Coroners (Coronial Cap) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Coroners (Coronial Cap) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

Let me just find my speech. Can I just firstly acknowledge the commentary that I’ve heard from across the House and concur with the issues that have been raised. But I do want the House to note that, as I said earlier, this bill, for the reasons that have been mentioned about the concerns of urgency, is very much targeted towards amending the Coroners Act 2006 to simply increase the maximum number of coroners that can be appointed any time from 20 fulltime-equivalent coroners to 22 fulltime-equivalent coroners.

The last speaker, Harete Hipango, made mention that, yes, we did increase it in 2019, but no one took into consideration that people move on, people would get sick, people would retire. Therefore, the temporary relief coroners were to try and help resolve that. However, it doesn’t take away the fact that we do need to address this. This is the first phase. This bill is being passed under urgency because Budget decisions to appoint four additional coroners cannot be fully implemented until this bill has been enacted.

So I say, again, the recruitment of the additional coroners will commence immediately after enactment. The new coroners will be appointed by the Governor-General on the advice of the Attorney-General. The additional permanent coroners will relieve some of the pressure currently sitting with existing 18 fulltime-equivalent coroners. But sharing the workload will enable faster resolution of coronial cases, and, together with other changes under way within the coronial system, this should reduce the length of time our bereaved families and whānau are waiting for coronial findings. This will help alleviate some of the considerable stress of families and whānau going through the system. I therefore commend this bill to the House.

Mr Speaker, thank you very much, and I acknowledge the comments of the Minister. I think it’s clear that across the House, as evidenced by the various first reading speeches, there is clear agreement on the problem faced. There is agreement on the solution required, at least so far as it is represented by the bill and also measures in the Budget. So I do want to acknowledge that. I think it’s positive that we have a bipartisan agreement on a matter so fundamental to the civil and political rights, and human rights, actually, of New Zealanders, in this case.

I do want to make just a couple of brief remarks at this the second reading to acknowledge, first of all, the comments of the ACT Party member. I won’t steal her thunder by speaking to the Supplementary Order Paper. That’s more appropriate for the committee of the whole House stage. But, actually, as it happens, I wasn’t aware of that measure that she was proposing in relation to increasing the cap when I made my remarks at the first reading that it might be that a cap at all is not appropriate. And it did occur to me that if we were to come back each subsequent year, starting this year, then we’d be increasing the number of fulltime-equivalent coroners as follows: 2022, 2022 to 2023; 2023, 2023 to 2024; 2024, 2024—anyway, it will be a lot and I don’t think we need to end up in a bidding war against ourselves and against the population and against, as the Minister said, the realities of attrition within the judicial officer framework.

The point that was made very well by my colleague and friend Harete Hipango, regarding the delays in quantifying those by reference to those statistics she used—I just want to amplify that a little bit by noting, in the form of written questions, that we have seen increases across various different measurement categories. So the average age and days of completed coronial cases by year 2017, 337; up to the present day, 512. The percentage of active coronial cases that are more than 24 months old: 16 percent in 2018 and 31 percent in 2022, an increase of nearly double. And the percentage of active coronial cases that are more than 36 months old as at the end of February: from 4 percent in 2018 to 13 percent in 2022. I think we can all agree, and it seems we do all agree, that this is an intolerable situation.

When the press release was provided in conjunction with the Budget documents yesterday, the Minister said, quite rightly—and I quote—“I know the coronial system is under pressure and that is why we have introduced these measures.” The question is begged, therefore, at what point did the coronial system come under pressure and why has it taken until now that these measures have been introduced? If it’s the case that the system was under pressure—let us say, in 2019, at the point that that excellent petition was put forward by Ms Taylor and accepted by colleagues in this House—why has it taken until 2022 before any measures to alleviate those problems have been put forward?

The other question, or rather, point, in relation to the press release is that the Minister has told us that officials have been working closely with the Chief Coroner on ways to reduce delays in the coronial system. And I note “ways”—plural—implies that there are a number of different measures that will be offered up. That’s good news if so, but, given that, effectively, we have one way of alleviating the pressures in this bill, namely the increase of coroners and more broadly coronial staff, as implied in the Budget funding, a point that Ms Swarbrick made quite rightly, my question then would be, of course, what other ways does the Government contemplate and when might we see those? So I’ll leave my contribution there, at this point, except to emphasise, of course, that National, notwithstanding that we have concerns about the operations system more generally, does continue to support this bill and the measures in the Budget in this place.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I stand to speak on the second reading of the Coroners (Coronial Cap) Amendment Bill. I think that there are some figures that have already been mentioned that do need to be repeated just to put into context the tabled amendment that I have placed on the Table this afternoon.

Between 2018 and 2021, the average time to close a coronial case—it took 42 percent of time to actually close it, and, as was mentioned, 321 days had been lifted to 455 days. In 2021, that actually averaged 494 cases, and we’ve just heard this afternoon that it’s even up on that in May 2022: that an inquiry is averaging 877 days to process; that an inquest is averaging 1,451 days to process—and that is four years. We’ve also heard through the Justice Committee where some cases have been waiting eight years on, and that is simply not good enough. As I mentioned earlier, I have tabled an amendment to look to increase the cap from 20 to 30. I had outlined earlier the reasons why, and that was the cap being set at 20 was when our population was at 4.2 million; now that our population is sitting at 5.1 million, we actually require 24.4 fulltime-equivalents to be able to cover the workload.

Now, the reason why we have suggested that the cap should be increased to 30, even though the Minister wants to ensure that we can have four coroners appointed immediately—we respect that and we want that to stand—but with the 30, it’s because there have been concerns about the number of inquiries and inquests that are not occurring because of the backlog within the court system. So if we do not appoint or are not able to appoint quickly in the future more coroners for the Coroners Court, then there is a possibility that some of the inquiries and some of the inquests will not occur. Now, it is really essential that they do occur. The reason for that is because you have families that have questions about what happened to their loved ones. They wait for an inquiry or they wait for an inquest so that officials can delve into the reasons why their loved one has passed on. So to deny them that ability to take part in an inquiry or an inquest simply because we don’t have enough staff to process it is, as my colleague said, denying justice to the families of individuals who are already suffering.

The delays will mean that there would be no inquests and no inquiries, as I stated before, and the stats have shown that when the bill went through last time to increase the cap, they thought they would reduce perhaps the inquests and inquiries by a number of 10 if we got an overload, but, in actual fact, it’s ended up decreasing them by 10 percent, not 10 cases. And that’s 10 percent too many for many of our families. It stops the families from getting the answers and from being able to have full closure about the death of their loved ones. If we have enough coroners within the system, we just may be able to get back to processing coronial cases within a six- to 12-month time frame.

My tabled amendment is not asking for the 30 coroners; it’s asking for the cap to be increased. If it’s not going to be accepted by the Government, I hope that through the committee of the whole House stage it can be explained to everybody why. We were told that the reason why we have had an issue is we’ve had coroners retire and we’ve had coroners that get sick. I think that’s an important issue for why we need to lift the cap: so that we don’t get into a situation of continued backlogs and the Minister having to come back to the House for more urgent bills. The ACT Party commends this bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

This bill is set down for committee stage forthwith. I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Coroners (Coronial Cap) Amendment Bill.

In Committee