Lawyers and Conveyancers (Employed Lawyers Providing Free Legal Services) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Lawyers and Conveyancers (Employed Lawyers Providing Free Legal Services) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

Just to give members the brief background to this, this was a bill introduced in the last Parliament and it was sent—I’m pretty sure I’m right in saying—to the Justice Committee where it’s been being considered for quite some time.

The genesis of this bill came from a New Zealand LawTalk article that I was reading—this is slightly embarrassing, but I’ll say it anyway—over summer on holiday in Mexico, three years ago, on the beach in Tulum. It was an article written by a lawyer who had been proposing to the New Zealand Law Society the liberalisation of the rules made pursuant to the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act around employed lawyers doing pro bono—free—legal work and I thought, “Well, that’s a good member’s bill, because the law does not make any sense at the moment.” As he pointed out in the article, the law is frequently breached without people actually knowing about it, without sanction—but we should still change laws even if things aren’t enforced. It actually does have the effect of stopping people from doing real legal work that would make a difference for people who are in need of access to justice in the community. So the bill was, I think, unanimously supported at first reading, sent to the committee, and has been considered since.

It looks unlikely that the bill will proceed beyond this point, which I think is regrettable, unless the Labour Party has had a somewhat different view—the whip is shaking her head so, no, it looks like the bill is going to fail, well that’s a shame. This is a genuine opportunity to improve the law, it really is, and it is disappointing that we’re not going to make any progress on it.

I suppose the first point I want to make is: the law, as it currently stands disenfranchises employed lawyers from doing pro bono legal work and that has the effect, to quote the Community Law Centres of Aotearoa Inc., “That disenfranchises 8,000 lawyers from participating in pro bono work through Community Law’s pro bono clearing house.” So just so we’re really clear what we’re doing: this bill will allow 8,000 employed lawyers to do pro bono legal work through Community Law’s pro bono clearing house, Te Ara Ture, which we talked about a lot at the committee. They are currently explicitly prevented from doing that work. As Community Law told us, there are lots of lawyers who want to do that work. This bill will fix that and it looks like we’re not going to proceed with it. I think that is a real shame.

The bill—let’s be very clear—will enfranchise employed lawyers, 8,000 or so, and provide greater access to justice for many people. The law at the moment stops employed lawyers from doing free legal work outside of their employment. The only exception is through community law centres or Citizens Advice Bureau, but the legal work that Te Ara Ture does through the Community Law Centres of Aotearoa Inc. falls outside that ambit. So we need to change the law to include those lawyers within the ambit of the free legal work.

Now, the current law is widely breached, so let’s be very clear what it means. It means that lawyers employed by Government departments—of which there are, you know, hundreds in Wellington—can’t do legal work for their local tramping club. So if you’re the secretary of your local tramping club, you’ve got change the constitution for a variety of different reasons—members will be able to think of any number of innumerable examples in which people are on boards of trustees, incorporated societies, whatever, the residents’ associations, which are very active in the Wellington - Hutt Valley region. Anyone in need of legal assistance—you could be a Government department, you could be working for a Government department: you can’t do any legal work. You can’t, and I think that’s wrong.

There are some people who turned up to the committee and said, “Well, how do we know that if we liberalise the law, people will do the right work?” Well, in a funny sort of way, the right work is self-defining. The right sort of work is whatever work people decide to do where there is an unmet legal need.

I mean, by definition, if you do legal work for someone pro bono, there is a legal need there by definition. It might not be exactly what members here would want them to do, but there is clearly an unmet legal need if you’re doing work. Not to take the analogy too far, it’s like when willing buyers and sellers in the marketplace engage in a transaction. By definition, that is good, because if it wasn’t good, people wouldn’t make the transaction.

When I go to a dairy and I buy a can of Coke Zero, the dairy owner is saying to me, “I will sell you the Coke for $2.50 or whatever”, and I will buy it, and if I don’t want to buy it, I wouldn’t, and if they don’t want to sell it to me, they wouldn’t. The fact that the dairy owner sells me the can of Coke and I buy it makes us both better off. If it didn’t make us both better off, we wouldn’t do it. And it’s a bit like that with legal need. If I decide as a Government department lawyer to do some legal work for my local tramping club and the tramping club wants me to do it and I do it and they are happy with it, by definition, that makes us both better off.

💬 Mark Cameron: Get a real Coke! Two dollars fifty for a Coke?

What’s that? Mark Cameron’s saying, “Get a real Coke!” Well I don’t know how much they cost down your way, mate. I don’t drink Coke anymore, it’s just an example anyway. I don’t, it’s very bad for you.

💬 Hon Member: They’ll be after you now!

Very bad for you. I’ll have the—Coca-Cola Amatil New Zealand’s going to be writing me correspondence.

Anyway, my point is this: by definition it is legal need that is being met here. So there is a real effect on the legal needs of people. It will improve access to justice. By definition, the bill will improve access to justice, and I’ve already made the point around how the bill disenfranchises 8,000 lawyers from participating in pro bono legal work.

Look, the view of members opposite, I think, is that the bill is not perfect and therefore we should just kick it out. We did have a discussion around some amendments that could have been made to the bill. For example, one of them was—and this was a point of discussion in the committee—requiring it, rather than leaving it optional for the Law Society to make rules for employed lawyers and directing the Law Society as to the matters that they should look at, such as the appropriate level of professional experience and the appropriate limits on practice areas. Those were suggestions made by Community Law to the committee. We could have put that into the bill, but there was, unfortunately, not a lot of interest in doing that.

There were other amendments that could have been made to make the bill a bit tighter because—I don’t want to make perfect the enemy of the good, I was prepared to accept some tightening of the work that people could do in order to advance the bill, because at the end of the day, getting something is better than nothing. But unfortunately, that’s not met with the favour of members opposite.

It is a real shame because at some point Parliament is going to have to come back and revisit this issue, and I just repeat again: the current law is widely breached and nonsensical, and other countries have recognised this. We are way out of step with other countries. The law does not allow people who are employed lawyers rather than lawyers in a law firm, but employed lawyers—people who work for a Government department or people who work for a corporate, like Contact Energy, for example, or Genesis Energy, whatever, the law does not allow those people to do legal work outside of their employment and pro bono legal work outside of their employment.

As Te Ara Ture has pointed out, that means 8,000 lawyers cannot participate in pro bono legal work through that through the pro bono clearing house that Te Ara Ture has specifically established because there is such demand from the profession for people to do pro bono work. So let’s be very clear about that. And if you go to the Te Ara Ture website, it has a checklist for if you can participate in pro bono legal work. You’ve got to tick off the various things and then right down the bottom, it says: “Unfortunately, if you are an employed lawyer, you cannot currently do this.” I think I think I’m right in paraphrasing—it says something like, “Regulatory steps to improve this are underway.” Well, this is the regulatory step; that’s the bill that I introduced to Parliament that is now going to fail.

So I’ll make a prediction: at some point the law will be fixed and it will just come later than it otherwise would have. We could use this bill as a vehicle to improve the situation. Members opposite, unfortunately aren’t interested in that. It’s a real shame. So with that, I regrettably, and I proudly commend the bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. That was a good potted history of the bill, but here’s my version. It’s a bit different.

So we had a good go. It is a reasonable intent in this bill to provide increased access to legal services in New Zealand, and we know that there is a need there. So I would like to make it clear that the Justice Committee had a number of attempts of trying to amend this bill in order for the areas that it was deficient in for it to be met. Really, it came down to submissions from two key submitters, and that was the Law Society and also the Law Commission—both were very important. We went to such detail to try and get this right that we actually called them back. I think they were called back twice—and maybe even a third time for the Law Society—to seek additional information. So I would like to thank both Community Law and the Law Society for the time and the effort they put in to try and make this work.

So in a nutshell, we needed to be making sure that that there were a number of measures in place for supervision. So if you’ve got a lawyer who’s providing pro bono or free legal services, there still is a requirement for supervision, because what we wouldn’t want to happen is for someone who is getting a free legal services getting a lower standard of legal advice. To make sure that that was working, it’s a requirement for the Law Society to provide a level of supervision, and potentially even insurance—that’s another side issue.

So what the Law Society told us is that if the bill was to continue in its current form without any policy analysis, there could be a real risk of channelling free legal services away from those who needed them the most. They were supportive of the bill’s intent of access to justice, but the real need was for further policy analysis to understand how that, in fact, would play out.

So at a minimum, the Law Society said—at a minimum—it would like to see the bill amended to assure that actual unmet legal needs are addressed, and it proposed doing this through the inclusion of a more narrow definition of “pro bono”. So the member in charge of the bill, Chris Bishop, took that away and made amendments to the bill—I think that was once—in order to try and get it. So we looked at that again. Then after additional advice that we received from Community Law, which I will go over in a while, the member sought to widen the scope of the bill, because at this stage, once we’d identified some of the issues around providing free legal services, the form of the bill was actually quite different to the one that the committee initially received.

So because of the additional policy work, the understanding of the costs and the requirements placed on organisations like Community Law and also the Law Society, we need to do all of that work before we pass a bill. It’s important to know what those implications are exactly. So it’s for these reasons that the committee regrettably cannot support a bill which has a good intent, which has a good idea at its heart, but how that’s executed and how that is delivered has not been fully thought through and has not been fully considered—the impact and the implementation costs are unclear.

This sentiment was echoed by a number of submitters. While the majority supported the purpose of the bill, there were mixed views on the best way to improve access to free legal services. One of the interesting points that was made is that if you just enable lawyers to do some work that’s pro bono—how you define that. It’s difficult to find out whether it’s meeting that unmet legal need. The member in charge of the bill who just spoke gave the example of, I think, a Scouts club or a tramping club, which is great, and there might be the opera society down the road who needs some free legal work done, and a local lawyer would be able to do that. But the point made by the Law Society was that how can we be sure that by enabling pro bono services to be made available, that this will actually be directed to the unmet legal need? That’s where the problem came, that the solution that the member was proposing to the identified problem wasn’t necessarily connecting in the right places.

So the important part to note is also to look at the work that Community Law put in, in terms of their submission. They recommended that the bill be amended to formally place pro bono legal services provided by employed lawyers into the remit of Te Ara Ture. Now, Te Ara Ture is a new online tool that enables lawyers to provide advice online. Essentially, by placing Te Ara Ture in a similar regulatory level as community law centres, it could employ lawyers to hold indemnity insurance, and it could also provide supervision to employed lawyers who provide free legal services. So this is a really good idea that we should be taking a greater look at. It provides an opportunity to increase access to justice and also to meet those unmet needs.

Community Law also told us that the solution to the issue would ensure that any additional pro bono resources could be allocated to access justice, and it told us that this would also increase the options for employed lawyers to do pro bono work. So this seems like a better pathway to take.

Community Law told us that this solution would require an additional Government funding of approximately $300,000. It noted, however, though, that the funding from Government would reduce the financial responsibility on the legal profession. So really interesting to see both of those different ways being applied. Of course, if the Law Society was required to be the supervising body, then that would incur a cost on lawyers, no doubt, as a way of sourcing that funding for administering it.

So the majority of us considered that although there was a clear problem with access to justice as it has been identified, the bill was not the appropriate way to adequately plug this gap. After quite a good amount of sessions of debate on the bill, we considered two potential means of tackling the issue. Those are the ones that have been laid out from both the Law Society and also the Law Commission.

Using the clearing house approach through Te Ara Ture I think has real merit and I’d be interested to see further work done in that space, and also costing of how that would work out. I think that having free legal services provided by employed lawyers through a clearing house supported by Community Law is an idea with real merit. But I would point out that that is a very different solution to the problem than the original member’s bill that the committee received. If we could enable free legal services to be provided by employed lawyers through a clearing house, that is a good idea, and it would be one that would address the unmet legal need.

I would like to acknowledge the member in charge of the bill, who did a significant amount of work—not only just listening to the issues that submitters provided but engaging with those issues and trying to resolve them in a way that enabled the bill to proceed. I think that it’s important to note that there was support right across the committee on the problem of improving access to justice. That is an important fact.

I would like to note that in Budget 2020, Community Law has received an additional $7.7 million worth of funding over the past year—funding that I would like to note was completely cut under the previous National Government. National froze the core funding of these centres when they were in Government, leaving them to struggle, so it’s nice that we’re looking for solutions now. So after coming initially into Government, there was a 20 percent increase for Community Law in the 2018 and 2019 Budget, and then, as I mentioned, the subsequent injection, which is a funding of $8.72 million over the following four years. So that is to provide new case management across the country in 24 new community law centres, and also the establishment of Te Ara Ture as well.

So this is a good bill in principle, but the work needed to be done on the changed bill that we came to needs to be done before we can step forward and make changes to the way pro bono legal services work currently. So we will not be supporting the bill further.

Well, I’m afraid to say that was 10 minutes trying to justify the unjustifiable. We had Ginny Andersen explaining why the Labour Party is not supporting this bill, the Lawyers and Conveyancers (Employed Lawyers Providing Free Legal Services) Amendment Bill, which does something that, I think, most New Zealanders would say makes sense, which is to allow lawyers and conveyancers currently barred from offering pro-bono legal services because they are an employee, and opens that up so that they can provide community law. This has been put together by—an excellent bill—my colleague Chris Bishop, and the Labour Party is opposing it purely and simply because they don’t want to give Chris Bishop a win, and that’s what it all boils down to. They don’t want to allow a National MP to do something useful in this Parliament and pass a piece of legislation that will make the lives of New Zealanders better. So she spent 10 minutes trying to come up with all sorts of waffle to explain why they are opposed to this; none of it made any sense, and it was quite embarrassing to watch. I just hope that they’ll get a chance to reflect on that.

So what we’re trying to achieve here with this bill—and most people would be flummoxed that this is the case, but you know, there’s plenty of lawyers across this country, many work in law firms, of course, and many don’t work in law firms. Many are in-house lawyers for Government departments or companies, corporates right across the nation. Currently, under the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act, they are guilty of misconduct if they provide free legal services to the public outside of their employment, with only the exception of doing it through community law centres or Citizens Advice Bureau. So what that means in practice is if, you know, you’re the in-house lawyer for Fletcher Building or something like that, but you’re also a member of the local tramping club—is an example that Chris Bishop uses—but, you know, you could be active in the local church or synagogue or something like that, and a legal issue comes up, and they don’t want to go engaging Russell McVeagh to deal with it, but they just want some advice, you’re there, you could give some advice. You can’t do it at the moment. You know, look, there’s some history behind that. But this bill is trying to open this up and free, what, 8,000 lawyers in this situation across the country, in order for them to be able to do pro-bono work. All sorts of people come up with all sorts of reasons why this would be difficult, but none of them are very robust. What it could do is to provide better access to justice for the many community groups across the country.

And what do we got? We’ve got a Labour Party opposing it for no good reason. I just think they should reflect on that. It’s quite disgraceful really, given the opportunity that we’ve had through the select committee to make some changes, if required. No bill that’s introduced into this House is ever perfect, and the select committee process is the opportunity for laws to be improved. But then to go through that process and say “Oh, yes, there is an issue here, but we should probably do a bit more work on it down the line, and let’s think about it and carry on.”, is a very insulting way to handle the situation.

The other thing I would say is, you know, speaking more broadly, I think there are a couple of key issues in the justice sector. Of course, there’s the rise in violent crime and the doubling of violent crime, which is a massive issue, and increasing gun crime in Auckland, and the sense of lawlessness. That’s a number one justice issue that needs to be dealt with. The 50 percent increase in gangs in New Zealand. Sadly, there hasn’t been much focus by this Government on that, and that’s a real shame, and something that is of concern to many New Zealanders.

The second issue is around this access to justice. Now, part of that is the dysfunction in the court system, which is taking so long for people to get trials heard and justice delivered. But related to that is the affordability of access to justice. That’s why there are some real issues around the legal aid situation at the moment. Legal spending on legal aid has gone up by 70 percent since this Government took office. We’re spending about $230 million a year on legal aid; huge sums. And yet, the whole system is still gunged up and delivering no more, in terms of outcomes, than it was many years before. Actually, less work is actually going through the system because of the gunged up nature of our court system. And so, you know, getting access to legal advice and justice is a colossal issue that you would think that the Government would be focused on. Now, when you look at the priorities of this Government in the justice area, well, you see that they’re not very focused on those issues of the rise of violent crime and access to justice. They’re more interested in: the next things coming up is hate speech, banning that; dealing with screwing the scrum on electoral finance; cancelling three strikes; and, a whole lot of things all related to ill-thought through promises sometimes in Labour manifestos, and other variety of issues that are of particular interest to Labour Party activists and not necessarily middle New Zealand.

So the point I’d make in relation to that, is you would think that there would be a focus in the mind of the Minister of Justice and of the Government at the moment to do everything that they can to increase the accessibility of justice and legal advice to New Zealanders. This bill was one step in that direction, which is to say, we’ve got 8,000 lawyers across the country, they’re working as in-house lawyers in firms and companies and Government departments who could, on the weekends or in the evening, from time to time, offer some free legal advice to the community groups and clubs and places of interest, local schools maybe—I don’t know—that may be useful. Currently, they’re stopped from doing that in a very arbitrary way.

This bill was set out to rectify that, and it has faced the great clunking fist of the Labour caucus, which, I think, for rather mean-spirited partisan reasons have decided to oppose this. That, to my mind, is a great tragedy. I’m sure many of those 8,000 lawyers out there working away in their Government departments or at their firms right now, who have found this a frustrating bar on their ability to help might have been looking, with hope, towards this House this morning, and, instead, will be filled with frustration, and questioning why on earth would Labour be opposed to this bill. We didn’t hear much from Ginny Andersen on the topic, but I’m sure some of the subsequent speakers might like to come up with some slightly better reasons than put forward so far. Thank you.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to stand and take a call on the Lawyers and Conveyancers (Employed Lawyers Providing Free Legal Services) Amendment Bill. I was, and am, a member of the Justice Committee, so I had the opportunity to hear from submitters and also to hear from Mr Bishop, who brought the bill to us. I won’t be supporting the bill to progress today, and I’ll outline the reasons why, but I did want to first commend Mr Bishop for the spirit in which he engaged with the committee. As a member of the committee, I can tell you we worked sincerely on the bill, and did recognise that there were underlying themes of access to justice which it contained. But the issues here are complex and weren’t able to be resolvable within this bill.

I just wanted to reflect on a few comments Mr Bishop made in his submission today. He talked about—I think he recognised that the bill itself wasn’t in a perfect state. But then he said, “It’s better to get something than nothing.” Now, that might be the case if you’re thirsty and heading down to the dairy to get a drink of something, but if you’re drafting legislation—particularly in an area like this—you need to take the time to ensure that it’s fit for purpose. The other issue I had with Mr Bishop’s statement is that he failed to define the problem statement as it is. He said that 8,000 lawyers were disenfranchised and couldn’t offer those services freely to communities—that is simply not the case. Community law centres currently have an exemption under the Act, so if an employed lawyer wished to do so at any stage, under the supervision of a community law centre, they could provide those voluntary services.

Mr Goldsmith, I was—yeah, expressed that he was perplexed about the current legislative scheme, but the reason why some lawyers are able to provide those services is because there’s regulation around exactly who can do it, to ensure that an appropriate skill level is in place. This is really about ensuring we protect consumers, because at present the Act doesn’t distinguish between services that are paid for and services that are given for free. There is a very valid reason, and I would recommend to the member that he reviews the rules under which lawyers practice.

But I want to talk about the big reason that, to my mind, the bill wasn’t fit for purpose, and why we need to do further, more robust, work in this area. That is that my sense was that there was an underlying access to justice theme, an underlying unmet legal needs theme, but it was never the principal purpose of this bill to meet true unmet legal needs. I want to spend some time talking about what that is.

I spent almost a decade working in the community justice space, for Youth Law Aotearoa, and it’s part of the movement that is truly about addressing that access to justice gap. We had volunteer lawyers, volunteer law students, who would come and work on those cases where individuals otherwise couldn’t access legal help. That is the key part of the definition. It was also a period of time where access to justice was acutely vulnerable because the National Government froze our core funding for these centres, and it really left us—at the time—to struggle. For me, as a general manager of Youth Law, we moved premises, in part so I could retain the total staff cohort. For many staff, who stayed because they were passionate about access to justice—true access to justice—it meant stagnant wages for almost a decade. After this Government came into power, we lifted that community law centre funding by 20 percent, initially, and then we made that funding permanent in 2019. As my colleague Ginny Andersen mentioned, in 2020 we supported community law centres with an extra $7.7 million over four years of boosted funding to do a number of things: establish a new case management system across the 24 law centres, also the establishment of Te Ara Ture, the pro bono clearing house that we’ve heard about, and finally—an important point—better wages so that community law centres can recruit and retain staff, and reward those many, many staff who stayed on those static wages over that 10 year period.

Following the Budget in 2020, the Government has announced a further $3.5 million over three years, and that’s an injection announced in August last year to help meet the increased needs that COVID has prevented as well. That investment into pro bono law in particular, the bridge to law, has showed our commitment to investing in access to justice. Yes, there absolutely will need to be next steps, but they’re not next steps that this bill has set out clearly. We were missing several things as we tried to nut through the bill at select committee stage. What we quickly got our heads around was that there was an un-appreciation of the gaps in access to justice more broadly, and where we ought to be directing limited capacity to address the most significant needs. I think you heard that in Mr Bishop’s speech tonight, that he just—still—hasn’t quite got his head around the fact that that is the core principle of addressing access to justice needs. There was a failure, when the bill came to us, to look at how other jurisdictions approach this—including Australia, who have some very useful points to reflect on in terms of the definition of pro bono, for example. There was little thought about the need for regulation, and the protection for the consumer. But when there was thought, through our discussions, I think there wasn’t quite the appreciation that the member had about what that would take, the work it would mean for the Law Society, the implications for lawyers themselves, as well, in terms of costs that are passed on. So I want to speak a bit about that.

The Law Commission made a submission to us where they talked about the need to establish new processes and new rules, and the way in which they communicated that to us was that it would be an extremely robust exercise, and so much so that the time lines they gave us were extremely broad. They also spoke to us about passing on additional costs to lawyers themselves, so increasing the levy. On those two points I would just say, while the member might think those are easy decisions to make, they’re not. There are serious consequences of how the legal profession might receive that, there are things to think through about whether we want the Law Society to regulate, in detail, in the rules, or whether that more appropriately sits with Parliament, whether we should be regulating for that within a bill itself. Finally, they talked about a balance needing to be struck between having necessary protections in place, but not overly burdening the Law Society with administrative burdens as well.

I’d also speak to the fact that the definition of pro bono wasn’t contained within the bill that the member brought to us. Now, again, for me this is foundational in terms of determining how we’re meeting that access to justice gap. If you look at comparable jurisdictions, for example in Australia, they’re very clear that you ought to be considering factors of access to justice, so whether or not people can afford legal services is one of the criteria you look at. Whether it’s a charity or a not-for-profit institution might be another. But that definition needs to sit soundly within any reform in this area, and in this bill the question of whether we could include that was deemed out of scope. Robust work needs to be done in the access to justice space, and this Government is a Government who demonstrated that we have a commitment to access to justice, and we will continue to going forward. I do not commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora, I stand on behalf of my colleague Golriz Ghahraman, to stand in support of this bill. We support—absolutely—volunteer effort and, in terms of access to justice and in the degree to which the Government has any sense of the unmet needs out there, I would dispute that they do. It is an extremely racist justice system that we have. Many Māori; Pasifika; many, many lower-income people struggle to get the advice they need. When we have a system where young Māori are routinely told “Just plead guilty and you’ll get a better sentence” by the people who are actually given to them as legal aid, we’ve got some really basic core issues happening here. So if they have access to someone in their family, in their community that they could go and just have a quick word to, we think that’s a really good idea.

We hear the points about supervision and systems where we would be fine to look at whatever the Law Society thought would be good to do. We have problems with the thought that an employer, at one time, can control the productivity, the skills, the knowledge, and the experience of the employees outside of that workplace, and that somehow the supervision they receive whilst inside that workplace somehow ceases to exist when they leave it. We don’t think that is accurate.

Many lawyers, I imagine—they certainly are in my family—are under pressure all the time to provide advice, and we want to give support to them to do that well, to do that properly. I certainly agree that that’s not going to stop. I have fully bailed up my cousin, who’s an expert in family law; I have fully bailed up my mate, who’s now a flash judge, and so, since I became an MP, was much more careful about that. But that happens everywhere. That absolutely happens in this country, and the fact that it’s illegal is very odd to us.

We support people using their skills to benefit their communities and their families as other people in most other, and probably every other, workplace can do. And so with those short words, we commend this bill to the House. Kia ora.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. You know, I think on the whole, as has been mentioned earlier today, members’ day is a day that demonstrates that Parliament works together where it can. This is a good example of that. There were reservations about this bill expressed by this side of the House when it was introduced, and they were articulated in the contributions from my colleagues at the time. But we did indicate that we supported and understood the intent of the bill and that we would support it at first reading to get it to select committee, to thrash it out a wee bit more. There are other examples that come to mind. I see members on the other side of the House who have come to this and had their member’s bill drawn from the ballot. Again, we wanted to get that to select committee to see if we could address the concerns that we’ve got and maybe look to improve it. I think, on the whole, unless there’s a fundamental opposition to what’s being proposed, you should always look to do that.

I look at my friend and colleague Todd Muller there, who’s had a couple of bills up: one around cooperatives and one around sunscreen. The cooperatives is one example where we went to select committee, tried to thrash it out, and unfortunately, despite appreciating the intent and appreciating the expertise of the member, couldn’t quite get it there. Then the sunscreen one is a good example where, again, we wanted to thrash it out and now we are supporting it. I think of an example of a bill from Ian McKelvie that came, and once we—

💬 Todd Muller: Point of order, Madam Speaker. Oh, look, I just wanted to correct the speaker. I didn’t want to stop him in full flow. He tends to be almost engaging when he starts becoming at full flow. But his reference to the cooperatives bill not achieving the support of the House is actually incorrect. It passed with unanimous support after a third reading, and indeed, Mr McAnulty was a key part of ensuring that eventually the Labour Party saw sense in what was being discussed.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Thank you. I call on Kieran McAnulty to continue his very good speech.

Thank you very much, and I see that Mr Muller fell for my trap and he corrected the record and gave me praise—so thank you for that. Got him in one. So as I was saying, this House cooperates whenever it has the opportunity to do so. I was giving the example, which is relevant to this one because I think it’s important to point out that wherever possible, political parties do actually work together a select committee.

One good example of that was Mr McKelvie’s bill around making the rustling of livestock a crime. It was unfortunate that it was just the way in which the bill was drafted, and the member conceded this himself. I worked really closely with him and went to the Minister and said, “We’ve been advised that this is out of scope in what it intends to do, and we can’t do it. Perhaps we might be able to include it in some of the Government’s work, to actually achieve it.” The Minister agreed and we actually got there. So the reason I’m bringing this up is I genuinely believe that again, unless there is a fundamental opposition to what’s being proposed, for members’ bills, there will be effort put in to get it across the line.

For Lawyers and Conveyancers (Employed Lawyers Providing Free Legal Services) Amendment Bill that was the intent: express some concern, we voted for it at first reading to get it to select committee, and as the chair of that select committee has demonstrated time and time again, and most notably with the conversion therapy bill that passed last night, she is a very good chair and wants to ensure that at every step throughout the select committee process, people have their say and those views are considered and where possible, amendments are made. I acknowledge the contribution that she made to this debate because I think she spelt it out very clearly that there was that intent to make it right.

But at the select committee stage, it became clear from submissions from the likes of the Law Society that there were concerns around whether this bill, as it is written, would achieve what it hoped to achieve and what we would like to actually support it to get there. And they couldn’t quite work it through, and that’s a shame, because I think if you look at the Government’s track record over the last four years around supporting access to legal advice and justice—I’m thinking about the support that came to community law centres almost immediately upon getting elected in 2017, we all, I think, recognised the contribution and support that community law centres give to our communities. I just think, at the top of my mind now, the numerous examples that the community law centres in the Wairarapa electorate have given to countless people in the community around guiding them through legal advice and the justice system. We recognised that funding for them was frozen over many years and swiftly provided a 20 percent increase in funding for them. So this isn’t some issue where there is such a fundamental disagreement as to what actually needs to occur. Community law centres were ultimately at the centre of many of the arguments in favour of the intent of this bill. You look at Budget 2020: further support of $7.7 million over four years in a funding boost to community law centres.

But, ultimately, you’ve really got to take into consideration the submissions that are given to select committees when deliberating on a bill. What it came down to was, as has been mentioned by other speakers, the submissions we received indicated that the bill as it was written was not likely to achieve what we had hoped it would and, I think, what the sponsor of the bill hoped it would. You know, it’s no secret in this House that Chris Bishop and I actually get on pretty well. We don’t agree on everything, but we co-captain the parliamentary cricket team with aplomb, I think.

💬 Hon Members: Ha, ha!

Yes, that’s right, and we will defend our honour against the diplomats later this month. But in this instance, we just couldn’t come to an agreement, and that is regrettable. But often, despite that, there’s the opportunity to support a bill even if it doesn’t quite achieve all your objectives. It’s not quite the case here. It’s not a case of achieving all your objectives; it’s a case of achieving the objectives that were set out in the bill when it was introduced, and it’s our genuine and sincere view that it doesn’t. So then we were, essentially, tasked with the proposition of supporting a bill despite agreeing with the intent, when the advice was that it doesn’t actually achieve that. As parliamentarians, you’ve pretty much got to suck it up and say, “Right—well, it doesn’t achieve what it says it’s going to achieve. We don’t believe, therefore, that it’s good law—with the greatest respect to the sponsor, but we don’t, and therefore we can’t support it.”

So my much more learned colleagues have articulated that better than I, but I just wanted to take the opportunity to stand in support of what they were saying, recognise the work that’s gone into it, both from the bill’s sponsor, but all parties that are represented on that committee, and also the officials that helped get to this point, because ultimately, yes, we are here to represent our electorates and the party that brings in list MPs, etc., but we’re also parliamentarians, and at the forefront of our role is to make good legislation. Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that this bill would not achieve what it hoped. We didn’t consider it was worthy of further support, but I think it’s fair to point out that it was given its best shot.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I just want to thank the sponsor of this bill, Chris Bishop, for raising a very important issue that we were keen to engage on in select committee. It is certainly important that access to justice is equitable and anything like this to make it easier on people is probably a good thing.

Nevertheless, the select committee did raise quite a few concerns, particularly with the Law Society submission—others as well—but the practicality of the bill suddenly became less obvious. At the end of the day, when we start to deal with issues like that, and submissions like that, and we see that, as other speakers have said, it doesn’t quite set out to achieve its good intent—and it is a good intent. I think it has given an opportunity, it’s brought the submitters together to actually say there is law change that’s probably needed here—some work for the Government to do perhaps, or another member’s bill, but this probably isn’t it.

I thank the member again. From ACT’s perspective, unfortunately, we have decided to switch and to no longer support this bill. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to talk on the Lawyers and Conveyancers (Employed Lawyers Providing Free Legal Services) Amendment Bill. I’d like to start my contribution by acknowledging Chris Bishop who’s promoted the bill and by saying I think I’m impressed that he took a LawTalk article with him on summer holiday to Mexico. I’ve read many LawTalk articles over the years, but never one in Mexico. I also want to commend Chris Bishop for wanting to act on the article he read in terms of improving access to justice. I think that’s something that all speakers in the House today talked about as being a very important objective.

It is interesting and relevant to this to think first of how lawyers are regulated. Lawyers exist in many different forms. We have lawyers that are in firms, and they will have a partnership or a directorship model, and there’ll be many different layers of lawyers and other staff beneath them. Those firms are very well insured. If it’s a bigger firm they’ll have many different people employed to think about risk training for junior solicitors to bring them up, and there’s a lot of support around people in a firm. Then you also have barristers, and these are people who are court advocates normally, or they might be specialists who write clever opinions on a specialist topic. They work by themselves so they are regulated in quite a different way from the firms, and they generally need instructions from a law firm before they can be engaged. Then you have the in-house lawyers, and these lawyers are what this bill applies to.

We heard from one of the previous speakers that in-house lawyers might be in Government departments. They might be in councils. They might in universities. They might be in agricultural companies. They might be in electricity companies. There is a whole host of in-house lawyers, and we’ve heard that there are 8,000 of them now. Those lawyers are working in quite a different environment from lawyers in a firm. Depending on how big the in-house team is, that lawyer might just be working by themselves and have no other lawyers that they engage with unless they’re talking to a law firm or a barrister. In some circumstances, they’re actually large teams of in-house lawyers, so there is a big range of in-house lawyers. My point is that this bill applies to those in-house lawyers and not ones in firms.

I was, in fact, an in-house lawyer of a sort. I had at least my practising certificate at the beginning of the millennium when I was working for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. After that, I went into a law firm and stayed there, with some maternity leave, for almost two decades. So I have some experience with pro bono advice, training up junior solicitors, and also doing community law work. The mischief that this bill is trying to address is to enable in-house counsel to do this good work. Currently, in the current legislation, it is misconduct to give legal advice out of your employment if you are an in-house lawyer unless, as my colleague Vanushi Walters has discussed in some detail, you are providing that advice at a community law centre. I would say that this is something that many lawyers can take up. I used to attend community law centres and supervise some students there, and I can say I’ve never really practised criminal law or family law, which were the main issues coming before that community law centre.

The bill is very simple really. Clause 6 of the bill inserts a new section into the Lawyers and Conveyances Act. Clause 6, “New section 10A inserted (Lawyer providing legal services to person other than employer” states that “Nothing in this Act prevents a lawyer who is an employee from providing free legal services to a person other than his or her employer if the services are provided—(a) with the agreement of the employer; and (b) in accordance with practice rules made under section 94 by the New Zealand Law Society.”

So that’s it. It’s a very small bill, but despite it being a very small bill it does raise some very big issues. The clue with that is this reference to section 94 which concerns the practice rules made by the New Zealand Law Society. That is because standards apply to lawyers giving advice. Why might they do this? Well, if the lawyer gives bad advice, then that might put someone on a terrible course of action that may cause them harm, cause somebody else harm, and may incur some liability. This is something that you think a lot about as a practising lawyer. There are many client care obligations for lawyers when they’re dealing with a paying client, and also if you’re in a firm giving pro bono advice, those same rules apply.

There is a large burden on firms. They take the giving of pro bono advice very seriously. There’s been some movement since I started as a lawyer in that firms really want to show to the community that they are doing pro bono work, and now they often have a senior partner who decides what the best pro bono work is for that skillset of lawyers to be undertaking, and how they can get the most benefit for society from giving their free advice. As I mentioned, though, they still need to insured. Solicitors who aren’t partners or who can’t practise on their own account still require supervision, and there is a lot of process surrounding it.

Therefore, if in-house lawyers were to be able to do this pro bono work there would need to be some regulation around that to make sure the people who are getting the advice are getting good advice and, particularly, to make sure that those junior lawyers are protected from the consequences of giving bad advice. Alternatively—and this is what the select committee considered as well—rather than having additional regulation, you could have a community law - type clearing house, and this is Te Ara Ture, which we’ve been hearing about, and you could fund that so that in-house lawyers could have a special circuit to come in to give pro bono advice about their specialist areas, and they’d provide security for some of those concerns that I’ve outlined.

I’m not on the Justice Committee but from reading their report they spent a lot of time on the New Zealand Law Society submission, particularly around the process question—what process would you put around those in-house lawyers who are wanting to do this good work? They noted, on page 3 of their submission, at paragraph 2.5 that that would be needed and at paragraph 2.6 that there would need to be additional resourcing to work out what this framework would be. They said, then, at 3.4, “A balance needs to be struck between having necessary protections in place to ensure that professional standards are met, and not creating an overly heavy administrative burden for the Law Society and for employed lawyers (who are not approved to practise on their own account) wishing to undertake pro bono legal services.” They go on at 3.5 to say that the Act and the rules do not currently differentiate between fee-paying and pro bono work. So that is the issue I raised before about why the law firms are so careful when their lawyers are undertaking pro bono work to make sure that those lawyers and the firm are protected from any liability.

The Law Society submission goes on to say that “lawyers’ professional and ethical obligations apply equally to both paid and pro bono legal services. Care needs to be taken to ensure that a legislative framework facilitating the provision of pro bono legal services does not undermine the existing regulatory framework governing the legal profession. This will ensure lawyers are able to meet their ethical and regulatory obligations and consumers receive the regulatory protections provided for under the Act and the Rules.”

So, in conclusion, there does need to be more work to improve access to justice. We’ve heard before that there has been a major increase to community law and that will continue under this Government, I am sure, and I oppose this bill. Thank you.

The next call is a split call. I call on the Hon Mark Mitchell.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m very happy to stand and take a call on this, the Lawyers and Conveyancers (Employed Lawyers Providing Free Legal Services) Amendment Bill. I didn’t sit on the committee. I haven’t sat on this bill. In fact, I wasn’t even in the House for the first reading of this bill, but I had been listening to the debate in the House. I note that Kieran McAnulty got up and took us on a walk down memory lane and was very effusive about the bipartisan approach and the approach across the House of working on these member’s bills. And actually I support that, I agree with that. Louisa Wall is in the House and we were just talking on her bill earlier, and that’s the right thing to do. But in this case, that spirit of cooperation wasn’t embraced. And I’m sorry, I know the speakers are standing up and they’re trying to be authentic and genuine about the way they are approaching this bill, but quite simply, the author of the bill, Chris Bishop, came to the Justice Committee and he said, “I’m happy to look at amendments. I’m happy to look at changes to this bill.” But, unfortunately, the Labour members on the committee would not embrace that. They wouldn’t support it.

The fact of the matter is when we’re living in a country at the moment when you’ve got a massive pressure on people around costs of living and interest rates and things like that, one of the biggest barriers to actually access our criminal justice system and legal advice is cost. Most people can’t afford to go and get legal advice. You’re not talking hundreds of dollars, you’re talking thousands and thousands of dollars, and it’s beyond the reach of most middle New Zealanders. It makes them stop and actually think and reappraise what their approach is and what they can do. There was a golden opportunity here for this House and for the select committee to actually support this bill, to make the changes to it, to make the amendments, to allay the fears of the members opposite. And I acknowledge the last speaker, Rachel Brooking, who’s a lawyer herself; I’m probably very sure—she’s got a strong social conscience—that she’s probably done some pro bono work and, probably, inadvertently, she may have actually broken the law, the way it stands. That’s why this bill was brought to the House, so that those areas could be dealt with. They’re laughing, but I’m sure—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! Order! The member will come back to the bill, and please, can we not make inferences about other people breaking the law or not breaking the law? Thank you.

Well, I just I got nods, Madam Speaker, saying that yes, she was engaged in pro bono work, so—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): No. Order! Order! She is shaking her head. Please go back to the bill, thank you.

So, the reality is this, and I want to take you back to one very good point here. And that was a submission made by the Community Law Centres—because they do an outstanding job and I’ve visited them myself all over the country and I want to acknowledge the incredible work that they do and the people that go and actually provide pro bono services through them—but the submission from the Community Law Centres o Aotearoa was instructive. It was the Community Law’s recently established Te Ara Ture, a pro bono clearing house connecting volunteer lawyers to people who need legal help. In their submission of 27 October 2021, they noted—in relation to Te Ara Ture—“The main part missing from Te Ara Ture’s ambit is our ability to refer employed and in-house lawyers. Under the current regulatory framework, Te Ara Ture can refer clients only to law firm principals or barristers acting on their own account. These people make up only 42 percent of the profession. Based on 2019 figures, this means that 58 percent of lawyers for the profession—that’s over 8,000 lawyers—cannot participate in our programme.” That was the whole purpose—that was one of the big drivers of him even putting this bill together and bringing it into the House: it is to make sure that those over 8,000 lawyers were actually able to legally offer their services pro bono.

So I’m sorry, but for members opposite to stand and talk about and celebrate the bipartisan nature of dealing with and working on these member’s bills—that wasn’t used at all in this bill. To me, it was probably a cheap shot against Chris Bishop—I don’t know. But it was a good bill. We could have worked on it. Actually, I’m on the Justice Committee now, I know the members well, it’s a good committee. We could have worked across party and we could have actually made changes to this bill that would have had a material impact and effect on everyday Kiwis who often have the barrier of cost in terms of trying to access legal help and legal advice in our justice system.

So I stand here, proud to support the bill—I’m just very disappointed that it hasn’t been supported from the other side. Thank you.

I’m a little bit perplexed that that member would get up and suggest that a hard-working select committee would come to the conclusion that they disagreed with this bill on the basis of pure spite. This select committee did an absolutely amazing job at investigating if this bill was right, the policy work had been done, to ensure that this bill could be the best it could be. But the select committee came to the conclusion that not enough policy work has been done. Putting this through in this form without doing that policy work would be irresponsible and would be poor lawmaking—that would be the bottom line.

The select committee did not say this should just go away. They looked at it and said, “There may be some merit here, but somebody needs to do the policy work around this to ensure that we’re getting the settings right.” The select committee knew that cost was a significant barrier to access justice, but there was currently limited research. Who puts law in place based on limited research? It doesn’t happen. We have an evidence-based practice in this country for law. The policy work gets done first. So on that basis, on this side of the House, we cannot—cannot—support this bill at this time. So therefore, we will not be supporting this bill further.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Gee, it’s getting a little bit rowdy in here. Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call on this bill.

I was part of the Justice Committee that considered this bill and so I—well, I didn’t stand and take a point of order and claim to be offended by the comments. I’d use slightly different language. But it was difficult, I think, for us on this side who sat through the select committee process on this bill to hear those criticisms of us that claimed that we were being somewhat fake or disingenuous in our comments today.

I can say with all sincerity—and those that are here will know—that we actually spent a huge amount of time on this member’s bill. We went backwards and forwards with the officials so many times, with the key submitters of the Law Society and some of the others also, to try and see if we could find the solution to the problems that had been identified by the member that the bill was trying to address, and I know that for a fact because I was in that select committee. We’ve got so many lawyers on our select committee that we were really going through it all with a fine-tooth comb. Those who have worked for Community Law, like the member Vanushi Walters, could look at it from that perspective and that experience. So I stand here and say sincerely to the members on the other side that we really did try and find a way, but, unfortunately, as other members have expressed in their contributions today, we just were not able to do that. Therefore, we will not be supporting the bill.

But I just want to talk from my own personal experience on this matter. Like many in the House, I have a law degree. I remember graduating from Waikato University. I started my first job at Te Ohu Kaimoana. I was employed as an in-house solicitor for Te Ohu Kaimoana, and I remember that as soon as I graduated, whānau, my marae—they all contacted me with legal issues and wondered if it was something that I could help with, not understanding that, actually, we are prohibited by the law and the Law Society from doing that. Now, while that gave me a convenient excuse to be able to say no to all of the requests that I got to provide those, and while I really wanted to be able to do that, when I listened to the submissions and when I thought about my own situation back then, I could understand the concerns that were being expressed by the Law Society and some of their reservations for it. I understand that there is a good reason why we have this in place.

So I think back to my own experience. I was employed as an in-house solicitor for Te Ohu Kaimoana, I had supervision from my managers and I was working within a very defined area of law, and we had all the protection mechanisms in place. I was then being asked to do something which I absolutely understand whānau doing that or communities doing that or organisations requesting that support, because they just see you as somebody who is one of their own with a tohu—with a degree—that could do something for them, either because it would save them money by asking you to do it for free on a pro bono basis, or because you’re somebody familiar with them and they trust the advice and support that they might get from you. But the situation that I was in was that I didn’t necessarily have the skills and expertise in that area—so I should say no on that basis—or if it wasn’t a particularly difficult area, I still had nothing there to protect them in case I gave them the wrong advice.

That really was one of the big issues that we had in the submissions that we heard from the Law Society. There is a reason why we have a process for lawyers being able to set up in practice on their own account. They have to go through particular training and certification to be able to do that, which is why they get indemnity insurance. Some of the problems that were identified with what’s being proposed in this member’s bill were that in this type of situation, where you are not practising on your own account and you haven’t followed all of those processes, your employer is not responsible for you acting outside of your employment agreement, and there is risk to those who are obtaining these free legal services and legal advice.

So I think that that’s an important consideration. As well-meaning as somebody with a law degree might be to be providing services to the public, to the community, and to people who may not be able to afford it, or they just want to do it to make a contribution to their local cricket club, sailing club, marae, and so on, there are risks to those on the other side when they are obtaining what they believe is good legal advice, but they don’t know what goes on behind that in terms of the legal community, the Law Society, and so on.

So I can understand the problem. At that time, I was a young lawyer. I didn’t believe I had the skills and experience in that particular area of law to do that. How many times somebody’s asked me if I could just look over their sale and purchase agreement for their house—no, I don’t want to get that wrong—or it’s to draft up the marae charter rules or to do somebody’s succession, or can I do them a will, and so on. The list is a large one of what people regularly came forward for and requested.

When the other issue that we identified in this was described to me, it was well-meaning lawyers who wanted to be able to contribute to their community groups and give back in some kind of way, and they would, obviously, do it within the area that they felt competent to do that. But we’ve raised the issues with risks and liabilities there.

The other issue that came up and was brought to our attention was access to justice issues for those who cannot afford legal services. So this is not just your sailing club who happens to know a lawyer, or a marae trustee who’s got a nephew or niece that’s just graduated from university, but people who actually need legal services, but can’t afford to access those legal services. So, on that basis, we heard really good submissions from Community Law. We heard about their programme Te Ara Ture. We heard about how much of a challenge access to justice, access to lawyers, either free or affordable, is for people, and we felt that this bill was not going to be able to resolve that issue. It may have contributed in some part to that greater issue, but the issue is actually greater than just some people being able to provide free legal services, pro bono services, while in employment—so outside of their employed situation.

Community Law has offered up a suggestion on how they might be able to be a clearing house for those sorts of things, but this wasn’t a piece of policy that we could just make in the select committee process. It requires a much broader review of the problems and identification of all the possible solutions and the costs associated with that, and then it comes with a commitment to the resourcing to be able to actually deliver on that.

So while this issue of access to justice has been raised, I don’t really remember that being the first examples that we discussed, but it became a live issue during the process, and we really did try, as the Justice Committee—all members of that committee—to find a way through. But what we found in the end was that what was proposed through submissions was unworkable—it had fish-hooks in it and potential unintended consequences—and that further policy work needed to be done. We have recommended that that policy work does get done, and I’m pleased of the Government’s record of contributing to our community law centres over the last few years. The point has been made about the other side’s level or support or non-support of that. So we do recognise that there is a problem. We are committing additional funding to it. We are taking steps, and we have recommended that there be a wider review to address the access to justice issues that have been identified through this process.

I thank everybody for the huge amount of time that we’ve put into it, and, therefore—just to be clear—we are not supporting the bill to the next stage.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call on the Lawyers and Conveyancers (Employed Lawyers Providing Free Legal Services) Amendment Bill, in the name of my colleague Chris Bishop. It’s an excellent piece of legislation, and you’d think, listening to the member on the other side, where she’s defined all the problems and said there’s so much more to do in this area, that, actually, the Labour Party would be supporting this piece of legislation, because, actually, this is the type of bill which is going to help many of their constituents to be able to access free legal services, and to actually get the assistance that they need. The reality is that the chardonnay socialists on the other side have decided again that they’d rather vote for legislation which actually makes life harder for their supporters and people who they say they purport to represent, rather than actually trying to work with the National Party to find practical solutions to make life easier.

So, effectively, this piece of legislation has one very important change to the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act, to allow a lawyer who is an employee to provide free legal work where the services are provided with the agreement of the employer and in accordance with practice rules made by the New Zealand Law Society. This is not about trying to come up with some dodgy way to get some free legal services done on the side; this is about saying, “Actually, there are around 8,000 lawyers who currently are unable to provide pro bono services.”—8,000 lawyers who are currently banned from being able to assist people, and from being able to make a positive difference in the community, and to actually make a difference.

The reality is what the Government is saying is those 8,000 lawyers representing about 58 percent of the profession should not be able to actually provide that assistance in the community, and I think that’s a real shame, because, actually, this Parliament had a real opportunity with this piece of legislation to really make a difference in those people’s lives and for these lawyers to be able to assist in the community.

We heard a number of submitters come to the select committee. I was on that select committee. We heard some excellent submissions, and, look, there are issues which needed to be worked through. But that’s the purpose of a select committee. A select committee is actually an opportunity to work through the issues, take the time, and make sure the legislation is going to give good effect to it. And effectively what this Government has said is “Well, because this is not perfect, we’re not going to aim for good; we’re going to just say no rather than work through the issues, get the advice, and make sure we have a piece of legislation which we could support.”

You know, I do acknowledge all parties in this Parliament who did send it to a select committee, and I think that was the right thing to do. But the next thing to do is actually to make sure that the select committee process develops it into good law so that all parties could continue to support it, because I think there was very much a strong intention to support this piece of legislation all the way through.

So I’m very disappointed that the Government has decided to not support this piece of legislation. What they’re saying here is that they want to continue to control who can provide pro bono services, continue to make overcomplicated regulations in regards to providing pro bono services, and what that, effectively, will mean is we don’t get that increased amount of people being able to get access to justice in New Zealand. There was clear evidence which came forward which said two-thirds of law firms spent only about 1 percent to 5 percent of practice time on pro bono work, and the whole purpose of this was to try to not only increase that percentage amongst firms which are already doing pro bono work but actually increasing the number of lawyers who are able to provide pro bono services, to be able to tap into those 8,000 lawyers so that they are able to assist New Zealanders.

What I find really ironic is you hear the examples going on about, you know, “Oh, well, it’s only going to help that sports club down the road—they’ve got a mate.” It’s very dismissive of the fact that, actually, our country is made up of people, individuals, communities, sports clubs, marae, and, actually, you know, these aren’t well-resourced organisations. I think of all the sports clubs in my electorate in Pakuranga, which, actually, yes, they might know a lawyer, but that doesn’t mean they’re well-resourced, and the only alternative is that they’ve got to go and now raise the money and pay for the services rather than actually talk to someone that they might know who can then talk to their employer and say, you know, “Can I have permission, and I will, of course, work within the rules and provide this advice.”

And we’re talking about very practical issues, and I can think of many times that I’ve had examples of issues where I’ve had to support local sports clubs in my electorate and they’ve come to see me and it’s an issue that I can’t necessarily get involved with—it’s potentially to do with a lease agreement with the council, and, actually, getting some legal advice in regards to those issues is actually a very good thing. But they come to me because, actually, you know, going to see a lawyer’s going to cost them 10 grand, and so they come and ask what support and advice I can provide as the local MP. And, look, as a local MP, we do that; we do whatever we can do to support and advise, but we’re not able to provide legal advice, and so it’s important they actually have that opportunity.

So here is the example of the Government saying to those people, “Actually, we don’t care. Go out there and find $10,000. Go and hire a lawyer.”—rather than them being able to use people in their networks and to be able to get that support, because, actually, New Zealand is very much a community-minded country. People like to help each other, people like to support each other, and this Government is saying, “Actually, no you can’t, and we’re not going to make this better.” So it’s very much a pity that that’s happening.

I acknowledge, again, my colleague Chris Bishop for bringing this bill to Parliament—a practical, pragmatic solution to an issue, trying to solve a problem—and, again, this Government puts its ideology in the way and doesn’t come forward and actually try to make sure that we help New Zealanders; a real big shame. We continue to support this bill, but disappointed with the Government’s dismissal.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. It’s my pleasure to speak on this, the second reading of the Lawyers and Conveyancers (Employed Lawyers Providing Free Legal Services) Amendment Bill. I too would like to commend Chris Bishop, who actually—his intention has huge merit. In fact, allowing a lawyer who is an employee to do free legal work pro bono, other than for the lawyer’s employer, on conditions set by the New Zealand Law Society, as many have said, had universal support at first reading. The merit was about improving access to justice, and, actually, that remains, I think, an intention that we are committed to improving through, I guess, the assessment and analysis of this bill. Having not sat on the Justice Committee, I want to congratulate and commend Ginny Andersen and the team within the Justice Committee. I’ve had personal experience with their work, so I have no doubt that full due diligence was undertaken and they in good faith tried to find a solution to some of the issues that were highlighted.

I think it’s really important that people understand what those issues were. In fact, the New Zealand Law Society, in their submission, did highlight the fact that an employed lawyer is potentially guilty of misconduct if they do legal work outside of the lawyer’s employment. But more than that, there were issues about providing free services and what that means in terms of adequate consumer protections. There are supervision requirements, for example, within those law practices. There are approval processes that have to be adhered to. There are client care obligations, and, actually, the handling of client moneys. So the liability—nobody could ascertain where that lay, and, in fact, if there was poor legal advice, how could we then help the person that the system was being designed to support, and would there be a requirement for that lawyer to hold professional indemnity insurance? Too many questions, unfortunately, that the select committee process could not answer.

I do want to acknowledge the 22 submissions and the nine oral submissions. So the Law Society, as a regulator—they in fact made a supplementary submission. There was a lack of policy work on the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. There had been no costing of the scheme, and the best method to meet the unmet need had not been ascertained. So the intervention logic wasn’t there, but, as I’ve said, there’s intent from the Government, but also all the parties involved and the Law Society.

I also want to highlight Community Law Centres o Aotearoa, who acknowledged issues related to access to justice, but from their perspective the issues related to access to justice are for specific groups of New Zealanders. Those New Zealanders are people with disabilities. Those New Zealanders are Māori, tangata whenua. Those New Zealanders are single parents. Those New Zealanders are those who suffer economic disadvantage. So in fact, the biggest issue that they had and the select committee had was matching that need with this proposal and matching that need with new investment that is obviously needed to make the intention of this bill actually work. That is the issue. That is the issue, because if we allow this bill to go through, in fact, we probably would have exacerbated access to justice issues, which would continue to contribute to inequitable access to lawyers. So that is at the heart of the select committee’s recommendation to this House by majority that this bill not be passed.

So I commend Chris Bishop for bringing this kaupapa to the House. I commend those 8,000 lawyers who would like to contribute. I commend the Law Society for their contribution to this discussion. I commend Community Law Centres o Aotearoa. But at the end of the day, it’s pretty clear that any investment in this space, any new resource, must be targeted to ensure that those who are most disadvantaged in accessing legal services can receive them. Therefore, I stand with my colleagues, unfortunately for Chris Bishop, in opposition not to his proposition, not to his intention but to the fact that this bill unfortunately is not fit for purpose. Kia ora.