Ardern JacindaJACINDA ARDERN (Labour): Mr Assistant Speaker thank you for the call and for the Minister's contribution to the discussion. Of course the Judicature Modernisation Bill which is now split into 23 separate bills has been a long time coming. In fact the Minister of Justice took over this bill from her predecessor and some elements of it have certainly changed along the way some as recently as in the last stage of the bill's debate. I will touch on that a little further on. But I do think it is important to add to the Minister's vote of thanks because particularly for officials within the ministry but also for Parliamentary Counsel Office this has been a significant drafting exercise and regardless of the various positions we all may have taken on elements of the bill they need to be congratulated on and thanked for the intense work that would have gone on for the Judicature Act. Some of the legislation that we are amending here today is 100 years old so there is no doubt that the work needed to be done. In fact the Law Commission's work was several years ago when it recommended that we consolidate the District Courts Act with the Supreme Court Act. So we absolutely agree that it is long overdue. But there were elements of that merger that meant that we lost some really critical parts some critical principles which I want to touch on. We also lost a few opportunities. We started this debate several years ago but actually as we have gone along there have been additional questions of legal reform that have come up—for instance the work by the Law Commission on alternative trial processes for sexual violence. That has recently produced a number of recommendations that could have been picked up in various pieces of work that were already before the House. This bill happened to be one of them; there was also the Evidence Act—there were various vehicles that could have allowed us to expedite some of the work that needs to happen within the justice reform area which still waits this Parliament's consideration. So there was a little bit of a lost opportunity there but perhaps more so for the Evidence Act. We do know for instance that this bill repeals the District Courts Act and makes a unitary District Court where the specialist courts will become divisions of it so then the Family Court the Youth Court and the disputes tribunal will sit under it. Part 3 of the Judicature Modernisation Bill—originally as it was set out—enacts the Judicature Amendment Act with updated language. We have then got the incorporation of the Law Commission's work on aspects of damages. This obviously was an omnibus bill so we did have some opportunities that were not taken up. But as I mentioned earlier I want to speak to the elements that were lost in the merger as it were. I mentioned that the Supreme Court Act 2003 was one of the Acts that were brought in under this piece of work. Some of those principles—like for instance the original principle around the Treaty of Waitangi—have been amended. Originally it was lost altogether in this work. I want to commend the Māori Party because actually I think it was its lobbying that saw that provision go back in—but not all of it. So let me just clarify here that originally within the Supreme Court Act one of the sections included: to enable important legal matters including legal matters relating to the Treaty of Waitangi to be resolved with an understanding of New Zealand conditions history and traditions;". That was dropped. What was put back into the bill through the work of other parties was simply: "enable important legal matters including legal matters relating to the Treaty of Waitangi". So we did lose half of what would have been I am sure a really robustly debated clause from the time that the Supreme Court Act was passed. That is obviously disappointing and strikes me as an unnecessary omission from this legislation. Secondly as was canvassed in the newspaper yesterday—the New Zealand Herald covered off the fact—we have in the legislation basically created compulsory retirement for judges. There are very few areas where you could justifiably have compulsory retirement and most are usually based around careers where there are certain levels of physicality. But it does strike me that we have used an age as the arbitrary guide to whether or not someone still has the competency for their role. Age is a very arbitrary measure for that. There will be a range of professions where people regardless of their age may need to be moved on for competency reasons. I do not want to comment on Parliament as an example of that but my view would have been that if we in this House were debating how to ensure that we always have the robust instruments to ensure competency we would not pick one measure and use that as a way of dealing with it. So for the judiciary it strikes me that if we need to remove people because there are competency issues we need to make sure that we have got the powers to do that and to make sure that we are able to have that flexibility as required—and age is not the best marker and determinant of that. So we saw that as being arbitrary. Secondary to that of course it is discriminatory as well and we sought to have that removed. It is such a danger zone to move into examples so I am not going to despite the Assistant Speaker trying to entice me down that dangerous track. I will not be doing that and so I will just leave that as that. One of the other elements—and I have to really reflect on this—of the bill that was removed in the last stages was the provision that said basically that we would be publishing all final written judgments. That was removed at the eleventh hour basically. We asked the Minister for some rationale. Basically the rationale that the ministry came back with was that the scale of producing all written judgments in that manner was just massive it would be costly and it would require immediately for new staff to be hired and basically courts were not ready for that. So our view was "OK well let's give you time"—let us put in a time frame for the Supplementary Order Paper to come into force that is longer than the enactment clauses for the bill itself. Unfortunately that was defeated although I think it had quite wide support in the House. I just went back and had a look at the statement that was put out by the then Minister of Justice at the time this bill was brought before the House. It was 27 November 2013—almost 3 years ago—and one of the primary reasons the then Minister—it was Judith Collins—said she was introducing this bill was to build a more customer-focused lower cost more accessible justice system. Let me reflect on this statement. She said: "The Bill includes changes to ensure all written judgments are published online unless there is a good reason not to. It also places a requirement on the Judiciary to publish information on the number of outstanding judgments … . New Zealanders are paying for this justice; they should be able to access it. The higher courts already publish decisions of interests but the biggest gap is the district courts where the bulk of cases are heard. We must work with the judiciary to close the gap and this bill is a key part of that dialogue … . People … have the right to know". Most of this press statement was about the online publishing of judgments. Most of the rationale that the then Minister of Justice gave for this massive bill was something that was removed by this Government at the very final stages of the bill. Again I just wanted to highlight that that seems a massive loss. We understood the timing issue but we absolutely believed it would have been possible to deal with that. One final word: in making the justice system more accessible the use of electronic filing was a theme in the bill. I have heard recently of changes that have for instance been used in the Family Court around electronic filing and that the time frames within which lawyers must have documents filed with the court have become so explicit. They have lengthened the time frames of course that things must be filed by because there have been issues with judges not receiving them in time—that is fine. If you are a minute late on that long lead time those documents will not be passed on to the judge hearing your case and you will find yourself when you are before the court having your hearing postponed—or you will frequently see documents lost in court and cases postponed because of that as well. I urge the officials from the ministry to sit at the back of a court for a day and they will see the inefficiencies we have at the moment because of the way our filing is working and the frustration from officials and registrars. It is cramming up our system to an unbelievable degree and there is no documentation of it so it is hard for this House to scrutinise but it is a massive problem and I really ask ministry officials to engage with the legal fraternity on this issue. It is denying people timely access to justice and this presumably was what this bill was meant to be all about."