McKee Nicole; Goldsmith Paul; Andersen GinnyNICOLE McKEE (ACT): Thank you Madam Chair and thank you Minister for the answers to that. The question about the sector leadership and support was not so much whether it was value for money for the $13 million but what was it that they provided specifically for $13 million. The request in the question about value for money was directed at the Human Rights Commission and them having two chief executives and them actually undertaking a project looking at the sovereignty of New Zealand and coming to a conclusion so far that it's illegal. So it was asking a question about that. I have two more quick questions for you Minister. One is looking at the biggest driver of costs in our justice system which appears to be our legal aid bill. When we looked at it it's gone from $180 million in 2018/19 to $281 million in 2022/23. Now it's an estimated $304 million cost for 2023/24; that's a 56 percent increase in legal aid requirement over the last five years. So I'm wondering: what is the driver behind this?This then leads on to my second question which is about the elimination of family and sexual violence. I understand that it's not the Minister's portfolio but the budget actually comes under the justice cluster and it has $22 million attached to it. So the question is: what has actually been done in that portfolio? The performance in page 95 of the vote is essentially saying that it's overseeing actions in the plan and that the Minister's satisfied with advice—so it looks like we've spent $22 million on actions that we don't know about and that the Minister is happy with the advice. We know and the Minister in the chair has said herself that we have an increase in family harm occurring at the moment. The police commissioner has said the same thing. So with the $22 million and everybody being happy but we're seeing no progress is the Minister able to answer as part of that justice sector what has that $22 million been spent on and will we see some tangible results in the next 12 months? Thank you.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Chair. So hoping for some good answers from the Minister on these things. So ultimately it all comes down to the Government's priorities for the $190-odd million dollars that it devotes to the Ministry of Justice to work on problems that we're trying to fix as a society. When we look around the justice space the three four things that spring to mind are the increase in violent crime that is the scourge in our community—the fact that the gangs are recruiting faster than the police and a sense of disorder on our streets. Secondly there is a real worry about the massive increase in youth crime and this is particularly exemplified by the ram-raiders who are running amuck and causing so many difficulties across our communities. The third issue which would strike me as top of mind is the very long delays to justice that many New Zealanders face whether they are in the criminal system in the family court system and all the other elements of the courts with people's lives being on hold. That partly relates to the previous question that my colleague Chris Penk was talking about the very significant increase in the legal aid budget. Well a big part of it is that everything takes so much longer and there are so many lawyers involved in the whole process.So those are three big challenges in the justice space the fourth area I'd identify would be around electoral law and the importance of reasserting equal voting rights for all New Zealanders. Now equal suffrage is a core part of our human rights legislation but it only directly applies to general elections. This Government has undermined that at local elections through its Canterbury Regional Council bill which moves away from equal voting rights for all citizens and democratic accountability.So given those priorities what I want to understand is why this Minister and this Government has instead prioritised reducing the prison population by 30 percent irrespective of what's happening in our community. Secondly they spend an enormous amount of time and official advice millions of dollars on an ill-conceived proposal to ban hate speech and whether the Minister regrets all that diversion of effort. Another area has been on reducing the voting age to 16 which is not something that I would have thought was top of mind for most New Zealanders in that justice context. Then a whole lot of electoral law financing boondoggles which weren't carried out in the normal process of being bipartisan but rammed through we think in order to skew things in one direction.So I suppose that what I'm putting to the Minister is: why have you prioritised those things at a time when as a country in the broader justice space we have these very substantial pressures when it comes to violent crime youth crime and very long delays to justice in our justice system? And does the Minister believe that she and her Government over the past six years has given enough attention to those real pressing issues on the front line that all New Zealanders are focused on?Hon GINNY ANDERSEN (Minister of Justice): Thank you very much Madam Chair. Look as we only have a couple of minutes left I'll touch on the issue of violent crime. The member has raised the issue that violent crime has increased and I'm pleased that he mentioned that the large reason for that increase has been family violence. That has been a significant driver of that area and it's for that reason that this Government has invested more so than any other in Te Aorerekura which is the first time we have the funding in place in those NGO sectors like Women's Refuge for those outreach groups to actually get involved and fund our communities not only to respond to family violence but to engage with those families to stop it happening again. So I would say that there has been the biggest investment New Zealand has ever seen to reduce family violence and stop it from happening to the next generation.When we talk about youth crime and the increase we have seen—a spike in ram-raid offending that looks like it is tracking downwards and that is because there has been significant resource invested in those wraparound programmes like Kotahi te Whakaaro like Circuit Breaker. We see that around 80 percent of those young people who go through those programmes do not reoffend and I put that in stark contrast to the National Party's policy of introducing boot camps which have an 80 percent number of those who do reoffend after going through those camps. So they don't work and we continue to be a Government that goes on evidence. We have evidence-based policy and that is why investing in family violence and that is why investing in reducing youth offending addresses and tackles those route drivers of crime that do take time but we know that they do track our communities in the right direction.