Courts Matters Bill, Tribunals Powers and Procedures Legislation Bill

When we were last debating this, Golriz Ghahraman had the floor, and she has 4 minutes remaining to speak should she wish to do so. Apparently, she does not. So I call Simeon Brown.

Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a very short call on the Courts Matters Bill and Tribunals Powers and Procedures Legislation Bill, which we were debating a short while ago in this House. National supports these bills through their second reading, and I just want to touch on a few of the elements of these bills. They are cognate bills, as we know, which we will be supporting. One of the key purposes that they do is they amend the Court Security Act 1999, and some of the key things that they do there is they extend the powers of court security officers to deny entry, to remove and detain people who possess illegal drugs or who act threateningly or abusively or who commit minor crimes on court premises.

I think this is an important part of these pieces of legislation, because it gives some clarity and it gives some particular powers to court security officers to exercise those powers when they are in the court, and it allows them to have the discretion not only when the court is in hearing but even when they’re not directed to take action against people who may come into the courts with different paraphernalia or with drugs, and to ensure that those matters are dealt with appropriately and quickly. It also just changes the definition of the court and clarifies what the court is and where they are able to exercise those powers.

I think these changes are important to ensure that we can allow the process of justice to run smoothly and for the courts to be respected and the role that they play in our society to be respected. So I think those changes, while small and technical, will make a big difference to ensure that they make a big difference to the way our courts operate. So I’m not going to spend much longer on these pieces of legislation. They do change a large number of other pieces of legislation. I understand one of my other colleagues will be touching on other changes that this legislation does make, and I commend these bills to the House. Thank you.

The Courts Matters Bill and the Tribunals Powers and Procedures Legislation Bill are deemed to be cognate bills due to their closely related nature, and as such they are treated as a single bill throughout the parliamentary process. The bills were referred to the Justice and Electoral Committee in the 51st Parliament, were reinstated in this the 52nd Parliament, and were referred to the Justice Committee in November 2017. The Justice Committee received and considered 16 submissions from interested groups and individuals on the Courts Matters Bill, and received and considered 34 submissions on the Tribunals Powers and Procedures Legislation Bill.

The purpose of the bills is to seek to contribute to modern, efficient, and effective court and tribunal systems. Matters concerning the general public, I believe, are largely in relation to the time frames for hearing and resolving matters. So this bill seeks to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and timeliness by simplifying and standardising statutory powers and procedures. I thank the officials and advisers for their hard work. They worked tirelessly to get the matters addressed. These bills are largely technically driven and, if I may say so, sometimes can be dry and tedious, but these matters, although minor, are very important. For instance, clause 6 would extend the definition of “court” to include any part of the building being used for services related to the courts, including the footpath between the building and the road, and therefore enable court security officers to deal with disruptive instances that continue on outside the court.

Other changes include changes to fines enforcement and criminal court procedures. This is particularly important as we are reversing the order of the two judicial inquiries, the fitness hearing and the involvement hearing, under the Criminal Procedure (Mentally Impaired Persons) Act 2003 so that victims and witnesses would not have to give evidence twice.

The most interesting part of the Tribunals Powers and Procedures Legislation Bill is probably in relation to the Human Rights Review Tribunal, and the submissions from its chair, Mr Rodger Haines QC, are very convincing. I thank Mr Haines for his contributions. Due to what Mr Haines described as artificial restrictions in the Human Rights Act 1993, a significant case backlog has developed over the past years. To illustrate the backlog and the frustration it has generated, we can simply have a look at the Stuff reports that people fighting for their human rights face a “beyond acceptable” wait of more than two or three years for justice after politicians and officials ignored repeated pleas for a law change to help clear the backlog. As Mr Rodger Haines said in his submission, for the past three or four years the workload of—now—five full-time decision makers has been carried by one person, namely the chairperson himself. Inevitably, a backlog of serious proportion is increasing year by year, and for most parties the tribunal has ceased to function. That sort of a backlog and other issues have been ignored over the last 3 or 4 years, and under this bill we will introduce the necessary amendments to clear the backlog. Thank you.

I rise to speak on the Courts Matters Bill and the Tribunals Powers and Procedures Legislation Bill, which National supports. I want to speak particularly, in my contribution, about the Tribunal Powers and Procedures Legislation Bill, which forms part of this bill. Of course, the purpose of the legislation we are discussing today is to modernise and bring our courts up to speed with the 21st century, and tribunal processes, of course, are a very important part of how justice is served in our community, and improving their consistency and transparency and their efficiency is a very important part of how we ensure that people trying to access justice processes are able to do so in a timely manner.

The proposed changes should be commended because they will reduce the time that it takes to hear and resolve matters. They will ensure that tribunals can have more consistency in the way that they operate. In particular, it ensures that tribunals can continue to be the first option for the timely and specialist decision-making on particular matters of importance that can be required, and affirm the role of tribunals in providing a dispute resolution system that exists outside the court system.

It’s important that the bill simplifies and standardises the statutory powers, because what that means in practice is that for people who are party to a dispute, there is a clearer process to follow, they can put the matter behind them sooner, and they can get on with their lives sooner, which in the end is the purpose that we want justice to serve—it allows people to go on with their lives and to make good contributions to our community.

The bill improves some tribunals’ scope to hear cases, making them more accessible for dispute resolution, and in doing so it provides better consumer protection and redress. There are 21 tribunals that have legislation applying to them. Most of them were created on a case by case basis, so there’s currently a wide range of variance in their powers. Standardising provisions around the summoning of witnesses, the awarding of costs where a person has obstructed or unreasonably delayed proceedings, and standardising the processes around contempt so that disruptive people can be more easily removed from a hearing are all things that will allow tribunals to act more effectively. There are also updates, of course, to financial thresholds, and then there is a simplification removing the Birdlings Flat Land Titles Commissioner, which is not required any more, the Health Boards of Appeal, and the Maritime Appeal Authority.

All of these things are about updating and modernising our law so that it can operate well for people. A particular example, of course, can be found in Subpart 7 of Part 1, where there are specific efforts taken to reduce the workload of the Human Rights Review Tribunal, which, I’m sure members of this House would all be in agreement that it is a very important tribunal in terms of the role it plays in our justice system. This change specifically enables the appointment of one or more deputy chairpersons; authorises the returning of claims back to the Human Rights Commission for further work; allows for a joint hearing by chairpersons and deputy chairpersons for training purposes so that they can be part of learning how that tribunal works and can therefore be better prepared for the future; and, of course, allows for more efficiency by allowing a chairperson or deputy chairperson to consider alone, as opposed to part of a panel, matters that are coming before that tribunal.

In essence, National supports this bill because we see it as an important part of modernising legislation to bring courts and tribunals up to speed with the 21st century, improving consistency and transparency and efficiency to better reflect the needs of today, and ensuring that New Zealanders are better able to access justice and have it served to them in a more efficient manner. Thank you.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on the Courts Matters Bill and the Tribunals Powers and Procedures Legislation Bill. It’s really good to see that these two bills been put together as they are largely relating to the same areas in terms of trying to make our court system a modern and effective court and tribunal system.

There are two key areas that these bills are addressing. Firstly, it’s the time it takes to proceed through any tribunal or court process. There are still very long waiting times for people experiencing that, and so it is good to see that these bills are endeavouring to ensure that the system is running as fluidly as possible.

Secondly, these bills address security within courts and in tribunals. There have been a number of cases over recent years of either judges or juries or others within the courts having their security threatened, and so helping people feel safer within the courts and tribunal system is important. So overall, what these bills are endeavouring to do is not only improve the fluidity of our court system but also improve people’s experiences of the court system itself.

In the Justice Committee we received 16 submissions on the Courts Matters Bill and 34 submissions on the Tribunals Powers and Procedures Legislation Bill, and they were from a range of different areas, including the judiciary, private people, interest groups, and professional organisations. Before winding up, I’d like to briefly say thank you to officials who undertook a huge amount of work on these two bills. If you pick one of the bills up from the Table you will see that there is a substantive amount of work, and while they don’t look overly exciting, it is a large job indeed to make sure all the parts are aligned and that they are working effectively and work well together.

The last point that I will touch on is the key change that has been brought about to the Human Rights Review Tribunal, which has already briefly been mentioned. There’s been a significant backlog that has developed over the years. In fact, as of June, 135 active cases were in front of the Human Rights Review Tribunal. Previously, the last Government appointed a second chairperson for a period of 12 months to help with that backlog, but that was insufficient to address it. Of course, as we all know, justice delayed is in fact justice denied, so this bill takes the good action of the ability of having two more deputy chairs who have the same and equal power as the chairperson, who can conduct hearings simultaneously in order to work through that large backlog that has accrued over the years.

So that’s great to see and I am really happy to see all of the work and all of the submissions come together and to bring these two bills to the second reading point. I would like to commend both these bills to the House.

I call Chris Bishop. [Interruption]

Thanks very much.

💬 Hon Members: Oh!

What’s with the groans? Goodness me! I’m very pleased to take a call on this important bill—well, these two bills, actually, I should say. These bills were introduced in the last Parliament by the last Government, and it’s pleasing to see—

💬 Nicola Willis: Very good Government it was.

Very good Government it was; that’s exactly right, Nicola Willis. And it’s pleasing to see that the current Government is continuing with them.

Look, it’s really important with bills like this that there is a bit of cross-party support, because we all want an efficient and effective justice system. The last Government spent quite a bit of time going through, actually, some of the fundamental provisions that govern the way our court system works. We had the judicature modernisation legislation that went through. I remember considering that. That was the outcome of an extraordinary amount of work done by various Ministers—and also officials, we should acknowledge. This bill is not quite as big as the judicature modernisation project, but it is in the same vein of bills to tidy up and improve the operation of the courts.

I’ve been listening to the debate in my office, and members have been canvassing some of the important provisions that the bills have introduced. I just want to quickly mention one in my time in the House, and that’s the disputes tribunal monetary limit, which is updating that financial threshold from $15,000 to $30,000, which, you know, is basically a very small provision in one bill but is actually a really important provision because it is a doubling of the threshold. Over time, as inflation, essentially, increases the price of goods, you do need the law to keep pace with the increase in the price of goods so that things can come within the disputes tribunal. But it’s also a recognition that those lower-level non—well, it is adversarial in the sense that it’s a dispute, but the tribunals have a simple process that are easy for people to access, and that are not particularly costly in comparison to a traditional court process. It is really important that people can access things like the disputes tribunal, and I think the increase to $30,000 will see more people using tribunals, and that will ultimately be to the betterment of the disputes that the disputes tribunal deals with, which is actually an amazing number of disputes, and we are world leading in our provision of low-cost, simple access to justice for people, and the disputes tribunal is a big part of that.

I think, personally, there’s a case for allowing Cabinet or the Executive Council to move that monetary limit through regulation rather than having to legislate often to increase the limit. It’s not in this bill; maybe we’ll see it in another bill. I personally think that would be quite a good idea. It seems a bit silly that you have to go back and legislate the monetary amounts, but that’s just me.

Look, these are good bills. They have been through the Justice Committee. I had the pleasure of serving on that committee in the last Parliament but also this Parliament as well. We have considered the bills thoroughly and diligently. Just in closing, I do want to pay tribute to the officials from the Ministry of Justice who have worked on these bills. They are very large bills. They make a large number of very minor and very technical amendments. Officials have spent a lot of time on them. This has been the outcome of a multi-year process, and so to the Ministry of Justice officials, who I’m sure are watching with bated breath to see whether or not the bills pass, I just want to acknowledge the hard work that they’ve done on them. Thanks.

Bills read a second time.

The House adjourned at 10.57 a.m. (Wednesday)