Judicature Modernisation Bill

I have been trumped by Grant Bamfield, but I would like to personally wish Grant every best wish for the future and thank him for his many years of service in this place. It is always sad to—I was going to say “see an old face go”—I mean it is sad to see a face that has been around for a long time leave this establishment. But to you and to all of your fellow workers who make this Parliament function as it can, thank you very much for your dedication, your commitment, and your service.

I was interested in Scott Simpson saying that he was going to take this Judicature Modernisation Bill home to read over Christmas. Good luck! We will give you a test on 25 January and see whether you have thoroughly absorbed it.

It has been my habit in this House, when talking about justice bills, to describe the National Party’s bills as lightweight political flimflam. Well, I cannot really sustain that particular argument on this piece of legislation. This is not a party political pamphlet, as so much of the National Government’s justice legislation has been. In fact, it is based on two very serious reports by the Law Commission. My experience of the Law Commission is that it does its homework, that it does its work well, and that we can be confident that the basis of this legislation will be sound.

The debate on the short title will be fairly easy because—unlike other bills, I think—we could agree that this is a judicature modernisation bill. It amends a bill passed in 1908. That is 105 years ago. That is not to say that the Judicature Act has not been modified many times—it has been—but when you modify and you make ad hoc changes you lose some of the coherence to the piece of legislation. So it is good to have this piece of legislation, and I am so sad that I will not be on the Justice and Electoral Committee and be required to read it page by page. Of course, Geoffrey Palmer would have already absorbed this before breakfast and would have given you a scholarly account of what is in it, but I fear that some of my colleagues on the Justice and Electoral Committee might be hard pressed to treat it as it ought to be treated. It is 1,182 pages long. It could be called the “Forestry Destruction Bill”, by its pure weight.

I want to say that although the bill has been, I am sure, thoroughly drafted through the Law Commission, I have taken the time to read some of the regulatory impact statements. The regulatory impact statements suggest that the select committee cannot simply take this as a given, and that it will have work to do. I am looking, for example, at the regulatory impact statement on the Judicature Modernisation Bill—the second paper—and it has caveats on the work that the Ministry of Justice has been able to do on it: “Limited consultation has been undertaken in relation to the options in this paper, … We do not have reliable data to assist in considering a number of the proposals in this paper. … We have not been able to model the operational impacts of the proposals …”.

So although the base and the work that the Law Commission has done are sound, the ministry constantly complains, through the regulatory impact statements, that it has had to be rushed in the work that it has done on it. Indeed, if I look at one of the other regulatory impact statements on the Judicature Act and the consolidation of courts legislation, it says: “limited consultation has been taken in relation to the options which go further than the Commission’s recommendations”. The work that the ministry has done on this, by its own admission, has not been fully consulted and has been a bit rushed in the time available, and the select committee will therefore need to consider carefully the proposals in it.

I want to begin my discussion on the substance of the bill with Part 5. I am taking it out of order because Part 5 of this bill stands out like a sore thumb. Let me read what Part 5 does. It “sets out legislation to enable and govern the use of electronic technology in court and tribunal proceedings”, including all current paper-based requirements to be replaced with electronic processes. I read that with some degree of amazement because last Friday the Minister for Courts stood up and said that an $18 million project on producing a paperless court, which he had earlier boasted would mean that processing would be 70 percent faster and save 93,000 man hours—this wonderful paperless court and the eBench proposals that the Government had invested $18 million in—has been scrapped. It has been scrapped. This from the Government that brought us the electronic wonder of Novopay and whose predecessor, the less than illustrious National Government before we came to power, had brought us INCIS, which wasted $100 million.

Well, I have got some questions to ask of the hapless Minister who introduces a bill promising that this will be an electronic miracle and that it will save all of this money and all of these hours, and who had to admit, just days before this bill was introduced, that everything that the Government had done on eBench had come to nothing that the promises had not been delivered upon, and that actually Part 5 of this bill is, therefore, meaningless and does not do what it promises to do.

I think that in the course of debating this bill, and for Scott Simpson and the select committee looking at it, some hard questions have to be asked. How did the Government stuff up converting the paper-based bench to an e-bench in such a way that it spent millions of dollars, and failed to deliver? I want to know how the Government got it wrong. I want to know how it intends to fix it. I want to know what the timetable is, before Part 5 of this bill will have any meaning at all. And I want to know exactly what it cost the taxpayer in wasted funding, because this Government once again stuffed up and failed to deliver on what it promised. So that certainly is a very controversial part of the bill.

We were promised that the judges could open digital files in court. They could input changes, including future appearance dates. They could input bail conditions—and you and I, Mr Assistant Speaker, sat in the court and watched the laborious way the papers appeared on the judge’s bench. All of this was going to be digitalised, and it has come to nothing. What is the explanation for that? Can anybody on the National bench act as an apologist for their Minister and say why the Government stuffed this up? It is a serious matter. The taxpayer does not mind paying their taxes if the money is spent wisely. But when you spend $18 million, you make big promises, and you fail to deliver, then this House deserves an explanation for why the Government got it as badly wrong as it did.

That leaves me with 2 minutes to deal with the other five parts of the bill. I want to say that there is some quite sound stuff in the rest of the bill. Part 1 repeals the Supreme Court Act, which is not that old—2003—and the Judicature Act of 1908, and it creates a Senior Courts Bill. This brings together the High Court, the Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court under one system. I think that is sensible. It streamlines the appointment of non-permanent judges. It establishes a judicial panel, under clause 18 of the bill, to hear certain types of commercial cases. These are incredibly complex and specialised cases, and I think we should be developing the specialist expertise of judges and panels to deal with them properly. They can take a lot of time. They can be very expensive. They can be very complex. I think this is a move in the right direction.

I note that there are more powers given in this part and in the second part to restrict vexatious civil litigants. If it is indeed vexatious, I am quite relaxed about that. But we must also honour the right of people to have their time in court, and we should not use that power lightly. Part 2 creates a unitary District Court system. We have got 59 separately mandated District Courts at the moment. This brings them together. The Family Court, the Youth Court, and dispute tribunals will all become divisions of that court. It also increases the threshold of the claims that can be heard, from $200,000 to $350,000. I think that is sensible. I will not go into the details of the award of interest on money claims, but it is sensible to preserve the real value of those claims. We will support this bill, but the Government must give an explanation of how it managed to so monumentally stuff up the digitalisation of the courts system.

I do not rise to give an answer to that speech by Phil Goff. Rather than nitpicking, I would rather lavish praise on a very good bill, the Judicature Modernisation Bill, which has a little bit of substance to it. May I first of all just acknowledge Grant Bamfield. Grant, thank you very much. Your friendly, smiley face has always been very important. I am sure you will have to go home now and do some of the domestic chores you have been avoiding.

Like anything, as you have said, all good things come to an end, and there is time for change. It is time for change for the Judicature Act 1908 with this bill. It is time to renew the Act. As the bill says, it is about the modernisation of our courts system. I look forward to our time in the Justice and Electoral Committee with this bill—all 1,182 pages of it. But I think more important is the opportunity to hear submissions and to thoroughly debate the critical issues of importance that are here. I do not have the wealth of knowledge or the legal experience, but what I do have is an understanding of the systems. I think that this bill will help to ensure that we have a modern courts system. We had Andrew Bridgman, who is the Secretary for Justice, show us that we have a system that works very well and is futureproofed, as well. I cannot speak for very long—I had wished to—but I commend this bill to the House.

I will take a short call on this first reading of the Judicature Modernisation Bill. Labour supports this bill going to the Justice and Electoral Committee, but can I just point out the irony of a piece of legislation that is 1,182 pages long—here it is; I do not know how much it weighs but it is pretty difficult to carry—that has a part in it, Part 5, devoted to making the courts system electronic, and yet we have a bill that is 1,182 pages long. I have to say that at the select committee it is going to be an interesting process to see just how feasible it actually is for that to occur, particularly in light of this Government’s inability to manage its ultra-fast broadband scheme. If you cannot roll out ultra-fast broadband, which is an extremely important programme—Labour is absolutely committed to fibre—without having a huge debacle, which is what we have ended up with, then how are you going to create a new system that is going to make the courts system run on an electronic system and move it away from a paper-based system?

That is a pretty important point that we need to make, given the current situation where day by day we have seen a new development happening that has seen the value of Chorus halved between this year and last year. We have seen three Ministers embroiled in a debacle that is essentially about a system of fibre that is going to underpin an electronic-based system for our judicial system—well, supposedly going to—and we have seen the threat to legislate to overrule Commerce Commission decisions. We have seen that taken off the table. And then we have seen a report commissioned by a financial company that is then given a verbal report that is now used as the basis to go in to do a renegotiation. This is just going from one debacle to another debacle.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! We are not talking about that.

It is a very big bill. It is a very big bill, and it is a very big debacle. Certainly, there will be select committee discussion on Part 5 of this bill, which comprises the provisions where the documents used in the courts system are going to be transferred to an electronic system, which is ultimately about bringing the courts system into modern times and cutting down on waste. That is what this bill is intending to do. It is a pretty significant part of the bill. It has a whole part devoted to it. This is a huge irony and I think it is important that we acknowledge that and that the select committee looks very closely at the Government’s ability to actually deliver on what it says it is going to do.

Can I first take this opportunity to wish Grant Bamfield all the very best for his retirement. Some may not know that Grant used to be a scratch golfer. So, Grant, happy golfing and happy retirement. Who knows; maybe I will come and get some golfing lessons in my own retirement.

In terms of the first reading of the Judicature Modernisation Bill, I think this bill is exciting stuff. I used to be a lawyer, for 26 years, and to be given the opportunity to not only speak on this bill, albeit briefly, but actually be part of the Justice and Electoral Committee, which is going to be scrutinising it, I think is a fantastic opportunity to look at modernising our court systems to bring justice up to the 21st century. I will look forward to reading this bill over the next wee while, and I will certainly look forward to the submissions and the scrutiny of the select committee. I have listened to the speeches. I have heard the Attorney-General raise references to clauses 93, 161, and 162. They will get special scrutiny. I hope that at the end of this process, an apolitical process, we really will have a suite of justice bills that as a House we can be particularly proud of. I commend this bill to the House.

Bill read a first time.

Bill referred to the Justice and Electoral Committee.