Faafoi Kris: Legal Assistance Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFaafoi Kris: Legal Assistance Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11591. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana):The title and commencement clauses debate for bills is usually an opportunity for members of Parliament to take some licence and have some fun with the titles of bills. But in this instance I am certainly not going to do that because this is simply not a funny issue at all and to do that would be belittling the effect of what this bill is having on our communities. It is a serious issue.As it stands I believe the title of the bill is the “Legal Assistance Amendment Bill”; the word “(Sustainability)” has been struck out by the Justice and Electoral Committee. The question has to be asked—and I have commended the select committee for making such changes—as to why the select committee thought it fit to remove one word from the title that being “Sustainability”. Wanting to be accurate the Chair has given me the ability to borrow his dictionary. It does not exactly have the word “sustainability” but under “sustain” one of the descriptions is “to provide for or give support to esp. by supplying necessities:”.Therein lies the reason why this select committee has taken out the word “Sustainability” from the title of the bill. It is because this certainly does not provide for or give support “especially by supplying necessities” to the legal assistance arena of our justice system. In fact we would argue that it does exactly the opposite of that by taking away support for and not supplying the necessities for legal assistance especially for our most vulnerable families. As Andrew Little argued we do not want to get to the stage where access to justice and the ability to go through the justice system whether it be a civil matter or a criminal matter is all based on how much money you have in your bank account.We believe that the motivation for this bill is simply fiscal and that is to cut costs. Unfortunately one of the effects of that is as we fear that access to justice for many New Zealanders will be removed. So we do believe when looking at the dictionary here that the select committee was right to remove the word “sustainability” from thetitle because this bill does not provide any support and it certainly does not provide the legal assistance arena with the necessities to do what we believe the legal assistance provisions in our justice system are there to do. We do think it does exactly the opposite.We need to think of this from three different perspectives. One is as I have mentioned before the perspective of the child. There are no words in the title at the moment that I can see that point towards it being in the best interests of the child nor in the explanatory note and that was a point that was made by the Children’s Commissioner. I will take the liberty of taking some quotes out of his submission to the select committee. He made a number of very good points. He noted that “the Bill makes no reference to the best interests of the child in the explanatory note to the Bill despite the fact that it will clearly impact upon children and young people who are involved in Family or Youth Court proceedings.” He went on to say that “These children and young people are among the most vulnerable in our community and it is therefore imperative that their interests are given primary consideration.”You cannot argue with the Children’s Commissioner on that. You may think that his being the primary advocate for children in our Government set-up would mean that he is purely focused on that but as we can see and as I have referenced before there is no reference to children in either the explanatory note or the title.The recommendations that the Children’s Commissioner made were basically not to proceed with this bill. His recommendations were “That the Bill is amended to expressly provide for the continuation of the current Court-administered selection processes;”. Also basically he thought that the provisions for access to justice for the best interests of the children were not in the best interests of the children.There are other pieces of legislation that are going through this House that we also think are down to cost cutting and one has been on the Order Paper earlier today. I do want to read a quote from Mark Henaghan from Otago University. This is going back to working in the best interests of the children. Professor Mark Henaghan expressed his feelings in a very concise quote on the removal of child advocates and this is certainly something that is covered in this bill. He said—it is a very quick quote—“So if we take their representation out we kind of doom them to not be heard.” In essence if we do make the barriers much higher for families to access justice which is what we are doing here in the Legal Assistance Amendment Bill I think that Mr Henaghan’s quote becomes quite apt. As Mr Little said we believe that one of the effects of this bill is there will be fewer child advocate counsels being able to be accessed by families and we do think that is of major concern to a lot of communities.Certainly as I have mentioned in my community in Porirua the legal fraternity is very worried. Family lawyers are very worried about their ability to be able to act for families that they have had a relationship with for many many years. I think they are a bit frustrated with some of the commentary that came back in their direction when they were opposing the moves that the Government is making—that the lawyers were trying to keep the gravy train going and that they were concerned only about the fees that could be got out of prolonging what is already in place or taking away any legal assistance that might be open to them. There was a deep level of frustration at that and I think that is well founded because if you go to most communities around New Zealand and you talk to lawyers who are acting in Family Court proceedings or family proceedings they very much have the interests of children and families at heart. I am sure some of them also need to eat so they want to make sure that they get paid but the insinuation that these lawyers were basically out to look after themselves was something from the Government that certainly upset them.As I said this is not one of those title and commencement debates where you have fun with the title of the bill or with the commencement of the bill—not that I think anyone has ever had any fun talking about the commencement of a bill. This is a serious issue. I note that the word “Sustainability” has been removed from the title. I have noted that this dictionary which has been loaned to me momentarily talks about sustainability being the ability “to provide for or give support to esp. by supplying necessities:”. We do not believe that this bill does that to the legal aid framework. We believe it does the exact opposite. It is appropriate that that word “Sustainability” was removed from the title. Maybe the Government should not have put it in there in the first place and it has been exposed for that. We do not believe that the bill does make the legal aid framework sustainable. We think it takes away the rights for many many New Zealanders to access justice especially for the most vulnerable. Especially on this side of the Chamber we do not want to get to the stage where access to justice depends on whether you can afford it or not.