Legal Services Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Justice: I present a legislative statement on the Legal Services Amendment Bill.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Legal Services Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

The Legal Services Amendment Bill addresses two barriers to accessing legal aid. By removing the user charge and the payment of interest from the Legal Services Act, it will give enduring certainty to users of the legal aid scheme that they will not have to pay a user charge to access the scheme designed to support them, and that the amount that they are required to repay will not continue to increase as they pay it down.

The user charge was designed to make people think carefully about whether to engage in legal aid. Not only is this unnecessary, in that people who are eligible for legal aid are on low incomes therefore the decision to take on debt will be a serious one, but also it’s a financial barrier to people who want to or need to use the legal aid scheme to access the justice system. Sometimes, to avoid this charge being applied, legal aid providers—that is the lawyers, are known to absorb the user charges themselves. This means that in some cases legal aid providers have to take a financial hit to provide their services. This is a workaround that shouldn’t be needed. It’s good to be removing this barrier to legal aid funding.

Interest payments were introduced to encourage people to pay down their debt. What interest payments assume, however, is that people using the legal aid system actually have the money spare to make payments that pay their debt down faster. In reality, legally aided people cannot afford to pay their debts down quickly. It will take time for them to pay the debt down, especially if they owe other debts to Government that need to be paid down first. In the meantime, the debt continues to grow as the interest continues to accrue. It can be demoralising.

There are other options that encourage legal aid recipients to make efforts to pay down debt, too. This includes placing caveats on property and issuing deduction notices so the payments are taken directly out of their bank account. Charging people more money is not a useful method to encourage payment of legal aid debt. Some people might call these changes “tinkering”, but for the people who need to use the legal aid scheme, it is far from it.

Let’s not forget the positive difference that these changes will make to low-income New Zealanders, who, without Government support, would be unable to access justice and assert their rights. We are committed to improving access to justice, and this bill makes up just one part of the ongoing efforts to do so.

The changes in this bill formed just one part of the Budget 2022 package to increase access to the legal aid scheme. In January this year, we increased eligibility and repayment thresholds for legal aid recipients. Wage inflation has slowly eaten away at these thresholds, meaning that people who meet the criteria for legal aid in 2008 would not qualify in 2022, despite having no material change in their circumstances. We increased eligibility thresholds by 15 percent, making another 93,000 New Zealanders eligible for legal aid. This goes some way to offset inflation and make sure that New Zealanders who should be able to access legal aid are eligible.

We also increased repayment thresholds by 16.5 percent, meaning people will be asked to pay back their debts at a level that more accurately reflects their income and ability to pay. Last year we increased legal aid provider remuneration by 12 percent in recognition of the important and essential work that legal aid providers do.

In all, these changes will ensure that more people are eligible for legal aid funding, that more recipients won’t be unnecessarily burdened with repayment obligation, and that providers of legal aid services are more fairly compensated for the very important work they do.

Lastly, I want to acknowledge those who have contributed to the bill. I’d like to thank the Justice Committee for their consideration of the bill, and also to acknowledge those who took the time to make a written oral submission on the bill when it was a select committee. Thank you to those submitters for your time and for sharing your views.

We have a duty to provide accessible, high quality legal advice to New Zealanders who otherwise couldn’t afford it, via the legal aid scheme. This bill is a step towards improving that accessibility, and I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The National Party is not supporting this bill, and it reminds me of and it sort of has all the look and feel of a member’s bill, actually. It’s five pages long and it’s the sort of thing that you would expect a backbencher to throw into the ballot and it might come up. But this has been, apparently, the focus of Government officials and the previous Minister of Justice, Kiritapu Allan, and, before that, Kris Faafoi, and now, currently, Ginny Anderson.

Look, it’s not a newsflash: this Government has a clear majority and they will pass this legislation, and that will be that. We are in the second to last week of this term, and this is one of many bills that they’re passing through. The point we make, ultimately, is that it’s just emblematic of the failure to deal with the big issues effectively under six years as Minister of Justice—or six years of Government—and a kind of a flick right at the very end, as if to say, “Aren’t we clever? This is what we’ve done.” Meantime, the inflation adjustments for the basic sort of work has only gone some way, as the Minister said, to dealing with inflation and so it’s a question of choices.

So when we look at the challenges facing the justice system as a whole, we identify three major issues round the increase in violent crime, increase of youth crime, and having to have a more effective response to that. But the third big issue—fundamental issue—is this broader context of access to justice being denied by an incredibly slow, cumbersome, and expensive system where people’s lives are kept on hold for years, waiting to grind their way through the Family Court processes or the Employment Court processes or the Criminal Court processes or any other process. In fact, in the civil courts, it basically just doesn’t work at all. If somebody steals $100,000 from your business, the whole process is so expensive and so cumbersome and so untimely and so uncertain that it’s basically not worth doing anything about it, which is unbelievable that we can’t design a system that works for those sorts of things.

So this grinding, slow process of the Family Court and all those other courts, year in and year out, is what creates this massive cost and problem, because every time that the lawyers go off to some meeting in the Family Court and at the last moment it’s cancelled for some reason because somebody’s not ready, and there’s no consequences for not being ready—it just rumbles on. There’s no discipline in the whole process. Some judges will use AV material and some won’t. They don’t like it for some reason, but I don’t know why—there is a whole heap of issues as to why the court processes are slow.

Our primary critique is that instead of focusing on dealing with that issue effectively, they’ve done all sorts of other things. They’ve started a plethora of projects and programmes that are under way. We just heard that finally, after six years, they’ve led a project to upgrade the IT systems for the court processes—well, that’s good, finally—and there’s things on various other rules. There are projects under way, but it has been very slow, haphazard, and it hasn’t been anywhere nearly a bigger priority as it should have been.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, let’s put a priority on going to the bill now. You’ve had a pretty good five minutes.

Well, that is the important context. That’s the context—it’s just the context of the bill. The Government has had six years to get around to it, and I’ve only had five minutes and I still haven’t. I’m just warming up—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: And you still haven’t got to the bill. Everything is proportional, Mr Goldsmith.

Six years, they’ve had, and so what we’ve got instead is this bill, which does two things, as the Minister did point out—two things. First, it does away with the $50 administrative fee. Frankly, if people are desperate for justice and they want to achieve justice and they’re looking to solve a horrendous problem in their life in some way, $50 doesn’t seem to me to be an insurmountable barrier for New Zealanders. So it’s all a matter of priorities for where the Government puts its money. You can choose between changing the thresholds further for which people have access to legal aid—you could do that—or you could do what is being proposed by this bill, which is do away with that payment and then take away the interest payments for the loans.

It’s pretty simple, really. If you don’t have to pay any interest on the loan, then there’s no incentive to pay it back at all or in any hurry. So the rest of the community ends up picking up that bill. The point of the process is that those who are really desperately in need get legal aid as a grant. This is the second category of people who would get it as a loan, who have more resources and more ability to pay. They’ve been considered by the system as able to repay that debt, but if we do away with the interest, then that’s very unlikely that they’ll do so. That has a cost, and so the question is whether this is a good use of that money or whether it would be of better use with higher thresholds, higher payments, to legal aid people or other areas of the justice system, and we’re not convinced by the argument of this.

Then, secondly, we would have preferred, like I say, that the Government—because these bills, even though this one is, like I say, five pages and looks sort of like a member’s bill, it still takes the focus and energy of the Ministry of Justice and the officials. We’ve been through the process in the select committee and we’ve listened to all the submissions, and I do want to thank the chair of the Justice Committee, Vanushi Walters, who has conducted herself, I think, very well and in good spirits. We’ve heard from many—well, we didn’t hear from many submitters, but we heard 10 submissions through the process, and we were well advised by the Ministry of Justice people. So it’s all just a question of what you focus on.

So the Ministry of Justice was working on this and they were doing that and we all had this group together while they were also doing other things like the hate speech and reducing the voting age and all those sorts of things, when I would argue that they would have been far better to have had a laserlike focus—which the Prime Minister talks about from time to time—on dealing with the big issue in the justice sector, which is how we get a much quicker resolution to the cases and a speedier application of justice. Ultimately, we look at it very much from the perspective of the consumers of justice, which is the people who want to get (a) justice for something that’s been done to them, or (b) the dispute or the thing that they’ve been accused of resolved in a timely matter so that they can get on with their lives. They can take the punishment, if they need to, but then being able to get on with their lives, or get the payment that they need to or get the resolution to the problem that they have dealt with so they can get on with their lives.

That needs to be the No. 1 focus of the Government in this space and we’ve gone backwards, badly backwards, over the last few years. COVID didn’t help and, in fact, I think some of the reactions to it went too far and slowed us down further than it should have. But the response has been too slow and given insufficient attention by the Government and the officials under their direction. So that is why we think this is tinkering at the edges when there’s so much more important work that should have been done.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I was listening intently during the committee of the whole House stage of this bill, and I will say this: it was the best of times listening to the Minister; it was the worst of times listening to the Opposition. I have to throw my Dickens in there, given the theme of the day.

But Mr Goldsmith is correct that it was a really collegial select committee that we had when we considered this bill. We received excellent advice and actually had a very thorough, robust conversation. So I must admit I was surprised by the Opposition’s position on this bill as the only party who are opposing this bill. I’m surprised and perplexed for a number of reasons.

So we were told, on the one hand, that this is a bill that’s about tinkering, and then, on the other hand, we were told that, actually, removing the interest payments on legal aid loans was a very, very big thing—a very big scary thing—that shouldn’t be done. So the question is which is it—is it tinkering or is it a big thing?

Now, I’ll tell you, I worked at YouthLaw Aotearoa for nearly a decade, and there’s something about watching the point of decision—after you’ve advised someone about the strength of their legal case and that they can access a legal-aid loan—watching their face as they go through that decisionmaking process, and seeing the people who are low income and who have very sound legal cases, who look at me and say that they aren’t going to access legal aid because they simply cannot perceive taking on that loan. Unless you’ve been in that position or advised someone who is, you do not know the scale of the people who are not accessing justice.

Now, Mr Goldsmith has repeatedly made the argument that if there’s no interest, people will not pay the loan back. But the advice we received was that the Legal Services Commissioner has the power to issue deduction notices directly to employers or to bank accounts. So that option is there; it was given to us in advice.

The Opposition have argued, “Well, why aren’t you doing other things like improving the court processes?” We are. Mr Goldsmith knows that. He was in the room this morning as we discussed Te Au Reka with the Ministry of Justice , which is their digital case management system. He’s been there as we’ve made changes to the coronial system. He’s been there as we’ve made changes to the Family Court.

Mr Simon O’Connor, in the second reading, argued that we should be putting our justice money in other pockets. He’s been there in the room as we talked about the circuit-breaker programme. He’s been there in this House as we’ve talked about expanding that programme; putting 1,800 police on the ground.

We’re about saying yes to all means of access to justice, and saying yes to all ways of addressing community safety in our community. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much. Continuing the Dickens theme, these are Hard Times for our justice system. Of course, that’s not to be confused with the quote that the member Vanushi Walters has made from A Tale of Two Cities—the name of a novel in itself. But “hard times” is a very fair description of the legal system and the appalling state of lack of access to justice in this country at the moment. The system was in need of reform for many years, admittedly, including across successive Governments. It has steadily deteriorated over the last six years. COVID didn’t help, admittedly, but the lack of imagination, energy, and impetus to do much about that is frankly appalling, and that responsibility lies with every branch of Government. I know that’s not a thing one should lightly say, but the fact of the matter is the matter has been allowed to slide in a in a fashion that is, frankly, hopeless.

As far as this bill goes and what it does and doesn’t do, I pick up on the theme, initially, of the comments made by my colleague and friend the Hon Paul Goldsmith. He notes that there’s not much in the bill. Of course, you know, that can be deceptive—I suppose you could have a good idea or a major policy change reflected in relatively few words. In this case, basically every second word is either “repeal” or “delete”. Again, that shouldn’t necessarily mean that we don’t find favour with it. Repealing and deleting is a legislative activity I would very much like the opportunity to do quite a lot of, 51 days from now. But I think it does show lack of imagination, because nothing constructive is being done by this bill. It is merely, at best, lessening pain only to a minor extent. It is a band-aid on the weeping, seeping wound of our lack of access to justice in this country, for all the reasons that we have already described.

In terms of the cost barriers, the greatest cost barrier is the extraordinary amount of time, and therefore expense, that is involved in taking legal claims at any level whatsoever of our justice system, courts and tribunals alike. That would be the single best thing that could be done to achieve more cost-effective justice, as well as more effective justice and justice that is less delayed and therefore less denied than we currently have.

We’ve heard from the previous contributor to the debate Vanushi Walters that the Government has been undertaking various measures in the space to improve matters. That’s true, as far as it goes, and I think it’s worth acknowledging the point that she’s made. But also it’s fair to acknowledge National has supported in good faith all of those measures. Associates have been appointed, there’s lots of talk about various reforms—not much more than talk in the case of a couple of the programmes, which is disappointing. But, to a large extent, that blame lies with not only the current Government but this branch of Government.

So not much has been effective. There’s been not much more than tinkering. Members opposite may disagree with that characterisation, but the results speak for themselves, and the results are of a justice system where the time frames and the backlogs are out of control. It is deeply dispiriting, deeply disheartening, and merely waving relatively small amounts of money here and there simply will not cut it. There’s no good reason that we should pretend that it is anything more than that.

It’s also worth noting that to some extent this is unnecessary because there is already a mechanism available, under which the applicant—that is someone who’s applying for legal aid—can have considered grounds of financial hardship, which, of course, is a directly relevant one when we’re talking about the costs involved, or for any other reasons that they believe should be considered. These are under the headings of “just and equitable” reasons. So the mechanism exists already, but, nevertheless, the Government sees fit to apply a blanket provision whereby we are to understand that society as a whole is to pay all the contribution; the person involved, himself or herself, none of the contribution. That seems wrong to me. If there is no skin in the game—not even a nominal amount of interest, not even a nominal co-payment—then there is no reason for people to accept responsibility for the situation in which they find themselves.

So, for all these reasons, we don’t think that it is worth supporting this bill. There are many more things that would have been much more helpful. Again, at this, the final reading of the bill, we do not support it, and we will not support it. But we will, if given the chance in a very short space of time, make real, tangible, effective measures to actually improve access to justice in this country.

A lot of years ago, I started in a firm called Ellis Gould. It was a high-priced firm and it had a beautiful view from my office of the city. I gave up that job to go to something which was the Union Law Centre in Ōtāhuhu.

When I got there, I was working out of the tea room. My first client came in and she had what was called, at the time, a non-molestation order that she needed—it’s now called a domestic violence order. I listened to her and I understood that she didn’t have the money to pay for the order, and I was concerned about that. I remember my boss saying, “Don’t worry about it, we just do those ones.” That’s what lots of the legal community do. Now, that woman had had a machete held over her head by her partner. She had four children and it was a pretty serious situation.

That’s the situation I’d like to contrast with some of the statements that have been made on the other side about how people have to have a bit of skin in the game if they are to deal with situations of their own making. That was a situation where we needed to be kind. We needed to understand what $50 is. We needed to understand what we needed to do in the circumstances. Our family lawyers and our employment lawyers know that, and they do it.

This law is going to help people. It isn’t a little law; it’s a really important law. I’ll never forget that story. It haunted me through my entire practice and it kept me honest. Thank you, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT to take a short call on the Legal Services Amendment Bill before us here, under urgency. It seems like an uncomplicated bill. We’ve got two parts to it: a $50 user charge, which has been identified as a barrier to accessing justice for those people on low incomes, and it really doesn’t seem to serve much of a purpose. The other part is removing the 5 percent interest on legal aid after six months. ACT says if the $50 charge is a deterrent for people struggling, let’s remove it and remove that excuse.

We already have an issue with people paying fines, and it’s good to at least go into the court process with a clean slate. Unlike most of Labour’s policies, this bill actually targets the right people. With the GST on fruit and veggies, the winter energy payment, prescription charges—all policies that help the rich people or the evil millionaires more than they do the poor people. So it’s good to see a focus. This will actually help those people who are struggling in the world today, which is often the world which has been created, again, by this Government, and it may reduce the stress in their lives.

The policeman in me thinks that it would be better if the person wasn’t in court at all and didn’t require any legal services. Again, an ACT-influenced Government will help them on this path, so there is hope. The bill will, hopefully, make it easier to access democracy—and that’s a word that we’re fast losing the meaning of in New Zealand. And because of this, ACT supports the bill.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. The Green Party supports this bill. They are good changes that are cleanly aligned with Green policies and statements. We would go further with much more substantive changes to the framework for legal aid. While these are small, the changes are clearly positive steps.

The Green Party opposed National’s legal aid changes in 2011. We lobbied against further changes in 2012. Green MPs called for an inquiry into the equality of access to justice in 2015. There should be no financial barriers to accessing justice and representation in the court and the provisions around interest on unpaid legal aid debt as well as the upfront fee are a barrier to access for justice. And it’s just a very clear case of an ideological approach of “user pays” that doesn’t recognise that all people are entitled as members of our society to have access to justice. We’re all better off if we make that as easy and accessible as possible. So we congratulate the Labour Government for getting this to this point, even if it isn’t as far as the Green Party would like to go.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the Legal Services Amendment Bill. This is a good bill, and it was a pleasure to sit with the Justice Committee in consideration of it and to consider the detail about how this will improve access to justice. Access to justice is something that everyone in this House should support, and this bill clearly does that.

This bill does two simple things, and I thank the ACT member who spoke about the removal of user charges being a good thing. It’s a real no-brainer; $50 is the difference between somebody being able to access the services of a legal aid lawyer or to make choices about, say, school camp coming up or groceries on the table. To remove that fee makes a real difference in the lives of exactly the kind of people who need legal aid.

The second thing it does is it removes interest, and that means that the bills of people who access legal aid services don’t continuously go up as they are trying to pay them off. It can be incredibly demoralising for people, especially those people who have outstanding debt to other Government departments. So it really makes sense to do this.

Any party who is opposing access to justice in this way has got the wrong idea. Fees and barriers to accessing legal services and the knowledge to navigate the legal system create the kind of inequality which is inexcusable in New Zealand society. It’s a trap of poverty that this bill does something to prise the jaws open from.

Those kind of barriers generate arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values this this democracy was founded on. It keeps people at the bottom at the bottom, while the continuous accumulation of capital lets people at the top keep going up and up. The existential growth of inequality in our society is something we should all push against.

The thing which brings us closer together, whether it’s in wealth or in our standing in our communities, is the diffusion of that knowledge. It’s the fact that you can go into a courtroom and have somebody who knows what’s going on explaining it to you. It’s those policies like education that transform people’s lives, and this is one of those. I’m proud to stand up for this bill, and I’m proud to stand with a Government that’s advancing it.

A five-minute split call—Barbara Kuriger.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. National is opposing this bill. We agree that New Zealanders struggle to access justice, especially under the current Government. The best thing that this Government or our new Government could do to improve New Zealanders’ access to justice would be to speed up the very slow court processes so that those involved in proceedings don’t have their lives kept on hold for years and years.

Rather than reducing the incentive for those with debts to repay by removing interest, we believe any additional spending in the system would be best speeding up the process of justice, firstly, and, secondly, to improve legal aid available to make it more attractive for lawyers. Currently, legislation allows for applications pertaining to the exemption of legal aid debt under the grounds of financial hardship or any other reason that the applicant believes should be considered. These are labelled as just and equitable reasons.

So, in my very short speech today, I just wanted to reiterate that there are much better ways of giving access to justice and tidying up the legal system, and to reiterate that National will be opposing this bill. Thank you.

It’s my pleasure to rise in this House and take a quick call on the Legal Services Amendment Bill. This bill, it’s all about access to justice, and my learned colleague Helen White painted the picture relatively well, I thought. People don’t access justice when things are going well; they usually access justice when there are a lot of other challenges going on in their lives. So it’s important to recognise that and make sure that the system recognises that—that when people are in vulnerable positions, that $50 fee can act as a huge barrier to getting that justice.

And then also, in the House, we’ve talked about the 5 percent interest that accrues on that fee as well, and then when that’s lined up with other outstanding fees that the individual may owe to other Government departments, that can quickly become quite overwhelming. So this is a really good bill, and these proposed changes will mean that thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to afford a lawyer will be able to have proper legal representation. Looking through the commentary on the bill, we had 10 submitters. Four were from individuals and six were from organisations, and all 10 of those submitters supported the bill and didn’t recommend any amendments.

So, just in closing, another point to note is that, you know, investment in Budget 2022, actually—it’s helped around 93,000 people be eligible for legal aid since January 2023. So we’re fulfilling our election promise to make improvements to our court system so that everybody has appropriate access to justice so that we can improve equitable outcomes for all. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m really pleased to be able to speak on this bill, the Legal Services Amendment Bill, and to take a call. I want to thank the Justice Committee members and also the officials who prepared the briefings and, specifically, the submitters who were able to put forward their contribution.

This is a good bill for those who cannot access the legal services or access justice, in terms of equality and equity. The bill refers to two minor technical amendments that will help those thousands of households on low incomes to access justice.

In my local community, we have the Māngere Community Law Centre. I want to acknowledge the team who work really hard, because they deal with very diverse community members who would not necessarily put themselves forward to access the legal services that are required to understand—because many of the people in the South Auckland community, or the local communities, come from different, diverse backgrounds. When they have problem, because they don’t necessarily understand the complexities of law in English terms, it is very helpful for them to access justice and access the community law centre.

The bill is helpful. It is very helpful, because, for those households—thousands of households—across the motu who cannot afford the fee, it is helpful to repeal those sections and interests. Although it seems like quite a small amount, it will be very helpful for those particular households.

It is important to be educated on the laws of the land, to understand your rights as a person in the community and that, whatever has happened, when you require legal help, there are the services out there in the community that will be able to assist you because they have the knowledge, the expertise, and the legal backgrounds. I do want to thank those who prepared this bill—and I would commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to make a small contribution on the Legal Services Amendment Bill, one that the National Party is opposing.

We do agree that New Zealanders struggle to access justice—something that has become certainly harder and longer in the last five years. Our view is that the Government would be best focused on improving New Zealand’s access to justice by speeding up what is a very slow court process. It’s something I have certainly seen in my previous career—even before the delays of the last few years, when it could take someone two to three years to progress their way through the court system. This bill does remove some costs. But, I mean, ultimately, people can still access the legal aid system; they can still get help.

We think it’s important that legal aid is accessible for all. But this bill simply takes away the $50 contribution that people have to make and takes away the interest that they’ll have to pay on any outstanding money. Of course, anything that someone has to pay less of is helpful—particularly those who are in a difficult position. But frankly, this country is in a difficult position. Core Crown debt has doubled since 2019, we have the biggest gross national debt we’ve ever had—just over $800 billion—and our balance of trade deficit is the biggest in the OECD, meaning that we are spending significantly more than we’re earning as a nation. So we don’t have a whole lot of money to spend on a whole lot of things.

I think it would actually be a lot more valuable to people who are trying to access justice to get faster progress through the court system, which fundamentally actually will cost them less in legal fees, and therefore there will be less interest they’ll need to pay on any debt that incurs if we’re able to speed up the court process. So we think the money is better spent on getting a more efficient, faster court process.

I think a $50 contribution would actually be a significant—I think many people would be very happy to pay that to have a much faster court process, which actually gives them certainty as to the outcome of that court process, whatever it may be. Because uncertainty is, actually, a huge cost to people emotionally, physically, and financially. A $50 contribution to the cost of the court and some interest being paid—so actually, if we can put that towards speeding up the court system, that would add the most value to people’s lives.

There’s an old saying that, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” That’s certainly a real truism. Fundamentally, that money, we think, would be best spent towards actually making sure justice is not delayed more than it needs to be and assisting with that. So with that, I will conclude my contribution.

Tēnā koe e te Mana Whakawā. I’m pleased to take a call on the third reading of the Legal Services Amendment Bill. I’m so grateful for this amendment, having myself supported whānau to navigate the justice system, and seeing the despair on their faces and not knowing what to do and wanting to know how to access legal representation. The justice system is a stressful place to be in if you’ve never been there before; absolutely, the experience is much more overwhelming than it already is. I recall turning up to court and it’s a sterile, cold place. You’ve got to stand there and look for the name of what courtroom you’re in, and so on and so forth. That is bad enough.

The bill does speak to two significant things, such as the removal of the $50 user charge. It might be a pittance to some, but, as I’ve said before in this House, it is gold to others. Secondly, it gets rid of that 5 percent interest charged on unpaid legal debt. I’m delighted the user charge and interest payments will already be in effect—in place—before this bill passes, by changing the regulations and removing reference to the charges and the interest payments.

Legal aid is central to ensuring equity in New Zealand’s justice system. By doing this, the legal aid scheme can keep doing what it was designed to do in the first place. This means that more people can, of course, access legal advice, ensuring the ongoing viability of the legal aid system. And I just want to note that the bill responds to the Ministry of Justice findings in the 2018 review of legal aid. The changes are part of our Budget, the 2022 package of $149.7 million to strengthen the legal aid system. I welcome this and I commend this bill to the House.