Criminal Procedure Legislation Bill

The House is resumed. Members, the House is debating the second reading of the Criminal Procedure Legislation Bill. David Clendon has the call. He has 6 minutes remaining, if he wishes.

Thank you, Mr Speaker—

💬 Hon Tau Henare: You don’t have to!

I would not deprive you of it, Mr Henare. I am pleased to pick up the remaining few minutes. Last evening, about 11 hours ago or so when we were discussing this bill, I was making the point that the intention of the original legislation, which we are now repairing, for want of a better word, was to make the criminal justice system more transparent, more understandable, and more efficient, and the Minister introducing the bill yesterday reminded us of that.

Those are admirable goals, and we support this legislation, in part because we do need a well-functioning justice system. But sadly—and I was also making this point last night, or had begun to—a lot of what this Government is doing elsewhere is actually counting against the implementation and the practice of an efficient and fast-moving justice system. By “fast-moving”, I mean we have to get cases through to the courts as quickly as we can practically do so. It is not acceptable, for example, that people may be sitting on bail, or, indeed, on remand, for 6 months, a year, or even 18 months, often in quite serious cases, because the courts are that jammed up that we are not getting the cases through in time.

The level of offending on bail has gone up, we are told, and clearly that is in part related to the fact that people are spending longer on bail because the courts are not moving sufficiently—they are not moving quickly enough or smoothly enough. Some of the reasons for that, we know, are that there have been some cuts in court staffing. The courts are now struggling to fulfil their core functions. We are seeing a significant loss particularly of senior staff, or experienced staff—the people who actually understand and have the institutional memory to make these quite complex organisations work well. Although we might seek a legislative remedy to ensure that the legislation supports an efficient operation of the courts, if we are going to remove the people who actually make it work day to day, then we will not succeed.

It is important too that we keep the courts open, and it is unfortunate that we are seeing closures of courts around the country. We are seeing a reduction in the accessibility of courts, due to reduced services, reduced hours. None of this is supporting or helpful in the sense of wanting to get our justice system working effectively, smoothly, and quickly.

We are seeing reductions in the availability of, and eligibility for, legal aid despite the fact that this can drive people of necessity to represent themselves, and we have seen on the Ministry of Justice’s own website cautionary tales advising people not to self-litigate. Self-litigants in the courts dramatically slow the courts. They cause a great deal of extra work and load on judges, court staff, and other people involved in the process. We ought to be making other practical contributions to a smooth and effective criminal justice system rather than undermining it. We have seen that very recently, in fact—legislation is still in process around the Family Courts, where, again, we are seeing a reduction in the accessibility to the right of people to use lawyers, which will force them to self-litigate. We are seeing increasingly that far from making courts more accessible and more understandable to lay people, they are becoming less accessible, and that is simply not helpful in terms of what this legislation is allegedly trying to achieve.

The Greens will continue, as I said at the beginning, to support this legislation. It is necessary to ensure the integrity and utility of the primary legislation that was passed a year or so ago. We will support it for that reason, and we do obviously encourage the idea of the courts being more efficient, more transparent, more accessible to people. But, unfortunately, we are going to have to wait for another Government, a more enlightened, progressive Government, to come along to actually put in place the necessary structures, the necessary legislation, the necessary policy to make our courts work as we all want them to do. Kia ora.

Debate interrupted.