Barker Rick: Third Readings — 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Barker Rick: Third Readings — 
[Sitting date: 07 July 2011. Volume:673;Page:19906. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon RICK BARKER (Labour) 
: 
 Firstly I acknowledge the compliments paid to me by the Hon Simon Power and say that they are appreciated. Very seldom do we have across the House acknowledgements of work. I say in that regard that this legislation arising from the Courts and Criminal Matters Bill should be seen in the context of a range of bills to try to modernise and update the administration of justice in this country. When I first became the Minister for Courts I was quite surprised at how antiquated the administration of justice was in New Zealand. It was complex it was arcane and things were done that were appropriate 50 to 60 years ago but are no longer appropriate in the modern time. For example if a person had a debt to the High Court and they had a debt to a District Court two people had to serve the notice of debt—one for the High Court and one for the District Court. Well as far as the person who owed the money was concerned the debt was to the courts and to the State. But the State had a different perspective on it. This meant that there was a considerable amount of duplication. These circumstances arose I think principally because—not wishing to cast aspersions on the efforts of my predecessors—there was an overdue emphasis on looking at justice as policy and public law rather than the administration of law. 
I think that we should have spent a lot more time on looking at the administration of law. Personally I did not see myself as having a great deal of expertise in public law but I did see myself as an administrator. So when I looked at the court system I looked at it as an administrator would and asked “What needs to be done?”. A great deal has been done and I want to acknowledge the good work and cooperation of the Hon Simon Power—for example in respect of depositions which are not touched on in this legislation but are a very important form of reform. I know there is a substantial amount of other reform going on in addition to this legislation to improve the administration of justice. I think this is an area on which all sides of the House should work cooperatively and constructively to make sure that our justice system performs to the highest level it possibly can. There is a great deal of room for more improvements and I hope to see many more courts and criminal matters bills and other justice bills come before this House to improve the administration of justice. We tend to spend time as a Parliament on legislation that has a high public profile and is about offences and offending and so on. But we spend little time on legislation about the administration of justice; this is one such bill. As I repeat myself I hope we see many more of them. 
The legislation covers a lot of bills whose names the Hon Simon Power has read out. I was quite surprised when I came into contact with his work about just how many agencies were involved. It is a vast network and all have to be actively engaged in the way in which New Zealand does its legislative work which I think is very good. There is a high degree of consultation with the local authorities and with all the other agencies—police and so on—to make sure that the legislation works and works well. There was a clear determination to make sure that it worked well and it was because our systems were not working. 
Very often we had in the courts young people who were confronted with $20000 $30000 $40000 $50000 or even $70000 worth of outstanding fines and the system seemed to be incapable of dealing with it. It is a little bit like the old saying of Lord Maynard Keynes: “If you owe the bank $100 you’ve got the problem. If you owe the bank $1 million the bank has got the problem.” So it was with the justice system. If young people owed a small amount then they had the problem but when they owed $70000 the system of justice was in the spotlight and I think that is a significant problem. I regret to say that this legislation does not do as much as I think it could have in this area. I think that two other interventions could have been made and I hope they come later. The first is early intervention so that when a young person’s fines get to a certain amount—say $2000 or $3000—they are case-managed. There is no point in our trying to case-manage this when the young person is before the court with $70000 worth of fines. I think that is an area in which we can get involved. 
But the area where we have taken a strong lead is in relation to outstanding fines. I will repeat what I said in the Committee stage. One of the things that drove me on this matter was a letter from a constituent a person who was known to me whose mother had been involved in a dreadful accident. At the court hearing it came to his attention that the young man driving the car had approximately $40000 of outstanding fines and a range of other prior convictions. The letter went on to ask whether the system did not understand or appreciate that this young man was a menace on the road and was likely to cause an accident. The accident that occurred was to his mother who was in hospital in considerable pain. There can be only one answer to that question: we should have known and we should have taken action. But we did not and the system needed to change. People needed to be held to account for their fines. The point was that this young person could drive incur a fine and not pay it with impunity. Because he could avoid his fines with impunity he saw the justice system as lacking teeth lacking enforcement and lacking credibility and I thought it was time for us to do something. 
Three things will happen as a consequence of this information. The first is that a person’s licence will be under threat if they do not pay their fines. The legislation provides for a driver licence stop order which will say to the young person that if they have not taken responsibility for their fines their licence will go. The second thing that will happen is that we will deal with a problem brought to my attention by officials that some young people were getting high-speed expensive cars driving very badly incurring huge numbers of fines and when the car was seized and sold the finance company got all the money for the car and there was nothing left to pay the fines. The young person whose car had been seized would immediately turn up to a dealer again finance himself into another car and carry on driving down the road. The dealer knew the circumstances of this young person’s driving and what was going on but there was no disincentive for the dealer not to finance the vehicle. Well there will now be a strong disincentive. If a young person has a substantial amount of money owing in fines and reparation for their bad driving then if a dealer sells that young person a car and the car is impounded the dealer will now be told that the fines and the reparation outstanding will be taken out of the proceeds of that vehicle first and only if there is something left over will the dealer get their money out. This will be a strong disincentive to financing bad drivers back into more vehicles and I applaud that. There were some concerns about this from a privacy point of view but I am happy to report that the Privacy Commissioner spoke to the Law and Order Committee and was very happy with the arrangements we had. 
The third element is that people were racking up large amounts of fines and this was having no effect on their particular financial position—it did not affect their credit. They would therefore be paying off multiple debts; they would pay off the debts they owed to the private sector and not pay the debts they owed to the Crown. They would not pay the reparation. If they paid off their debts to the Crown and the reparation ahead of the private sector debts and left the private sector debts then those debts would impact upon their creditworthiness but if they paid off their private sector debts and did not pay off the debts to the Crown then it would appear to all the world that they had a good debt record and they would have a positive credit rating. I thought this was wrong. This legislation changes this so that if a person has a debt to the Crown for fines and reparation it will be on the public record and it will affect them. When that person goes to get a credit card or finance of any sort the finance company will see that that person has $5000 $10000 $20000 $40000 or whatever amount outstanding and will know the sort of person they are and their liability. This will put extra pressure on those people to pay. 
This is good legislation that contains many things that will improve the processes for collecting debts and for putting attachment orders on people with debts and it will simplify the system across the board. It will mean that one official from the Ministry of Justice will be able to serve debts from multiple courts and multiple jurisdictions. All of this is good stuff. There is nothing down in this legislation at all. The last point I want to come to is I think a very important one: it is the ability to resentence. I think this is very important because many young people have gone before the courts and promised to pay reparation and that has been taken into account when they have been sentenced but they have not done so and they have laughed at the courts because of that. This change will say to them that if they do not pick up on the promise they made they will come back to court they will be held to account and the book will be thrown at them. This is a very good provision. Thank you.