Henderson EmilyDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei): It's a real joy to stand up and dig in with the Hon Louise Upston into this bill because this is an awesome little bill. As I understand it with my very minor experience in this Chamber it's had a very unusual process as my colleague Ginny Andersen the chair of the committee and the Hon Louise Upston have both begun to describe. I'm sure that that we will have more of this because it's been a fascinating thing.But I do want to just take this moment because there is real weight and significance to this matter. There is tremendous detail to go through and it is important that we explain it in that detail that only a committee stage gives us the opportunity to do. But I do want to start by talking about the philosophic significance of this—and the Hon Louise Upston I want to dig in a little bit to that with you tonight. I come from a background in law and particularly in the rights of victims and the place of victims in the adversarial court. When I began that work to my shame it's—well to my shame not to my shame at all. What an awful ageist thing to do. Over 25 years ago when I started work looking at the plight of victims in our justice system what was really the case when I dug into that victims do not have a place in the traditional criminal adversarial system—they simply do not. They are tools of the lawyers and the judges to be used for the evidence that can be got from them and then set aside. That is the fundamental problem with the position of victims in an adversarial system which is essentially that dialectic discussion between the prosecution and the defence. In that system a victim really has no place except as cannon fodder.It is very different if you look across the ditch from the originator of the adversarial system in England. If you look across to France and you see the inquisitorial system and you look there and what you see is a system that is dominated by the State whose interest is in setting right the situation the imbalance that has arisen by the commission or the allegation of a crime. For that system the victim actually does have an integral place in the system and a part to play and a role and a right to stand as we say in this Chamber and as they say in courthouses across the land. There a victim has a lawyer. A victim has a right to make submissions. A victim has a right to a say in a sentence in a very very different way to the small and cautious way in which we allow our victims into court to have a say on the disposition of the case. So it seems to me from the outset when I got to grips with this bill that it is actually putting a pou in the sand and advancing one more step along something that I know is very dear to this Government's heart which is to integrate victims into the criminal justice system to give them the respect and the voice that they have so lacked for so very very long. When I began all those years ago—in fact I think it's closer to 30 than 25 when I try to do my addition but my brain may be trying to ignore the fact. When I began as a 21-year-old it was common to hear victims talk about their sense of total disempowerment their sense of a total lack of voice and the fact that the trial was a re-victimisation. These things were common parlance and I was really saddened when I heard those same experiences. And the Hon Louise Upston you will know this better than I do.Maureen Pugh: What's the question—what's the question?Dr EMILY HENDERSON: I'm getting there but it's really important to set the scene Ms Pugh.Maureen Pugh: Very waffly.Dr EMILY HENDERSON: Thirty years of academia give me a chance. I've got a long history here. [Bell rung] Thank you. Thirty years of academia cannot be put to bed in five minutes. I say that to the Opposition. It may put the rest of you to bed but not me. So my point is and to quote the great Ellen I do have one." When we heard the experiences of those victims back in the beginning of this process the same pain that we hear from victims in a rape trial or in a sex trial was coming from them. That intense feeling of disenfranchisement and disempowerment in what was their experience. That intense feeling that they had walked into an arena where it should be essentially about their experience and their reality and it was not. It was about them as tools of a system that was not focused on them at all. Therefore it really struck me the title you gave your bill Ms Upston. Because rights for victims is almost a contradiction in terms in the adversarial system as it has been traditionally conceived. Yet it is a real mark in the ground as to where you were going with that and it is something where we see—you know later this week I hope we will be considering the Sexual Violence Legislation Bill. I see this bill as of a piece with the work that we will be doing on the Sexual Violence Legislation Bill. It is again about the place of and the respect given to victims or complainants in the process. It is about moving aside those two bullies those two domineering people the prosecutor and the defence moving them aside and admitting into the frame that third person the victim or complainant.When I just go back to the inquisitorial system in France it is sometimes thought that any mention of an inquisitorial system or the inquisitorial system might have advantages over ours is some intrinsic attack upon the rights of the defendant. When one sees the words "rights of victims" that is often seen by criminal defence or traditional criminal lawyers as an implicit attack on the rights of the defendant. But I think what you're demonstrating here Ms Upston and what the work that we have here that we did so painstakingly and with such passion and nerdy determination particularly if I may say so from some of these slightly newer members of the Justice Committee. That level of nerdy attention was justified because we are doing something significant here.But when I say that the inquisitorial system is often seen as a threat to the adversarial system that the idea of inserting victims as players into the system with rights of standing of their own is seen as a threat I really think that that seriously underestimates the capacity and the elasticity of the adversarial system because—and here comes the serious nerdism—it has been said over the last 20 years in research on the inquisitorial versus the adversarial system that actually they're not opposed. They exist on a continuum. So you often see elements of the inquisitorial system creeping into the adversarial system but also elements of the adversarial system creep the other way too. I think it's really important to put that frame around it. When we talk about rights for victims which 10 years ago would have been seen as a slap in the face an existential threat to our criminal justice system—and I am not putting that too highly because I know criminal defence lawyers—when you come from that perspective I think it is really important to put that debate into context and say "This is not only a big step forward for our system but it is not a threat to our system." Our system is endlessly elastic provided we stick to those fundamentals of the protection of the defendant's human rights and dignity and the accurate fact finding. Once we know that we are holding those two intrinsic quests that make up a trial once we know we have given those due respect I think the trial is virtually infinitely malleable whether it is in terms of the procedures you use whether you use pre-recording or whatever or whether you allow a victim to have a place in the trial and to state their truth and to give their voice and to have rights. So Ms Upston I'm inviting you one very deep nerd to another to stand and address us on why you named this bill the way you did because I think it is important and I think you should say it."