecdotal evidence as presented in the regulatory impact statement—about the overlap of jurisdiction about the lack of clarity about who is in charge about who can do what and about who should be doing what and these are things that are amenable to improvement I am sure. Clearly as I said where we have these procedural and process bottlenecks or imperfections that creates not only financial cost but significant social cost as well and we need to do as much as we can to remedy that. None of these things look to be straightforward but some as I say are amenable to attention to the more mechanistic aspects of the Act—just trying to make it work better.I think that where the real controversy will kick in—in my assessment anyway—is around two provisions of the Act. One of those is changing the requirements around deaths in custody and the other one of course is around the issue of suicides. In terms of deaths in custody I guess the primary change as discussed in the explanatory note is in “removing the requirement for a mandatory inquest into deaths in official custody or care to provide the coroner with more flexibility particularly when the death is from natural causes and there are no suspicious circumstances (however the corner would still be required to hold an inquiry):”. Putting aside for a minute the difference between an inquest and inquiry—it is a key difference of course in the matter of holding a hearing—we have had recent examples of significant concern challenges and quite high-profile cases around deaths in custody where there has been considerable unhappiness about the results the findings and the outcomes of those deaths. I am not going to comment on specific cases because I am aware that some of them are still either in some sort of legal process now or there will potentially be legal issues arising around them. In general terms I think it is fair to say that deaths in custody have been seriously challenged as to liability and the circumstances leading up to a death.I think part of the problem there—and I perceive it as a problem; others may not—is the fact that in medical services within our prisons the people providing those services are employees of the Department of Corrections. I advocate very strongly that there ought to be an independent organisation be it a district health board or whatever that provides medical and health services in our prisons simply to draw that bright line between a focus on containment if you like and that on delivery of health services. I think some of that has come through in the controversy around some of the more recent high-profile deaths in custody. It is not only prisons of course; it is people detained under alcohol and drug addiction legislation young people who are kept in residences mental health detainees people in police custody and people in custody of security officers while being transported. There is a raft of situations where people in custody have passed away and often in circumstances that are obviously unnatural. But I am sure there will be unease about this change from a mandatory inquest to simply an inquiry. It is something that I think we need to investigate and invite submissions about and to look very hard at the costs and benefits of.The other issue of course is around suicides. I think I entirely understand what the legislation seeks to do and that is to manage the reporting of suicides to take away the opportunity for these things to be sensationalised and to try to manage the risk of copycat suicides particularly with young people. So on that side there are very sound arguments which I generally agree with to control the release of information about suicides.Alongside that and not necessarily in conflict with it though is an advocacy for actually talking more about suicide particularly with young people. I have been involved around the margins with groups in Northland—Riders Against Teenage Suicide is one of them. We discovered that a bunch of people on noisy shiny motorcycles coming into a town attracts the attention of young people and that they open their ears. I will just acknowledge Arthur Harawira who has been driving some of that having suffered a tragedy in his own life around this and who is passionate about trying to ensure that our young people do not see suicide as an option. We can only do that by talking to them and by very carefully managing situations to endeavour to get that plague of suicides out of our communities and out of our young people not least of all in Northland where there is a very serious problem. That has already been mentioned. So I think we will have to carefully manage that to ensure that people do not perceive that by endeavouring to manage better the reporting of suicides and events around suicides we are trying to shut down the debate. I look forward to this ongoing debate. We will support this legislation.