Tanczos Nandor: Legal Services Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
Tanczos Nandor: Legal Services Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
[Volume:625;Page:20641] 
NANDOR TANCZOS (Green) 
: 
 I begin by thanking Mr Franks for reminding us of the Government’s promise of an eligibility review. I remember those days. I remember when Mr Franks and I and a few other members sat on the Justice and Electoral Committee. In some ways I think the only thing that kept us going was the promise of an eligibility review. We sat through long tedious hours while we gutted and rewrote the Legal Services Bill which had been introduced by National and transmogrified by Labour. The only thing that kept us going was the promise that one day we would be able to do the really exciting work of considering changes to eligibility. 
It is a wee bit of an anticlimax to be dealing with this bill today. There was real interest among the select committee members in addressing those issues—both stopping the abuse of legal aid which we all acknowledge does happen and also expanding the provision of legal aid into socially and ecologically useful areas which is the issue I was more interested in. For example we could expand it to include community and environmental legal aid where there is a clear public interest but little private interest. We see numerous examples around this country every week where the only thing standing between an ecologically sensitive area and a rampant developer is an impoverished hapu or community group. So extending the provision of legal aid into those areas is something the Greens very strongly support. It is part of Green policy but unfortunately this bill does not address it at all. 
We will support the bill because we think it does a number of useful things. It extends eligibility. It raises the income threshold which is something we strongly support. A number of people who are not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination have been excluded from eligibility for legal aid because of those unadjusted thresholds. The provision to allow those thresholds now to be set by Order in Council is something that we think is eminently sensible. It is crazy that legislation has to be brought to this House every time members want to adjust those thresholds so we support that change. 
The Greens support the ability for better assessment of assets—for example those held in trust or those disposed of quickly just prior to an assessment. It is distasteful to all people and it is distasteful to justice to see people getting legal aid when they have significant hidden assets. The cases that caused the most offence to people as Mr Franks said were those where people got significant support from legal aid when it was plain to see they had assets stashed away where they could not be got at. So we support that. 
We support the debt management provisions. We think that where a debt exists there should be effective mechanisms to recover it. That makes absolute sense. But we also like the fact that the bill clarifies that those debts can be written off where they are causing undue hardship. But alongside our support for the clearer debt management provisions we are concerned that there is an increasing focus on getting repayments of legal aid. We have to remember that it is the poorest people whose access to justice is reliant on legal aid. We think it shows a kind of mean-spiritedness to have too much focus on repayment when that is not really where the concern is. 
As well as the funding for private mediation which is also something the Greens support I note that the new section 23A(2) proposed to be inserted in the Legal Services Act by clause 13 is somewhat restrictive. It states: “(2) This section applies to an aided person who seeks funding for private mediation as part of an existing grant of legal aid.” so it is very restrictive. I am not sure that those restrictions should be there and that is something we will look at in the select committee. 
But as I say we are disappointed with the bill. It is an anticlimax. One of the key areas that we would like to see provision made for is community and environmental legal aid and that is something that Mr Goff had indicated would be included in an eligibility review. 
Dr Richard Worth 
: He promised it. 
NANDOR TANCZOS 
: Mr Worth says that he promised it. I cannot remember whether that is exactly true but it may well be. It was certainly my understanding that it would be in there but it is not and that is unfortunate. 
Of course provision was made for some environmental legal aid—a very limited amount of money—to be granted through the Ministry for the Environment but that is not really the place to put it. It should be administered through the Legal Services Agency. That is where the proper administration can take place and that is where the criteria can be properly applied. I am not sure whether the Ministry for the Environment is particularly well-equipped to do the kinds of evaluations that are standard practice for the agency so that aid should be provided through the agency as part of the legal aid scheme. 
The other thing that I will touch on is that we would like to see greater provision of restorative justice in particular. I was in Christchurch recently talking to the community restorative justice group there which was very concerned because it had had numerous requests to do restorative justice procedures. The procedures would have been extremely helpful first of all for the victims and that has to be the No. 1 priority; they would have been enormously helpful for the victims. They would also have been helpful to offenders in the sense of their establishing remorse and in developing processes for those people to move away from a life of crime. That is the kind of situation where restorative justice is the perfect solution. It does not work in all cases but there are situations that are calling out for the provision of restorative justice and it is unable to take place simply because of the victim’s inability to access it. That is a real tragedy. I think that is the kind of area that legal aid could quite usefully be extended into. Again those people are some of the most vulnerable people some of the poorest people and some of the people most in need of that support as victims. That is something we think the select committee should also look at. 
So the Greens support this bill. We support it going to a select committee and we look forward to addressing a number of those issues there.