Jones Dail: Supreme Court Bill — In Committee 
Jones Dail: Supreme Court Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:612;Page:9064] 
DAIL JONES (NZ First) 
: 
 What the Minister has said is absolutely wrong. Many of these people will not have the right of a second appeal in the sense that they can bypass the Court of Appeal and go directly to the Supreme Court. Therefore they will still only have the right of one appeal under this new legislation. The Minister has forgotten the situation with regard to the Employment Court for example where people can go directly to the Supreme Court bypassing the Court of Appeal. I am staggered that this Attorney-General should be totally unaware of what is in her own legislation and that she should come here and tell members that there will be a right of two appeals. In fact when the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions gave evidence before the select committee it was adamant that it wanted to have this right of direct appeal to the Supreme Court bypassing appeal to the Court of Appeal. 
It shows how little attention the Attorney-General has given to this legislation. It shows that she is interested only in ramrodding it through Parliament come what may. Before Parliament we have a bill that came back for the report back on Tuesday. I asked the Attorney-General during that debate for the amendments that were to be made but nothing was forthcoming on Tuesday. On Wednesday we got eight pages of amendments. We even got amendments to the schedules which we are now discussing. Even at this late stage we now have the Attorney-General indicating she is not familiar with the complete nuts and bolts of this legislation. 
The member for Epsom Richard Worth went through some of the provisions of schedule 1. We are not talking about a minor schedule as is often the case. That schedule actually has 12 substantial amendments to the legislation on top of many other smaller amendments. The 12 substantial amendments that I counted—and when I say substantial I do not mean a two-line job that just replaces “High Court” with “Supreme Court” or “Court of Appeal” with “Supreme Court” but substantial amendments—include changes to the Child Support Act and the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act. The amendment to the Courts Martial Appeals Act which we are dismissing in a matter of moments actually goes on for two and a half pages. That is the length of the amendments taking out the fact that one or two parts are struck out—perhaps I will reduce it to just under two pages to take into account the struck out bits. 
But here we have amendments to the Courts Martial Appeals Act totalling almost two pages which we are having rushed through Parliament. The Crimes Act again has a substantial amendment that is being rushed through. The next major one the Harassment Act has a reasonably small amendment. The Human Rights Act has a substantial amendment and we are going to have to rush that one through. The Summary Proceedings Act is the sixth major amendment. The amendments to this start on page 38—if it is taken into account that page 37 is totally deleted—and go through almost to the end of page 39. 
Substantial amendments to the Privy Council legislation and the Supreme Court legislation are being rushed and ramrodded through Parliament by this minority Labour Government. There is no majority support for this legislation as far as the votes at the last election were concerned even taking into account the Labour vote the Greens vote and the Progressive vote. They got 38 percent of the vote and the other votes were also at 38 percent. There is no electoral support whatsoever for this legislation. 
Clayton Cosgrove 
: What was your vote? 
DAIL JONES 
: I have had 9 years in this House as a constituency member and I can tell those members that they do not know what being a constituency member is. The soft life they lead nowadays as constituency members is just unbelievable compared with the good old days. 
The Bail Act is another piece of legislation with amendments and there are one and a half pages of amendments to that legislation. It is the seventh amendment I must mention and the amendments to the Crimes Act is the eighth major one. For all those practitioners in that area there are six pages of this schedule devoted to an amendment to the Crimes Act. We will be lucky if we get 5 minutes to speak on this schedule so that is why I am rushing through in this way. If I start to speak on the six pages of the Crimes Act amendments I will be cut short and not get another chance to speak.