Hughes GarethGARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora Mr Chair. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou kia ora. I rise to take a very brief call. I have not followed the bill through the Justice and Electoral Committee but I want to touch on a couple of points given that we are taking this bill in the Committee stage as one debate.The first point is at the high level—that this is coming after the last 1908 substantive clean slate review of our judicial environment. We welcome this opportunity to engage. There are serious changes within the legislation that the Green Party is supporting. One area in particular—given my technical background and interest in IT issues—is the idea of the specialist panels. These High Court judges can establish a specialist panel on areas for example in commercial law.A recent case I was reading about relates to copyright and intellectual property (IP) and is about who owns the copyright for a tattoo. It is one tangible example of some of the changes that our society is going through and the legal challenges we are grappling with that will possibly be addressed through this the Judicature Modernisation Bill. The question is who owns the IP for the tattoo. Is it the person wearing the tattoo? Is it the artist? What happens if that representation is for example used in a video game? Again who owns it? There are complex issues.IP is an area that this Parliament has battled with—for example the software patents legislation. We have seen it as a controversial issue in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It is a very technical area that is now seeing much more widespread public concern and involvement in the debates. It is a highly technical area with case law going back literally hundreds of years. So it is good that we have some flexibility that we can see these specialist judge panels established.The second point I would like to touch on is Supplementary Order Paper 66 in the name of my colleague David Clendon which is introducing new clauses 167A and 167B and a new cross-heading. This is relating to a judicial register of pecuniary interests. It is something that my other colleague Dr Kennedy Graham had a member's bill on and promoted very heavily a number of years back and something we urge other members of the Committee to support. This is something that every single member in this House deals with in our democracy and our Parliament is better as a result. Our register of pecuniary interests allows us to be transparent with our information regarding our assets our outstanding loans and the gifts we receive. We have seen some cases in the media and in the public domain where judges' relevancy has been called into question when it comes to these issues.We think a judicial register of pecuniary interests is something that is reasonable. We think it is something that is important for transparency. It is incredibly important that our judicial system is seen to be of the highest quality. Everyone in court be they a defendant or on the other side of the bench deserves to know we have got a high-quality system. The Supplementary Order Paper in the name of David Clendon would require a pecuniary interests register to be established and judges to declare whether they have a close relationship with litigants legal advisers or witnesses to the case. I think this is entirely reasonable. I understand the Government was previously quite interested in this area and I hope we can see some substantive debate on this point. This is something that other countries—Canada I believe—have done and is something we should be doing because as we have used it in our Parliament in terms of the pecuniary interests of our members of Parliament it is important we translate this and bring those principles of transparency and sunlight to this realm.All in all we support this legislation and we welcome the debate.