te Heuheu Georgina: Arbitration Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
te Heuheu Georgina: Arbitration Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:642;Page:11848] 
Hon GEORGINA TE HEUHEU (National) 
: 
 I am pleased to rise to make a contribution to the third reading of the Arbitration Amendment Bill. It implements the principal recommendations of the New Zealand Law Commission contained in a report in 2003 which proposed changes to improve the Arbitration Act 1996. 
As my colleague Chris Finlayson said the Act—which has been in operation now since 1996—has worked reasonably well but some changes will be needed in the future and some are needed now. The changes in the bill are designed to make it more desirable and easier for parties to disputes to resolve those disputes privately by the use of arbitration. That is a worthy objective. National supports the third reading of the bill and congratulates the Government on bringing these amendments forward; they are timely. As I say the amendments have been proposed since 2003. 
Arbitration is only one way of resolving disputes. Other methods in an ordered civil society like ours include conciliation mediation and finally resolution in the courts. Although mediation has shades of arbitration—a neutral intervener facilitates the resolution—the end result is not necessarily a final binding outcome. Conciliation also has limitations that arbitration does not have. Of course we could say a whole lot of things about the court process but in this day and age our court processes are not working as well as they should and of course they have not improved under the current Labour Government at all. 
The beauty of arbitration is that it is consensual. Parties come to it freely of their own accord. They can determine the rules under which they wish to have the dispute resolved and can appoint a neutral arbitrator to adjudicate the dispute—there is agreement on that—and importantly for the parties they can accept the ruling of the arbitrator as binding. The process is somewhat regulated by the legal system in that there are limited rights of appeal to the court and interlocutory orders can be made during the process but its strength is that it is a method of resolution outside the normal legal system. 
It is not surprising then that more and more parties are referring their disputes to arbitration rather than to court proceedings. As I said earlier our court system is not working at optimum levels. In fact in some parts of the system it is clogged up; it is absolutely clogged up. It does not serve our community well at all and there is a perception—wrong I might say—that in court proceedings only the lawyers win. That is an increasingly popular view and it does not enhance the use of court proceedings. Resolution through the courts is becoming in a way the last resort. Mr Deputy Speaker you know that very well having been involved as a Minister in the justice sector as well. 
Colleagues have detailed the main changes promoted by the bill. I refer to only one in concluding my contribution on the issue of confidentiality. The underlying principle of our court system—that proceedings are conducted in public—flows from the maxim that not only must justice be done it must be seen to be done. For that reason court proceedings with only limited exceptions are held in open court. Increasingly however there has been a growing recognition that a range of disputes particularly in the business and commercial sector are more appropriately dealt with in the private domain. It is a strength of the arbitration system as well that the process quite properly allows for that. Indeed the changes in this bill ensure that total confidentiality of arbitral proceedings with a few well-defined exceptions is confirmed. The openness of justice principle is preserved as well; if the parties have recourse to the ordinary court system then open justice applies unless there is good reason that persuades the judge otherwise or unless there is agreement by the parties. 
All in all I commend the Minister in charge whoever it is; with all the changes that go on on the Government benches we are left wondering sometimes— 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: Me! 
Hon GEORGINA TE HEUHEU 
: It is Minister Cosgrove. This is a good bill National supports it and we are very pleased that this bill will pass into law reasonably soon.