Davidson MaramaMARAMA DAVIDSON (Green): I rise on behalf of the Greens to support the Courts Matters Bill and the Tribunals Powers and Procedures Legislation Bill. We will be supporting these to select committee and as my colleague David Clendon has already outlined we welcome some parts of the legislation but we have some concerns. Firstly we see merit in what the legislation is proposing to do in terms of standardising processes; making it clearer and simpler for users to access justice; making sure that the systems are modernised when it comes to filing storage and communication; and making sure that the courts are operating in a more efficient way. So absolutely we welcome making sure that we can offer a good robust system in our courts process.I think though at this stage that it is worth mentioning that the courts are facing a backlog of work and we know that there was gutting to the funding for the courts. So I think we also need to consider a systemic response while this legislation is trying to catch up on some of that. I think we need to understand why there was a backlog in the first place. I did want to mention that. We look forward to the select committee submissions on both what the Greens think this legislation offers in terms of its merit but also on our concerns.The courts matters and tribunals bills have a range of amendments with the intent of improving the efficiency of the courts and tribunals systems which I have just referred to. But we are particularly concerned—and this is what I wanted to spend most of my time on—about the Courts Matters Bill which will give court officers the power to issue an arrest warrant when they think it is necessary to compel the attendance of a defendant. The fact is that this bill significantly extends the powers of court security officers to detain people.The Green Party is always concerned about extending powers of detention and arrest in particular. At this stage it is police officers who have those powers. We will want to remain concerned about extending those powers to court officers. I particularly wanted to highlight that a concern that we should have is that this is another opportunity to consider the cumulative impact of a justice system that is not free from bias and discrimination—something that is evidenced and researched and known very well and very clearly.What then will extending the powers of court officers to detain and arrest—what does that mean for the situation where already Māori and Pacific people are overrepresented in our justice system by virtue of having a justice system that is not fair and is not free from bias? What will that cumulative impact mean if we are going to extend the very powers that have not been used fairly across all of the communities and groups in our country? We are going to want to have a good look at that at the select committee stage.I am quite keen also on understanding the training that is going to be required to ensure that we do not transfer over the very discrimination that is used currently in arresting and detention when it comes to Māori in the community and that we do not transfer that very discriminatory practice which we still have not sorted out even for police.So that was the main core of my contribution at this first reading. We will be wanting to go over that quite deeply at the select committee stage. As I said at the beginning we do welcome the parts of the bill that will have merit in terms of upgrading and modernising our system. But again we also need to address the cause of the backlog that the courts are facing in the very first place and we will remain concerned about the extension of powers of detention and arrest. Thank you.