Dalziel Lianne: Legal Services Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Dalziel Lianne: Legal Services Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:659;Page:8349] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I rise to support the further passage of the Legal Services Amendment Bill. I guess that in many respects timing is everything. I would not like to agree with anything that the previous speaker David Garrett said for obvious reasons but the timing of this bill—given the report of the legal aid review which has recently been released—means that in actual fact we really are not doing justice to the issue. I think that this bill ought to be referred back to the Justice and Electoral Committee for consideration to make the further amendments that will obviously come from the legal aid review. Given that I know that busy Ministers are always looking for passing trains to add carriages on to I would have thought that this was the perfect carriage to hold on to in the select committee for a wee bit longer before progressing it to this stage. So I was really disappointed to see it on the Order Paper at this stage of proceedings. 
I am concerned about a couple of things with this bill. One of them is that the select committee did not address the issue that I raised in the bill’s first reading. It is all very well to look specifically at the victims of crime with respect to coronial inquests but it actually ignores those who have no one representing them at a coroner’s hearing when the cause of death has come not from a criminal action but from an action that we might describe as criminal in a less legalistic and more pejorative sense. I am talking about what happened at Christchurch Hospital in 1996 where people died who ought not to have died at that time in their lives. The reason they died was systemic failure at Christchurch Hospital which was identified by a group of courageous doctors who were prepared to put a document together to show the sequence of events that led to preventable deaths. 
Four of those families ended up with coronial inquests into the death of their loved ones—a mother a brother a father a husband. They ended up in a coronial situation where everyone in the room but the family was represented by a lawyer. Everyone else was represented by a lawyer: the doctors were represented by lawyers the Crown health enterprise—that wonderful experiment that we had in the 1990s—was represented by a lawyer the nurses were represented by a lawyer and the trainee interns were represented by a lawyer. Everyone was represented by a lawyer. The only people who had no legal representation were the families. The reason they had no one to represent them was that they could not afford the cost of hiring a lawyer to represent them in their case. That meant that the one person who could not be represented was the person who had died. That is what the coroner’s hearing was all about. 
I said when this bill was introduced that I felt that it was really important that it did not look just at the victims of crime but at the broader victims in situations where there were coroners hearings and where it would be appropriate for the Legal Services Agency to say to those family members that it would allow them to access legal aid that it would not require them to pay it back after the result of the hearing came out and that it would not test their financial eligibility for legal aid. It is not so much the family individually that is being represented but the memory of the individual who has died. What is being sought in a coroners hearing is the truth. I heard one of the lawyers put it very well. He said it was not so much a court of inquiry; it was a court of truth. People are looking for the truth; it is not a court of blame. He was representing one of the groups that were able to have representation in that hearing. None of my constituents had anyone except me to stand up and represent them and I was not qualified to do that for them. I have felt very passionately about this matter for a long time. I put it on the Table of the House and I asked that the select committee look at it for the purposes of this bill. I would like the Minister in the chair the Hon Simon Power to respond to that. 
The second question is the question of the legal aid review and the report that has come out. As the Minister is aware—he mentioned it in the House when he launched the review a few weeks ago—I intended to make a submission on the legal aid review. I made that submission. I went into some detail. I recognise that there are limitations on an Opposition member who has to do all the background work and who has no officials to call upon in that regard. But I put a bit of effort into it because the concern I had about the legal aid review was that it was not going to take advantage of the two very important structures that I thought we had put in place over not one but several Governments: the Public Defence Service as far as criminal legal aid went; and from the civil perspective the community law centres and the hub that they could provide for communities all around New Zealand. For a lot of people it is the access to the upfront advice that they need to get things on track. 
It is also about the big guy against the little guy. The little guy often does not get the chance to have his case heard. In many respects when a number of little guys have been hit by the big guy—and members can look at the finance company failures if they want to look at an example of that—we ask how we can provide support for people who should not be subject to individual means-testing to take on a company. So I put together a submission that I thought was pretty broadly on track with how it could resolve these issues. Fortunately I felt that I had been listened to. Although I did not have a direct input with the reviewers I felt that I had been listened to and that the report itself reflected that. 
But what has undermined the report has been the insistence that we have a much larger scale of fraudulent behaviour within our legal profession than I think can be warranted by way of statement. I think it is really important that the air is cleared in that regard. Margaret Bazley unfortunately stated in her report that up to 80 percent of the lawyers in one District Court’s jurisdiction—up to 80 percent—have been involved in unacceptable practices. I think that statement cannot stand. No evidence in the report backs it up. It is unfortunate that it has been said because it undermines the quality of the recommendations that I would like to see supported. 
I think this is an important opportunity for the Minister to take the time to address some of those concerns in the context of this bill. We always wish that we had time on our side but in this particular case I think we could take a little bit more time. The Legal Services Amendment Bill could be an ideal opportunity for us to gain some very quick amendments that could be made. I would hate to end up with what will inevitably be an Erebus report - style approach as to whether people can be found guilty of things they have not been charged with. That will undermine the credibility of the report. I would rather see the Legal Services Amendment Bill as an opportunity to tidy up some of the elements of the legal services provisions that we agree on on both sides of the Chamber and move on to the benefit of all concerned. I would like to hear the Minister respond to those two particular points.