Borrows Chester: Disputes Tribunals Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Borrows Chester: Disputes Tribunals Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:655;Page:5109] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 I rise as chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee. I thank the members of that committee and acknowledge the efforts they have put in to progressing the Disputes Tribunals Amendment Bill through the select committee process. 
Chris Hipkins 
: And the acting members. 
CHESTER BORROWS 
: And various acting members who were all welcome and who ate their fair share of the chocolate biscuits. Having said that I can say that a number of submissions were made before the committee but not a heck of a lot; most of them were around the issue of the threshold in terms of making suggestions that it be raised so that people could come before the disputes tribunal to settle disputes with a higher monetary value than the bill currently before us has. 
The decision was made that the threshold should stay at about where it is on the basis that once we start raising that threshold and taking it as far as some submitters wanted—at around the $50000 mark—there would be a need to have greater legal expertise because the weight of the ramifications of the decision of the arbiter would be too heavy for those who did not have access to legal counsel bearing in mind that those appearing before a disputes tribunal are not legally qualified. 
There was also some concern about certainty and consistency around the country. Whereas the majority of those arbiters in the disputes tribunal process have legal qualifications there are some who do not and there is seen to be a variation in the integrity of some decisions from tribunal location to tribunal location. Then of course the way to appeal that is through the District Court which in itself becomes expensive. 
It is important to note that access to the disputes tribunals is easy. Paying a sum of about $40 obtaining specific statement of claim forms from the court house filling them in in handwriting and giving them into the court can see people before the disputes tribunal in a couple of months. The arguments are made as I said earlier without legal representation. The adjudicators can apply fairness as well as the black letter of the law to a situation; they are not bound specifically by the law. So it is seen as a ready remedy that is available quickly to the public. 
The point has been made by previous speakers about the mechanism involved in being able to raise the threshold in the future. It has been suggested that this should be able to be done by regulation or could be done through the legislative process by having some sort of inflation-tied figure. That is a matter for another day; suffice it to say that it should be that flexibility could be accorded to the disputes tribunal process because the thresholds appear to be changed only about every 10 years and it seems that getting to the end of those 10-year time frames the sum is not appropriate because it is too small bearing in mind the cost of legal representation to proceed through the District Court. 
So I too commend this bill to the House. I am pleased that it has received wide-ranging support from across the House. I look forward to its speedy progress into use within our disputes tribunal system around the country. Once again I thank members of the committee and those submitters who took the time to make submissions before it. Thank you.