Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill

I seek leave to present a legislative statement on the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Leave has been sought for that course of action. Is there any objection? There appears to be none. That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: I move, That the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

This Government’s about fixing the basics and building the future, and one of the most basic things in the justice system is ensuring that we can get timeliness and access to justice so that people can get on with their lives, they can get their disputes fixed, and they can make some progress and restore themselves; get on with it. Under the previous Government, of course, time delays in the courts just dragged on and on, and people were waiting longer and longer, and so we’ve got a big focus on turning that around.

There’s many, many things that we’re doing to achieve that, but one of them is what this bill does. This bill will be in its final reading. The point of this one is it makes changes to the Senior Courts Act, the Criminal Procedure Act, and the Coroners Act to improve timeliness for New Zealand courts by maximising judicial resources. In particular, it increases the number of High Court judges that may be appointed, because, ultimately, the population is growing and we need to ensure that we have enough judges—senior judges—to get the job done. That’s what this does, because we need to change the law to do it.

Why are we doing it? Because if we look at the three things that we’re trying to achieve in the justice sector in general: we want to reduce the number of victims of crime; that’s what it’s all about—fewer victims of crime—and the good news is we’re making good progress on that. Secondly, we want to have fewer repeat recidivist youth offenders. We’ll reduce that by 15 percent, and we’re already ahead of target. There’s still a lot of work to do, but making good progress. The third area that I’m focused on is to speed up the process of the court so people can get on with their lives and get access to justice in a timely fashion, and that one is much more complicated.

Lots of issues to work our way through, but this bill strikes a blow by bringing in some extra High Court judges to the system and maximising existing judicial resources. It will also minimise the number of proceedings that abuse the process of the courts, reduce duplication at the pre-trial stage, ensure appeals are heard at the most appropriate level, and enable certain coronial inquiries to be closed where appropriate. All these changes will free up judicial time and get the whole system working more efficiently. On this basis, I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. We have a lot of bills come through this House. A lot of bills come through in urgency. In fact, I don’t think many bills come through this House these days that aren’t in urgency. Every so often, there is a bill that is passed through the House and is thrown slightly off its natural pathway. This is one of those bills. Normally, if it’s a Government bill, it’s going to follow a logical path. There’ll be some excellent speeches made—you’ve just heard one from my colleague Duncan Webb about the previous bill—but, ultimately, the numbers count, and the bill will go through. However, this bill has had a slightly different pathway through here. We should have been here with the third reading of this bill about a month ago. Funnily enough, after three days of urgency, there was a slight hiccup on the other side. The Leader of the House called it a snafu—I won’t mention what that actually means in the House, but there may have actually been another explanation. It might have actually been the Opposition backbenchers seeing a bit of daylight.

Hon Simeon Brown: Tell me what a snafu is.

GREG O’CONNOR: Backbenchers, not front-benchers, Mr Brown. There’s no light on the front bench opposite; I can tell you that now.

Anyway, as this bill casts its way through, we ended up having to bring it back here. Again, in the dead of night, funnily enough, after four days of urgency, on the second Friday night before Christmas, when every self-respecting journo will be in a bar somewhere, certainly not sitting watching television, it was recommitted to the House. All of a sudden, that offending little part of the bill that had seen the number of judges go to a sensible number, a number that was meaningful, and a number that was more reflective of the real crime rate in New Zealand, not the one that we do see here—

Hon Simeon Brown: Do judges cause crime?

GREG O’CONNOR: Mr Brown, did you just make a comment? Have a look at the murder rate, have a look at the manslaughter rate, and have a look at the attempted murder rate, because you can’t hide the bodies. You can do all sorts of other things with crime statistics, you can do all sorts of things with health statistics, but you can’t hide the bodies any more than you can hide the number of foreclosures of businesses. In fact, the bodies of businesses are lying around, again, making for a lot more work in the High Court.

What would have been sensible would have been to have a range of judges so that when you do get the spikes—anyone reading the paper over the last weekend would have seen how many homicides there were over the weekend. I believe there are about four or five homicides over the weekend. As those homicides, those serious crimes, work their way through the system, it’s going to put considerable pressure on every stage of the system and certainly the number of judges. The number started out at the number of judges going from 55 to 57. It hasn’t been done, actually, for some years. In fact, if we went back to the last time it was done and applied the population to it, we would actually be going to 69 judges, not the mere two. However, the Minister put an Amendment Paper in. He may have seen a little bit of sense because he took it from 55 through to 60. However, as it transpired, the Attorney-General said, “Well, I’m only going to give you one more of them. That’s just simply to cover for retirements and illnesses. Several of our High Court judges are suffering from illness at the moment and are not available for the bench. I certainly never intended for it to go to 60. I certainly never intended for it to go anywhere near the number that is required.”

Anyway, in the dead of night, the bill was recommitted, and, of course, we went back to 60, with the intention of only putting one forward. That’s a real shame. As I’ve just pointed out, once we look at not only the population but also the crimes, we need—another really important statistic is the average length of a trial. It used to be—and I’ll just say, there’s nothing worse than someone saying, “in my day”—that when we took a homicide or a serious case to court, relatively speaking, it was a relatively simple process. We’d have fingerprints. Generally, we would have a confession. We were able to interview for more lengthy periods of time in those days. Now, of course, you’ve got your DNA. The first thing you do is you go for the telephones. Well, of course, by the time you pull a telephone apart and get all the numbers, you are also likely to have, if it’s a serious crime, an electronic phase where we could be listening. All these things mean the trials go on for a heck of a lot longer.

Now, Madam Speaker, you know what it’s like to sit in that Chair for four days when there’s a considerable amount of work being done. Imagine sitting there for 17 days, which is the average length of trials now. That’s why we actually do need more judges. That’s why it would have been a very good idea, an inspiring idea, if the backbenchers had stuck with their guns, stuck with their inspiration, and actually stuck with voting for my amendment. However, it didn’t happen. We’re back here now, again—funny enough—in the dead of night—at least it’s not Wednesday night. At least it’s a night when all the journos are next door doing whatever they do on the night of the journalist drinks. However, it is what it is. Like many of these bills, we will be back here. We’ll be back here when we suddenly realise that two makes no difference, that two is not enough, and that we’re going to require more judges as we get more of our crimes coming through the system.

Now, there are some other aspects to this bill. I might say Labour is actually supporting this bill—other than that particular section. Some of it does make sense, particularly around the coroner’s court. At the moment, there’s a considerable backlog of coroner’s cases. At the moment, it takes 637 days to dispose of the average case, and the average time for disposing of inquiry cases is 957 days. Well, yes, we’ve got to do something to back that up because that’s nearly three years. It means that when there’s been a death, the family really can’t move on.

I know that often when even police officers are involved in deaths—I’d say, get used to this—the coroner will not report on this for four years. It’ll be four years before you’ll be able to put this behind you. That’s the same for any families that suffer from deaths. There’s got to be a finalising. You can’t really move on till, finally, you’ve got this final court case waiting. I know that in the coroner’s court, every death, particularly for suspicious deaths, all have to be opened. The coroner will keep that open. What this provision allows is that, when new evidence arises that wasn’t available at the time the case was opened, it’s now possible to actually close the case off. There are some good restrictions in there: the family have got to be notified, and they’ve got the opportunity to make some sort of appeal if they would like to do so. There’s some good backup in there. It’s a good part of this bill.

There are some sensible parts of this bill, but going back to the real point of this bill, the real part of it was to make sure that the Senior Courts Act increased the number of High Court judges. I am aware that late at night, as we are—this is the third time late at night we’ve been doing this bill. I suspect we’ll be back here doing a very similar bill, increasing the number of High Court judges, within probably about two years. It’s just a shame that we didn’t put a range in there so we could save Parliament the time and effort that we’re having to go through now. I’ll commend this bill to the House.

The member is correct. It is late at night, and with that, the debate is interrupted, and we will set it down for resumption next sitting day.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 9.58 p.m. to 9 a.m.