Chauvel Charles: General Debate 
Chauvel Charles: General Debate 
[Volume:641;Page:11146] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 I am very proud to be a member of this Labour-led Government that is delivering very good government to this country. It is getting on with the job of governing and delivering strong stable prosperous conditions to the people of New Zealand. We are doing what we were elected to do. We are doing what we said we would do as we have after every other election. 
I am also very proud to be a member of the Justice and Electoral Committee which is doing very very good work in advancing the programme of this Government. It will surprise members opposite to know that some of that work includes looking at electoral finance reform trying to get the formulas right and conducting an inquiry into victims’ rights with the cooperation of Nandor Tanczos from the Green Party. That is something he has spearheaded and it is something we regard as very important. We think the work is important—not the rhetoric. We are considering the efficiency of some of the entities in the justice sector like the Legal Services Agency the Law Commission and the provision of Crown legal services. We are also looking at access to justice. These sorts of things are important to ordinary New Zealanders and they are the sorts of things that we are trying to look at hard in our committee. 
The three matters I have just described are the ones that our committee chair on behalf of the committee put before the Speaker in support of an application by the committee to travel to Australia to compare approaches on those questions in a comparable jurisdiction. That request was granted and the committee travelled to Melbourne last week. It is a great shame that the week before our travel the National Party members of the committee—Mr Finlayson Mr Auchinvole and Ms Wagner—announced via the media that they would not be participating in the trip. We all know that the public does not like the idea of politicians travelling. We all know though that with a good programme and good management these trips are incredibly valuable. New Zealand is a remote jurisdiction. We are far from our neighbours and it is very easy to get insular and provincial. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Look at the Internet. 
CHARLES CHAUVEL 
: Mr Henare is living proof of that I am afraid. The National Party instead of doing what it had agreed to do—participate in the trip pull its weight and look at the serious questions—decided to play politics in the media. National members called the trip a junket and said they were not going. They pulled out of the meeting. [ 
Interruption 
] 
I will respond to the criticism that has just been voiced across the House by that member because the members of the committee who were present—Mr Tanczos Ms Pillay Ann Hartley and myself—can confirm that we undertook 16 substantive visits on that trip. The itinerary will be interesting to the House. First we went to the Victorian Electoral Commission where we looked at its innovative programme for enrolling younger voters something we are going to share with the electoral authorities here. There were some good lessons. 
The next visit we made was to the Victims Support Agency of the Department of Justice. Again we were walking the walk rather than just talking the talk—the victims’ rights rhetoric. We found how important it is to coordinate victims’ services something that we can do better in this country. That was worthwhile learning. Then we went to the Australian Electoral Commission. 
Simon Power 
: Nationalise it. 
CHARLES CHAUVEL 
: I am glad Mr Power thinks it is a good idea. Let us see some commitment to it from the National Party instead of just the heady rhetoric that is a lot easier to deliver than real services to victims. 
As I was saying we then went to the Australian Electoral Commission and had a look at the three limbs that it says are important in a clean system: public funding for political parties disclosure regimes that actually work and campaign spending limits. We heard the commission’s criticism that if one does not have all those legs of the triple one does not have a satisfactory electoral system. Well it does not look like we are going to get public funding here so our select committee is going to have to work as hard as it can on ensuring the other two work as well as they can and I am certainly committed to that. 
The fourth meeting was with the Electoral Matters Committee of the Victorian Parliament where those lessons were further reinforced. Then we saw the Victorian Law Reform Commission and we shared some experiences about the need to really take the reports of law reform commissions seriously put them before Parliament quickly and get their recommendations enacted. 
The fifth meeting was with the Victorian Sentencing Advisory Council which is very similar to the body that New Zealand has just created—the Sentencing Council—and we learnt about the importance of the educative function of the council. Again it was more than just rhetoric as with the National Party; it was putting things into practice. There were 11 other visits. It was a substantive programme. It was worthwhile and we actually did the work rather than engage in the rhetoric.