Tuiono Teanau; Webb DuncanCHAIRPERSON (Teanau Tuiono): Just for members' awareness we are starting to drift into debates which could be better placed in other clauses. So I'll take another call but I'd just remind members to stick to this particular clause. Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Kia ora. Thank you Mr Chair. I do hope in terms of notifying legal aid providers within 14 days the Minister's not using New Zealand Post because that might not quite work. That's probably for the Minister for State Owned Enterprises. I do want to talk about commencement and that 14-day period because as the Minister has just pointed out in terms of that within that period the legal services agency will have to formulate the notice and what it means for various providers and send it out. This is the point I want to make about the commencement date: providers will have to adjust their practice accordingly and in particular legal aid providers are generally very busy criminal practitioners and they will want to do right by their clients and this will create an enormous bulge of work. The reason for that is that what essentially legal aid providers—lawyers—have been doing is subcontracting this bit of evidence saying We need cultural report evidence; I'm really busy it's not really my area of expertise. Please can you find out about the family circumstances the cultural background the victim's circumstance and what the relationships are and get back to me and I can present it to the court." Now these practitioners with 150 criminal files on their desk will have to do that themselves. That's not something they're geared up to do within 14 days. These are cases where the reports haven't been commissioned yet and won't be commissioned yet. These are cases that are in train; might not yet have gone to trial so a sentencing report isn't appropriate yet. What will happen is that the burden of this work which will fall upon them will mean they can't possibly satisfy all of their clients and do right by them. So Minister in fact the kind of impact of this the ripple effects of this will be felt in the legal profession in terms of how they properly serve their clients for six nine 12 months depending on how quickly you can sort out the court backlog. The lawyers can't just say "Oh look I'm too busy I can't possibly do your sentencing report. You know I can't possibly talk to your mum talk to your brothers and sisters talk to your kaumātua about what your cultural background is." and do all of that work and then get all of those bits of evidence in a presentable form—Helen White: Call the witness.Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: "Call the witness" as my friend Helen White said; call the witnesses orally if necessary perhaps get letters from them to present to the court because informality is generally OK in those situations. That's all work that this commencement provision doesn't allow for. This is going to be a bomb of work that lands on these practitioners because there's no phasing out. It's just a guillotine where the funding for these reports is stopped but the need for them doesn't and these hard-working criminal practitioners and I must say the Crown as well—no Crown solicitor I have spoken to thinks this is a good idea because they also want to see this done; they want to see this evidence. So it may well have an impact on the Crown's work as well. I know the Minister came to the Justice Committee and said you want to work on the backlog. This is going to exacerbate it because we don't have a transitional phasing in; it doesn't commence in a period of time for practitioners and judges prosecutors and defence lawyers to have time to adjust their frameworks to it. So I'm interested as to whether you've talked or thought about that bottleneck of work that will hit the legal profession as a result of the quick commencement."