Wall LouisaLOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. It is my pleasure to speak on this the third reading of the Coroners Amendment Bill. I am going to outline why the Labour Party is not supporting this piece of legislation. After going on the coroners' website and looking at what coroners do I really want to start by taking time to mihi to our coroners. They do an incredibly important job. What they do is they help to determine when where how and why a death has happened in Aotearoa New Zealand. What they also try to do is work out whether anything can be done differently that might prevent similar deaths in the future so I want to emphasise that. They want to identify whether there is anything that we could have done to have prevented a death. In fact I think that is one of the most significant roles of the coroner in addition to ensuring that families have the information and know what has happened to their loved ones. It is very much about an individual good I suppose you would call it—the understanding of individuals' families of what has happened to their loved one—but coroners also have a responsibility in terms of our collective or public good. Those reasons essentially are why coroners make recommendations. So I would like to highlight the Supplementary Order Papers of my colleague Jacinda Ardern which were actually rejected in the Committee stage of the debate in this House. They were Supplementary Order Paper 145 and Supplementary Order Paper 146. Essentially what they said was that persons or organisations or Government agencies must respond to coroners' recommendations. Where did that come from? Actually the Law Commission wanted to support it too. I want to note some particular University of Otago research by Dr Jennifer Moore and Professor Mark Henaghan. Dr Moore actually has a public health degree as well as a law degree. Her piece of research focused on the effectiveness of New Zealand's coroner's court. Her rationale was that the coroners' work is extremely important and the recommendations save lives and guide policy. What she did was investigate coroners' cases and recommendations—remember that this Act started in 2006—and her research was from 2007 to 2012. When she attempted to ascertain what happened to those recommendations she was actually mystified—mystified" is probably the best word—because what she found was that the coroner's court does not report annual law reports. She found that intriguing and so she spent months travelling around the country going to different courts and gathering data herself. What she found in that 5-year period was that there were 607 cases and 1644 recommendations that involved 309 parties and of those 309 parties 121 were Government organisations. What did she do? She contacted them. Of those 309 parties she contacted 200 of them and of those contacted 79 agreed to be interviewed and a further 42 completed a questionnaire. Essentially the key finding of her piece of research was that a mandatory response regime should be put in place to ensure that organisations responded to coronial recommendations—sounds pretty simple—and what Dr Moore has continued to do is to engage with coroners and to work with them because one of the other findings of the research was that some of the recommendations were not targeted enough. They were not specific enough about who should actually do something to prevent deaths in the future. That has become an ongoing piece of work that she is engaged with. In fact the coroners themselves said that sometimes they made recommendations in a vacuum. So this two-way process that she wanted to create and that my colleague Jacinda Ardern suggested has been rejected by this House and that is a sad thing. The other part of the process that we have gone through that I want to highlight is the proposed amendment of my colleague the Hon Phil Goff. Essentially what his proposed amendment would have done was continue the presumption that coroners would investigate military deaths unless the Attorney-General directed the coroner not to as opposed to what this legislation will create in the future which is that coroners cannot investigate military deaths unless they are directed to by the Attorney-General. The rationale for coroners continuing to investigate military deaths was actually highlighted in a Stuff article that was titled "Secret death panel planned". Within that particular article former army medic Sarah Erb who was the partner of Corporal Luke Tamatea was quoted. Corporal Luke Tamatea was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2012. I want to highlight Corporal Tamatea's situation because in that instance there was a coronial inquiry and there was also a court of inquiry because it was a military death. What we know from what Corporal Tamatea's whānau have said is that because of the coronial report—the whānau actually received a copy of that report. Having read that report they got the answers that they were looking for. There was a particular emphasis in this article about Corporal Tamatea's mother receiving the answers that she needed in order to get some closure because her son died not in Aotearoa but in Afghanistan in the line of duty and she was mamae because she did not know what happened to her son. I think all of us would agree that it is incredibly important for families to be able to understand what has happened to their loved ones so that they can answer all the questions they may have and then they can actually process that and have closure mourn and grieve and then get on with their lives. I think a number of us would agree that unless you get closure it is very difficult to move on because you have a whole lot of unanswered questions. I want to contrast that however with the court of inquiry and the record of proceedings. There was also involvement of the military because in any military death there is a court of inquiry and I spoke about this in the Committee stage. I wanted to look at putting forward a Supplementary Order Paper actually but because the governance of military deaths—courts of inquiry—are actually enabled through the Armed Forces Discipline Act 1971 I could not. One of the things that I wanted to ensure was that family members have access to the record of proceedings when there is a court of inquiry because of a military death. The reason I want to particularly focus on this is that I asked at the Committee stage for the Minister in the chair to confirm that if there is a military death and if the only inquiry into that death is a military court of inquiry families have automatic access to the record of proceedings. No Minister got up to refute my assertion and in fact I want to highlight that the chair of our select committee Jacqui Dean was in the Chamber at that time and she said that I was wrong. So I am taking her on her word. I want it recorded in Hansard that it is the expectation of this House that if a military court of inquiry is the only inquiry undertaken the family has automatic access to that record of proceeding so that whānau can have those questions answered they can get the closure that they need and that they can move on with their lives. Other than that I hope that I have clearly outlined why Labour is not supporting this legislation. Finally I really enjoy my membership of the Justice and Electoral Committee I think we have incredibly robust discussions but we do so because we are talking about law and we are talking about matters of principle and matters of policy. So I hope that the people of Aotearoa New Zealand understand now why the Labour Party does not support the Coroner's Amendment Bill. Thank you."