Little Andrew: Third Readings —Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLittle Andrew: Third Readings —[Sitting date: 28 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10468. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW LITTLE (Labour): It is a pleasure to get up to speak on what was previously the Criminal Procedure Legislation Bill and is now broken into nine bills. I will not adumbrate them all; they have been laid out by the Hon Chester Borrows who spoke just now. As we have done so throughout the Labour Party supports this legislation. This is the end of a process that started under the previous Labour Government to reform our criminal procedure legislation when the original amending bill was passed. This now deals with some refinements and some technical amendments. It has been properly processed through the chamber of this House and the select committee and it is supported by us. There is no controversy to it and indeed the select committee process showed that the Government was listening. It listened to Labour’s concerns about the “Henry VIII” clause that was in the original bill. That has been removed and this is perfectly acceptable legislation now that ought to have the backing and the support of this House.As Mr Borrows pointed out this completes the most significant reform of this area of our law in around 50 years. I am very pleased to see that one of the break-out pieces of legislation is the Auctioneers Act. It is an Act that goes back to 1928 and if there was ever a piece of legislation that was crying out for review it is probably that Act at least and it has been amended in part under this series of bills—Hon David Parker: Going going gone.ANDREW LITTLE: Going going gone as my colleague Mr Parker says. That is probably a piece of legislation that deserves some attention in its own right given what is happening now on the interweb. The trading and retailing that happens in that forum now is perhaps making a traditional auctioneer’s role somewhat obsolete—although not completely because of course they are good people and do good things.Mr Borrows talked about the many other changes that are happening in criminal justice and the administration of criminal justice. One aspect of course that will not be there which was expected to accompany this legislation when it took effect on 1 July is eBench the new information technology system that was meant to cover the courts and the court system. It has been delayed by at least another year. Talking to people in the traps they expect it would be longer. But of course due to a reliance on eBench a number of courts—admittedly small regional courts—have been closed down and the people in those courts do not have the benefit of new wondrous technology that allows them to communicate by looking at a TV camera and a screen and communicating through that with courtrooms in other parts of the country. We do not have the benefit of that but we do have the benefit of modernised legislation.The objectives of this legislation and of the total reform are worthy. They are about ensuring fewer appearances not only for counsel and for judges but for witnesses as well. That should lead to less delay. If there is one problem that defines the difficulties with our justice system at the moment it is the problem of delay. I can say from talking to many members of the profession that they approach 1 July if not with trepidation then certainly with a small degree of anxiety as they wait to see how this will all bed down and bed in. The very many crimes that we have in our Crimes Act the Summary Offences Act and the various other criminal statutes have been categorised into four types of crime and that is going to have a bearing on the way that criminal lawyers conduct their practices and indeed how judges administer the law. So this will be an interesting time for us all.I repeat too what the New Zealand Law Society said as this bill was progressing through the Justice and Electoral Committee and that is that in areas such as criminal justice these should proceed on the basis of cross-party agreement as opposed to the Government ramming through its particular agendas and its desired reforms. This is an area that requires—or where at least the participants in the system are entitled to—certainty and agreement in this House and the full backing of this House when it comes to that area of our law because it affects people’s lives but most important it affects their constitutional rights and criminal justice potentially affects their liberty. That is a matter upon which this House ought to ideally speak with one voice.But of course there is one other aspect that was expected to have been successfully reformed to accompany the commencement of this new criminal procedure reform and that is the system of legal aid. That is now in complete disarray and yet it need not be. As recently as last Friday the Court of Appeal handed down its ruling on the challenge by the Criminal Bar Association and found that that aspect of reform which was handled single-handedly by this Government and by two Ministers of Justice—the current one and the preceding one—is now left in a most unsatisfactory state. It was declared by the Court of Appeal to have been implemented in an unreasonable way for the Legal Services Commissioner now responsible for legal aid to have had hisindependence compromised and that there was a lack of flexibility and far too much rigidity in the regime that this Government would like to impose on the system. So my plea to the Minister of Justice is this: it is not too late to get the legal aid system sorted out and in a satisfactory state in time for 1 July.Hon Judith Collins: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. Perhaps the member is not aware that this matter is currently in front of the Supreme Court. It is not appropriate to be discussing a court matter in Parliament.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Yes I thank the Minister for that. Also when we are doing a third reading I refer the member to Speaker’s rulings 122/4 which says: “Members must confine themselves to the general principles of the bill as it emerged from the committee.” So please confine your comments to that.ANDREW LITTLE: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. I appreciate your guidance on this matter except to say that when it comes to the administration of criminal justice the Criminal Procedure Amendment Bill and the other bills that we are dealing with in this third reading came under the umbrella of the Criminal Procedure Legislation Bill and is integrally related to other aspects of criminal justice. It is simply not possible to not talk about the greater efficiencies that are expected from this set of bills without referring to other integral aspects which in this case includes legal aid. I will say no more on that.I simply want to say this though. The way we deal with criminal justice the way we deal with criminal procedure and the way this House speaks on it is absolutely crucial to the principle of the rule of law. The way this legislation—what was originally one bill and is now nine bills—has been managed has been a model process for the management of bills by this House and in a very sensitive area. It was properly introduced it was allowed to be subject to the scrutiny of the select committee members of the public and indeed important institutional submitters like the New Zealand Law Society had their say and changes were effected during that process and we now have a satisfactory piece of legislation to complement changes already made. That is a good thing but it would be nice if the felicitous way in which this process was carried out was reflected in other pieces of legislation too. I make that point because it is becoming increasingly apparent that the way some pieces of legislation and some issues are handled is not good for the reputation of this House. This piece of legislation this bill will stand as a model of lawmaking by this House. It is a good bill and it is being conducted appropriately and properly.The process started with the Labour Government and we would expect that a piece of legislation that started its life under a Labour Government would be a good piece of legislation and would be managed and processed correctly and properly. But the same cannot be said of other pieces of legislation including sadly pieces of legislation that bear upon people’s individual and personal rights as we saw in the aftermath of the Budget just a couple of weeks ago. We welcome the fact that this bill has reached this stage. We are 5 or so weeks away from the implementation of what will be a significant change to the management of our criminal justice system and the criminal procedures that will apply in our courts leading up to it.That is a very sensitive point and a very sensitive area. We have a profession that will now be called upon to bring life to these pieces of legislation and to this reform. Members of the profession who are practising at the Bar and judges will have to make sense of it and I am confident that they will do—no pun intended—justice to the legislation we are passing. But they are in a state of concern. In fact it would not be going too far to say there is a sense of alarm developing in the profession about the way in which and about the respect with which they are treated as well as their issues and their ability to conduct themselves and fulfil their duties—both statutory and ethical—when it comes to criminal justice laws and the criminal statutes that they are called upon to work under.So it will be a pity if we look upon this time and the passage of these bills as the high-water mark of good legislation and good legislative practice. Let us take a leaf from these pieces of legislation these nine bills as we see them through their end stages tonight. Let us say that we want all legislation to follow this proper constitutional process with good input from members of Parliament and good input from members of the public and those stakeholders who have a greater interest perhaps than others when it comes to legislation as we have heard from the important stakeholders in these pieces of legislation. As I have said we support the bills and we will be voting for them. But let us take a lesson from these bills and let us not allow this House to repeat the exercises that it has been forced into in the last couple of weeks that have dealt with individual and personal rights and ridden roughshod over them. Let us look at these pieces of legislation these nine bills and say that this is the right way to go about it this is the way to pass law this is the correct way to do it. Let us make sure that this law is simply the start of a new approach a breath of fresh air for this 5-year-old Government to say: “You know we’ve got it wrong before. This is the way we do it. We’ve taken a leaf out of the Labour Party book. We know what good law looks like and this is the way we’ll approach all other legislation from here.”