Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon JAMES MEAGER: I move, That the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

I would like to, firstly, give my strong and sincere thanks to the ever-hard-working and robust Justice Committee for your consideration of the bill. The committee only seems to have gained in strength and skill over the past 10 months, so I want to congratulate them for the work they’ve done on this bill. The committee recommended unanimously that the bill be passed with only one change, and that is to the commencement date. That is because the original date has since passed, so I think that’s a pretty sensible change to recommend, and one which I’m sure all members will support.

This Government is committed to an effective and efficient justice system, and community legal services play an important role in promoting access to justice. The amendments in the bill are necessary to support the long-term funding of organisations that deliver community legal services by clarifying how the Lawyers and Conveyancers Special Fund can be used.

The special fund works by collecting interest from banks on solicitors’ and licensed conveyancers’ nominated trust accounts. Money in the special fund must be paid to the Secretary for Justice for the purpose of funding community law centres; however, as the law currently stands, it is narrowly framed. It’s actually unclear whether the special fund can be used to meet other expenses incurred by community law centres in the provision of those services, such as their overheads.

Without the special fund, Crown funding or other sources, like donations, have to be used. This bill makes a narrow but important change to provide that certainty to community law centres that money from the special fund can be used to meet these indirect expenses. It does not affect the core purpose of the special fund, which is to fund community law centres. The change will support sustainable access to legal services within our communities around the country. I commend it to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. First of all, I want to recognise the really important work that community law centres do. They’re an important part of access to justice in New Zealand, and the special fund that the Minister’s just referred to—the Lawyers and Conveyancers’ Special Fund—is, of course, the way in which they are funded.

I guess it is interesting that, last night, we were doing a statutes amendment bill which was full of tweaks and clarifications, and yet here we have a bill which has one substantive clause and is purportedly a tidy-up because the original legislation wasn’t “sufficiently clear”. Why we need to trouble the House with a single bill for a tidy-up rather than putting it in a statutes amendment bill—either the one that we’ve just seen or I know there’s another one which is waiting in the wings—why we couldn’t do that, I don’t know.

The other question: I was always perplexed—and I never got a good answer to at select committee, to be perfectly honest—as to why this bill is even needed, because the way the whole framework operates is the money from lawyers’ trust accounts goes firstly to the New Zealand Law Society, and then it goes into a special fund which is administered by the Ministry of Justice, and then the Ministry of Justice purchases services—legal services—from community law centres so they can enter into the various contracts with community law centres around the country.

I don’t know who it was, but someone seemed to think that when you purchase community services—and if this is the precedent, there’s going to be a whole lot of contracts around the country for all kinds of services which are in in trouble—but the idea is that, whilst the existing law says you can purchase community legal services, apparently it wasn’t clear enough that that includes ancillary services, so all of the things that go alongside it, things that support; for example, computer systems, administrative staff, library systems, and all of those things that are a necessary part—an absolutely necessary part—of providing community legal services.

Of course, the other thing is Community Law Centres of Aotearoa, which is the overarching body—the idea of an organising and coordinating body across community law centres and whether, in fact, that could be purchased out of the special fund, because it didn’t strictly fit in with the phrase the “purchase of community legal services”. Now, to be perfectly honest, I can’t accept that when you enter into a contract for purchasing a service, you’re not also empowered to purchase those things which are necessary for the service to be provided. Whether it be community legal services or social work services or drug and alcohol addiction services, all of those things have a necessary administrative framing around them. But somewhere in the Ministry of Justice, I think some over-enthusiastic lawyer—I mean, there’s far too many of those, we know—has come up with the idea that purchasing community legal services is a narrow thing. You know, I get it: you’re dealing with Crown funds. Well, actually, you’re not; you’re dealing with funds from lawyers’ trust accounts.

That’s actually an important point that I would point out—that sometimes the Ministry of Justice seems to deal with this special fund as if it’s its own money. It’s not. It’s money which must be spent on community legal services. They are simply a clearing house for those funds, and they perhaps need to take a slightly different approach, because it’s not an appropriation. One of the things, when we read the Budget and look at the provision of funds to Community Law Centres of Aotearoa, it doesn’t appear in the Budget, because it’s not an appropriation. It comes from an entirely different way. There are occasionally—or there have been occasions where—the Government has topped up the special fund, in which case, obviously, an appropriation is needed.

The kind of rigour that the Public Finance Act might bring to an appropriation line in the Budget is not the kind of rigour you necessarily need when you’re purchasing community legal services from funds from the special fund—a fund which comes from lawyers’ trust accounts. The main point is this could have been in the Statutes Amendment Bill—

Vanushi Walters: Exactly.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: —thank you, Vanushi Walters—and we probably don’t even need to be here anyway, but here we are.

I guess the other thing is this: here we are under urgency, right? They want to keep cracking on with this; they want to go straight into the committee of the whole House stage when we have a lot of questions. Yet it’s about as urgent—well, it’s just not urgent. I mean, it’s a really good example of how this Government does, in fact, use urgency for non-urgent work. This is a thing—an issue—that’s been floating around for a while. It’s a short bill and it could have gone on any Order Paper, but no—they’ve put it in here under the auspices of urgent business, and it’s simply not urgent.

I guess the other thing I’ve just observed here is that the special fund—it’s worth just examining it in the longer term. In fact, there’s other work around the special fund that would have been far more useful, and in particular, the amount of the interest or the split of the interest, because lawyers’ trust accounts, in fact, have hundreds of millions of dollars in them at any one time. Banks love that because that’s money that they can take—you know, that’s just sitting there—and use as, essentially, their float, and lend money out and so on; make good money on it. They are therefore required to pay an appropriate rate of interest on it into the special fund, but the way it’s done is that 60 percent of that interest goes to the special fund and 40 percent goes to the bank in their back pocket, notionally for the administrative costs of administering trust accounts.

Well, that was done way back, I think, in—when was that?—2008, when the Law Practitioners Act turned into the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act, and arguably there was some administration, but the administrative burden of administering trust accounts now is extremely low. If you look at it, the banks are getting about $10 million a year from the special fund in profits, and that is eye-watering. I think it works out—I’ve done the numbers and, I think, from memory, it was about $10,000 per account that the banks get to keep. That’s $10 million that could usefully go into the community—ideally, I suppose, because it’s lawyers’ trust accounts, for legal services to the needy.

But look, if the Government is determined to proceed with this bill—and the other thing I would note and that I’ll raise later is: if the Government has been funding the ancillary services—as it says, the other services which support the provision of community legal services—is there a validity problem, and how are they addressing that? If the Government has entered into contracts without authority, then we’ve got a problem on our hands. This bill doesn’t seem to have any validation. It’s quite common to see validation bills, right—local government muck things up all the time; we’re constantly validating their actions—but there’s no validation aspect to this bill. That’s something I really want to interrogate and understand a bit later on.

But I do want to make clear that we absolutely support the work of community law centres. A little shout-out to Sue Moroney, who has been the chief executive of Community Law Centres of Aotearoa and has stepped down, given a new role that she’s got, I think, on Hamilton City Council.

So, yes, we’re going to support this bill, but if you’re going to bring it through urgency, a bill that isn’t urgent could have been in the Statutes Amendment Bill. We’ll give it a working-over and see where we go to from there.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I think I just want to pick up on, first of all, the previous speaker’s, the Hon Dr Duncan Webb’s, point that this bill is being brought back to the House under urgency. But I also think that there is a level of symmetry there, because, if the Hon Dr Duncan Webb remembers, this bill was introduced under urgency in June, and one of the questions that we had back then was: why was it introduced under urgency in the first place? I mean, yeah, I guess, on one hand, tangentially, you can have budgetary implications, but, again, the budgetary implication of this bill is about as removed from the rest of the bill that is needed, potentially under urgency, as it comes.

Then here we are, under urgency again, going through the remaining stages. I think the first thing I do want to mention and kind of pick up on is that during the initial urgency, because it was the first time that we were able to see the bill, the Green Party did oppose the bill out of caution. In the first reading, I spoke on the necessity of this bill in the first place and whether there is something more to it than initially meets the eye. Because, again, it was introduced under urgency. There wasn’t any form of a regulatory impact statement at that stage that I could see. However, as the Hon James Meager mentioned before, there was a very robust, you know, Justice Committee process. Again, props to the Justice Committee for the work that they do on a variety of different bills—but this is one of them that had a lot of consideration by that select committee during the select committee process.

So in terms of some of these contexts—yes, in terms of the legal services distribution of the special fund—we are looking at, particularly, the special fund that is done through the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006, which provides money into the special fund that must be paid to the Secretary for Justice for the purpose of funding community law centres. I’ll talk a little bit more about the purpose and some of the details of the fund, which we were able to obtain as part of that select committee process. But just in terms of the select committee, there were 13 submissions on this particular bill—sorry, 19 written submissions on this particular bill. Then we’ve had quite a few people who opposed this bill, interestingly. I think the most important oral submission was done by Community Law Centre Aotearoa—CLCA—which is appropriate since this is one of the bills that affects them the most.

In terms of the submissions, I think it’s important to note that while there were some submissions that opposed this bill, they were partly out of the scope of the bill in their opposition. But, nevertheless, both themes in the opposition is deserving of some highlighting in the second reading.

I think the first theme that took place as part of that is: what does it mean in terms of less funding for direct community legal service? One of the ones I can think of immediately is the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB), for example, which also offers a different kind of service, but also is an important service to this area. They also do a lot of work in terms of educating the communities on some of the legal issues or awareness things around the Privacy Act, etc. But this highlights the importance when it comes to things like access to justice, which is one of the core priorities for the Greens when we’re looking at this, because, again, I think many of us, or all of us, should, hopefully, unanimously agree that the rule of law and equity in access to justice is something that is paramount when we’re looking at the legal system. But, again, at this stage, we don’t see that equitability when it comes to the justice system, and both our community law centres that this bill affects as well as the CAB fulfils some of those and fulfils a requirement, as well as the legal aid, which fulfils various requirements for our communities to be able to have that if people aren’t able to pay for lawyers in the first place.

So that’s one of the first things. I think that it is outside of the scope of this bill, but it does highlight an issue that we need to address more broadly when we’re looking at other concerns—for example, when we’re setting the Budget for various community organisations. Again, because this bill was introduced in the Budget in May, it’s appropriate to also bring the Budget into the conversation here in the second reading.

Also, the other, I guess, theme, when it comes to opposition, is around what it means for any particular ring-fencing from a Māori and Māori law perspective. I also think that in that case it is also important, I guess, to note that while the bill itself doesn’t really address this particular area, but through conversations with CLCA, CLCA does have a very big focus not only regionally dependent because it very much depends on the need of the communities—but the equity impact or Māori-led service deliveries is something that is quite prominent within CLCA, depending on where you are. With that, I do want to give a special shout-out to the Community Law Centre Aotearoa in Rotorua. That particular CLCA, for example, does deal with a lot of the cases around the Māori Land Court, for example.

So it is, again, one of the things that the submitters have raised as part of the submission process that deserves highlighting, and it’s something that we should always consider, as with any policy setting or legislation—to ensure that we consider the equitability for Māori and how Te Tiriti o Waitangi and He Whakaputanga also centre in a lot of the decisions that we make.

Finally, I mentioned in the beginning that we, as the Justice Committee, did want to get some more information as a part of that process, on exactly what are some of the fundings that has been available, and what are some of the, I guess, relationships between the Crown and how the special fund, in this case, is used. I think it’s important as part of that select committee process that we are looking at the fact that, in cases where—OK, so, I guess, to start with, when we’re looking at the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act, it does set out how the special fund is used. In that particular legislation, section 301(5) allows banks to retain 40 percent of all interest payable on nominated trust accounts, but with an agreement that the CLCA has an arrangement in place with five of the commercial banks to receive an additional 20 percent of interest on lawyers’ nominal bank accounts.

This is what is being used to fund the 24 community law centres, and I think this is where, I guess, the initial concern and the initial purpose and the reason that the Minister of Justice brought this bill to the attention of the House and it was introduced in the House: it is around the contractual relationship under that particular usage of the special fund, and also the way that the secretary who holds some of that special fund is able to distribute the special fund, and we see that being played out in clause 4 of the bill.

But it’s also important to note here that as part of that submission process, the New Zealand Law Society also notes the amount of interest on trust accounts retained by the banks and the impact this has on practising fees, and the amount appears to be greater than what is retained in other jurisdictions. I think this is also something that is worthwhile, although outside the scope of this. But I think, again, it’s something that the legal experts in the New Zealand Law Society have raised and that is an important consideration for any further bills.

I agree with the Hon Dr Duncan Webb that something like this potentially could have been packaged as part of the statutory bill, because it seems to provide clarifications as opposed to make any sort of substantial changes. I think this is where some of the, I guess, overlap took place during the select committee process, with submitters hoping that the scope of this bill could be expanded and maybe there was room in this bill to expand that scope. But, again, as the bill stands, it’s quite a minute adjustment and clarification on how the Legal Services Act is playing out and how the secretary is able to do that.

With that, I’m happy to say that, in the second reading, the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand will be supporting this.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise in support of this piece of legislation. I note that my colleague Todd Stephenson normally sits on this committee but, unfortunately, he can’t be here to take this speech. This bill just clarifies how money from the Lawyers and Conveyancers’ Special Fund may be used by the community law centres, ensuring that the Secretary for Justice can contract for a wider range of costs that support the delivery of community legal services. This is a good bill and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill. I sat on the Justice Committee to hear the submissions on this bill. As has been briefed by other speakers, we had only 19 submissions, but the submission that we did have from the Community Law Centres of Aotearoa—they made a very good contribution to the select committee. It was very interesting to hear that 24 community law centres across New Zealand rely on this funding. From their submission—just taking a part out of it—they provided free law-related services to 47,000 clients and education to up to 26,000. I thought that contribution very much showed how important this funding is to them.

The biggest part of this was trying to broaden the use of the fund. We had an initial briefing how the direct services, the legal services, the representation advocacy work, and education could be used for this funding. However, things like the overheads, professional development, training fees, and coordination and maintenance couldn’t. So, really, this bill, through clause 4, replacement section 94(1), is just broadening the ability to use the fund.

Also, it is enhancing community law centres’ ability to assist the most needy. That, again, is very, very important. It offers sustainability within the legal aid system, without new Government spending. On this side of the House, any way that we’re not using taxpayers’ money where we can actually make dollars go further is something that we endorse. On that, I look forward to the committee of the whole House and I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This bill, as my colleague Lawrence Xu-Nan mentioned, is something that we initially opposed. The bill was originally considered under Budget urgency—I think it was in May rather than June—but then introduced in July, and it appeared at that time to be a change which would broaden the acceptable use of funds that were legislatively ring-fenced for legal aid services, but resulting in less funding for legal aid itself. So here we are, again, in urgency, considering a bill that doesn’t really need to be done under urgency. In fact, we seem to have been sitting under urgency for most of this term, which really shows that we have a Government that is more anti-democratic than anything and doesn’t really pay attention to good legislative process.

Hon Mark Patterson: So mean-spirited.

SCOTT WILLIS: Mean-spirited, perhaps, but it is a Friday and we do have things to do, but we will stay here until Tuesday next week, we’re quite happy—we’re quite happy. We know that a major barrier to seeking justice is its cost and high fees mean some people cannot—cannot—have access to their rights. This is not in the public interest. Community law centres are available to help with some matters, but are not adequately resourced, so legal aid is limited.

I do remember, many, many years ago, having had recourse to legal aid, and without the money to be able to go to a lawyer, it was really, really helpful—to be able to deal with a company that was doing double glazing but did a very poor job and contested their work, claimed money that they shouldn’t have claimed, and I didn’t know quite how to deal with that. Community law was incredibly helpful at enabling people—we were a young family at the time—to deal with that problem and assist us through a challenging situation.

We know that community law centres are an essential part of meeting the growing access-to-justice gap that we have, empowering people to resolve their legal issues. We know that the need in this area is growing. It is growing because we have increased poverty in our community; we have people under energy hardship in our community; we have people dealing with disreputable companies who are willing to take whatever money they can get; we have people who are dealing with agencies that are not serving their need in our communities because of this Government’s actions. That’s a problem, so we do need access to legal assistance.

We need to resource community law centres so they’re better able to meet their clients’ needs—their clients, who are the people are suffering or struggling the most in this society now—and restore and their mandate to act in individual cases and engage in more justice sector advocacy.

We were opposed to this bill at the earlier reading because it appeared to usher in a change that would broaden the acceptable use of legal services funding, but as my colleague Lawrence Xu-Nan has mentioned, that concern has largely been resolved during the select committee process, and we note that Community Law Centres of Aotearoa has given its support to this bill. As a result, we will support this bill at this point, but we will note that we think that the overuse of urgency is a dangerous, dangerous thing that this Government has engaged in, and we think that the anti-democratic nature of this Government is something that we really do need to address. We need to consider this—it’s a bigger question—so while we certainly do listen and pay attention to our community, we also want to make sure that our community has the ability to input into legislation.

Rather than sitting in urgency, we want to see better time for select committee process—longer time. This bill’s had some time, but we’re sitting in urgency doing the devil’s work with this Government, and we want to make sure that they don’t abuse urgency and give us more time to have the public have input into processes. Thank you. We’ll support this bill.

Mr Speaker, we have Opposition that is crowing about the use of urgency at the same time as saying these are non-controversial bills. Why don’t we clear the Order Paper, get through this quickly, and get on with the work of this House? I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to speak on the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill. What a crucial bill for the cost of living of all those Kiwis that are out there right now struggling to put food on the table! I’m sure this bill will make a big difference to people who queue up in the grocery line each week wondering how they’re going to feed their kids or put shoes on their feet!

What this bill does is it identifies that the Legal Services Act 2011 enables the secretary to enter contracts with community law centres to purchase legal services. However, there’s a glitch. Because this provision is narrow, it is really unclear whether community law centres can use money from the special fund to meet the indirect costs they incur when providing services, such as their leases or utilities. The Government has taken it upon itself to sit in urgency—not to help people get a job; not to help people pay for their food; not to help people pay for their mortgage or their rent or even help clothe their kids—to change it so that there’s a small technicality in the Legal Services Act to enable community law centres to access some funding.

I’m saying nothing wrong about community law centres, though. They do an outstanding job in New Zealand. Can we just pause for a moment and take a look at all the good work that they do. They have been substantially underfunded by previous National Governments and have really struggled to be able to provide the free legal advice that they do. I think this will actually go towards paying their leases, potentially. It would have been even better if there was additional money to be able to provide them to function and do all the good work they do. We know that many people struggle to access justice because the funds are prohibitive. Many people want to be able to proceed with legal advice—whether it be family law or other issues, immigration, or employment law—but we know that the ability to pay for a good lawyer is really prohibitive for a lot of New Zealanders. Community law services step into that space and do an excellent job. I’d like to acknowledge the Hutt Valley community law centres. We refer a lot of people to them through both of my offices that operate in Petone and Wainuiōmata, and they provide people with free legal advice in areas where people can’t afford a lawyer and they don’t know what to do next.

What community law services often do is they stipulate special sessions where people can come in and receive expertise and advice about a particular area, whether that be immigration, family, or employment law. They’re special, dedicated sessions where people can come and access a lawyer. I want to acknowledge those lawyers who do give their time and effort to go and provide that advice. It is warmly received in the community—especially those who are stressing about issues where they don’t fully understand how it’s going to impact upon them and their future and their families and their budget. Having that legal advice accessible to them is incredibly important.

For those reasons, we support the bill, but we don’t think urgency is a particularly good time to be passing legislation like this given that New Zealanders are struggling under a cost of living crisis and that, largely, Christopher Luxon is out of touch and has broken his promises to New Zealanders. He’s cut women’s pay; he’s promised to make the cost of living better, and while families struggle to pay the bills, he’s looking after property speculators and fossil fuel companies and largely abandoned middle New Zealand. But don’t worry, everybody—we’ve now got a technical change to the Legal Services Act so that they can all pay their rent, so, rest assured, help is on its way!

I’d also like to say that the Lawyers and Conveyancers’ Special Fund was established back in 1982, and it collects from banks 60 percent of the interest earned on solicitors’ and licensed conveyancers’ nominated trust accounts.

The Justice Committee only wanted one change made to this bill; the commencement date was changed to reflect the fact that 1 July 2025 has already passed—so we missed that one. This Government has fallen behind its plans in passing legislation, hence why we’re all sitting here ramming through a whole bunch of stuff at the end of the year, because they couldn’t plan their legislative programme properly. But that’s all right—we can just stay on a Friday and do all the work they didn’t manage to do during the year. We can expect more of that next year as the Government realises that it’s failed to deliver on its promises and it’s running out of time. New Zealanders are beginning to take notice of that, and that’s reflected in our polls right now.

This bill is important for those people who want to access more ability to get to legal services. If your local community law centre is struggling to pay the rent, this change will now enable them to pay for their lease. In some areas—and I know in Lower Hutt—it’s not easy and cheap to afford rent, so it allows the costs and the functions to be met through the special fund rather than Crown funding. That saves the ability of the Crown to fund that, and funds it through the special fund. It will enable future Crown funding to be reprioritised, and we hope that that does happen. We’re grateful for the fact that this bill, brought in for the use of the Lawyers and Conveyancers’ Special Fund, allows for these expenses in the delivery of community legal services. It’s not explicit in the current legislation that the delivery of community legal services can be paid, and so that’s what this bill is doing. It’s important that community legal services are funded properly, because they provide that vital role.

I don’t actually have all the submissions that we have—so we think that it’s a really important move to do that, but, once again, as I have highlighted, we are really concerned about what the priorities of this Government are. It does highlight that maybe they got their priorities just a bit wrong. If 200 people are leaving New Zealand for Australia every day to find better-paying jobs, I wonder if the Government could have a better policy programme to retain New Zealanders here—to provide jobs and to give young people some hope and some training or apprenticeships. All those things would be great things to do to actually give people here in New Zealand some sort of vision about what the Government intends for New Zealand to be like in the next five or 10 years. But don’t worry, because Labour’s got that sorted out: we’ll be talking lots about jobs, health, homes, and real action on the cost of living. We do have a vision for New Zealand, and we want it built by New Zealanders for New Zealanders, because that matters.

We want an economy that works for everybody, not just a two-tiered economy that serves some people while the rest of the country is really struggling to be able to make ends meet. That doesn’t seem fair, and it seems, quite frankly, really out of touch. While all we hear from the Government is trying to blame the previous Government, as the clock ticks on, people are starting to realise that a lot of the entrenchment and the prolonging of the recession in the economy that we’re seeing now is largely because so many of those big projects around the country got cancelled, 20,000 construction workers went overseas, and that’s been a significant reason why prices have continued to go up and why people just don’t have the wages.

The fact that we’ve now had this technical change to the Legal Services Act really has no impact whatsoever on all of those pressing issues on New Zealanders right across our lands, who are really wondering and scratching their heads and looking at the current Government to try to find some solutions to these daily issues. It demonstrates, really, that they have no clear understanding of the reality of New Zealanders’ day-to-day lives. Many New Zealanders are out of work; the rates of unemployment in regions such as Gisborne are way up. I think it was like a 70 percent increase in unemployment in places like Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay—huge ones. In particular, the doubling of unemployment for people aged 40 to 44—that’s a big doubling of unemployment rates. Our youth unemployment rate is at 15.2 percent. That’s a huge amount of increase in our young people being unemployed.

The solutions offered—apart from this Legal Services Bill—are that they’re taking the jobseeker benefit away from 18- and 19-year-olds, as well, at the same time as cutting funding to apprenticeships and tertiary training. You would think, at a time when they’re taking the jobseeker benefit off 18- and 19-year-olds and when there’s record unemployment in New Zealand, that you would offer some alternatives like training or education or opportunities—but no. We’re consigning everybody to a flight to Australia, because the Government doesn’t really care about the outcomes. At the end of the day, we can all rest assured that the rent in our local community law service’s office will be paid on time because of this bold, forthright, and ambitious bill for the future of New Zealand. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill. I’m a big fan of community law centres. When I was a law student, one of the first things I did was head along to—well, I studied at Victoria—to the Wellington community law centre and volunteer as a student, and then as a lawyer. I used to volunteer on the employment night. As my colleague Ginny Andersen says, many of the sessions are specially focused on particular issues that people have. There was always a line, and there were always a lot of people waiting to see lawyers there.

I really love the community law centre movement because, although in my particular line of work, doing a lot of employment law work—and I did do a lot of work for trade union members—there will always be a section of the community who, for whatever reason, usually financial reasons, are unable to get assistance in any other way than going to a community law centre. The lawyers at community law provide a really invaluable service.

I don’t know how much people know about community law centres, but it’s not a full service—“We’re going to take your case to the Supreme Court”—usually. I think, maybe, there might be a few instances, and my colleague Vanushi Walters, who’s much more experienced in community law centre legal provision than I am, can probably think of a few examples of some strategic and important cases that community law centres do. But generally, it’s the type of hard work of looking through people’s papers, figuring out what their legal problem is, pointing them in the right direction, and telling them it’s going to be OK. It’s not glamorous and it usually won’t get your name on a reported case, but it will make a big difference for those people. For some of them, it will be the first time they’ve talked to a lawyer. The work of community law is really invaluable.

I think New Zealand should be proud of the fact that, actually, our legal community has got together and decided to support New Zealanders through not only staff in community law but also with their trust accounts. You’ll know, if you’ve ever bought or sold a house, when your money goes to your lawyer, it sits in a trust account, and so sometimes, there can be millions of dollars sitting there, of course, earning interest from the bank—accumulated, of people’s different house transactions, not usually just one house, but, of course, that could be also the possibility. Anyway, so there’s a lot of money in trust accounts. The interest goes to funding community law centres—at the moment, it’s about 60 percent. This money then goes to fund these community law centres.

I’ve spoken very positively about the community law movement because it’s something that I think is really important and invaluable, and we should support it. My wish is that we support it more than we currently are. It is disappointing to see this bill focus so much on funding but provide no real additional change in the amount of funding that will be provided to community law centres. As far as I’m aware, this is a clarification, it’s a funding fix, and it just clarifies that the practice, as it currently stands, is legal. It’s not an additional amount of funding for this very important service. That, on the one hand, is disappointing.

The second thing is, if we are going to spend the House’s time looking at community law, I wish that we were doing something that would actually be improving the situation for community law, and this bill doesn’t do that. This bill finds an issue, which I think, looking at it, is arguable. I did look at the primary piece of legislation, and I think, probably, what’s happening currently, on my brief reading, is probably OK. I’d be really surprised to find an instance of where someone would challenge that, as Duncan Webb said, the provision of legal services that requires a building, a premises, a photocopier, the lights to be turned on, running water, health and safety to be present there, desks, computers; I would really be surprised if it was—which is what currently happens, and that’s funded through this fund—found to be not permissible.

We will support this bill. We’d like to see more support for community law centres, and I’d also like to see greater ambition with the legislative programme in front of this House. If this was truly a necessary change, why didn’t we look at how we might be able to support community law centres more? Surely there was something, additionally, that this House could have done to enable them to do their work.

I know everyone around this House who is an MP will have, at some stage—maybe weekly; almost daily—referred their constituents to community law. They deserve our assistance, they deserve our support, and I wish this House would do more to support them.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This bill is amazing. It supports our community law centres, who do great things in the community for people who can’t afford to pay for their own private representation. I have great pleasure in commending this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Now, of all the bills that we’ve seen come through the House under urgency, this one has to win the prize—this one has to win the prize for the strangest use of urgency to put a bill through the House. Shame on you, Government. But I’ve got to say, I’m at least very happy that you didn’t use urgency and you did let the bill go through to select committee. You know why I’m very happy? Because we got this beautiful quote from Community Law Centres of Aotearoa itself that says, “We view legislative change to be unnecessary.” Ha, ha! Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic use of time! So they’re kind of going, “Yeah, OK.”, but they don’t see that it’s necessary. Not only are you passing legislation on it; this is the second time you’ve put it on a list as being urgent. It is absolutely bizarre, I’ve got to say.

It is a pleasure, though, to speak about community law, because I spent almost a decade there as a lawyer, a supervising solicitor, and then managing YouthLaw Aotearoa, so they have a very close place to my heart. I’ll have a lot more to say about that at committee of the whole House stage, of course. But I do think that they play a crucial role—the role they’re most frequently known for is the role their lawyers and student volunteers play, but they do play other roles, as well. One of those roles was the first one that I got involved with as a law student when YouthLaw were involved in drafting the shadow or parallel report to the United Nations on New Zealand’s compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

YouthLaw is part of an organisation that’s called Children’s Rights Alliance Aotearoa. When I was part of it, it was called Action for Children and Youth Aotearoa. An interesting fun fact: the current Children’s Commissioner was on the board of that organisation, as well. That’s the first time I met her. But we travelled to Geneva and we were the civil society delegation who were holding the Government to account to see whether the Government were actually complying with children’s rights. The Hon Anne Tolley was leading the Government delegation at the time. So, yes, they play an important role in terms of direct legal services like the provision of advice and representation, but they also look at law reform roles and issues and they also look at broader issues in terms of reporting internationally.

Another interesting fun fact was that in a previous National Government, the National Government decided that they would no longer fund Community Law Centres of Aotearoa to do law reform work, so that funding was shifted into other legal services. It’s only with the Labour Government coming back in that that service was restored. It always really appalled me that the then National Government weren’t concerned about the systemic issues that we were identifying by actually talking to people about their issues on the ground—so a really broad-based set of services that Community Law provides.

I also wanted to give some examples of the type of legal advice that would be the kind of day-to-day, bread and butter work of a community law centre, especially with my former YouthLaw hat on. There were frequent instances when we would provide advice to young people about sexual harassment issues, often in the context of student jobs. They simply just didn’t know where to go and we would be the first contact for them. For young people experiencing family violence issues—on that we’d get calls directly from young people, but also from counsellors and people working with young people.

We’d work on minor criminal matters, as well, including where young people were charged with offences. An interesting thing that I found working in that role is that young people often will go into situations where they’re with a group and will want to defend their friends. On several occasions, we had young people claiming to be the person responsible for things like minor wilful damage while they were out with their friends when, in fact, they weren’t the person who did it. On reflection overnight, a week later, they sat down and thought about it and did want help defending that.

Most of what Community Law were doing at the time when I was there was employment law cases—I think that’s common across the country still; it tells of that huge employment need in that part of the system. But I think one thing we struggled with—and the system continues to struggle with this—is the delay in actually getting justice when you have an issue in the employment space or, for that matter, if you have what I’d like to call an everyday legal issue, where your recourse is with one of our tribunals. I’m sure Government members would be horrified to know that if you wanted to take a privacy case, for example, to the Human Rights Review Tribunal, you could be waiting up to three years to get in front of the tribunal members and to have a decision made. That, of course, is not access to justice. I mention that because we can sort of protect this funding, but then, of course, we need to make sure that the other parts of access to justice are there, as well.

On the special fund itself—and others have spoken about the 60/40 balance in terms of what comes to community law centres. The amount—and Dr Duncan Webb has referenced this—that comes from the special fund has fluctuated in the past. There have been many times when the Ministry of Justice budget has topped up the funding, and other times when the special fund could accommodate the entirety of community law’s needs. So back in 2019, the total pot of funding going to Community Law Centres of Aotearoa was almost $13 million; the amount of the special fund was $10.9 million, so that top-up was there. By 2023, we had more than $20 million in the special fund. You can see how, when the markets are doing particular things, that really can affect special fund funding.

Now, I raise this because I was a little concerned when the Minister who was moving urgency listed this bill and said that it was part of Budget savings commitments. Now, I think that’s a problem, because there will be times when the special fund can cover the entirety of Community Law Centres of Aotearoa’s funding, but, in truth, as others have said, it doesn’t cover the totality of legal need at the moment. So, in my view, there currently is a need for the Ministry of Justice to be topping up that funding even further. This shouldn’t be—and I hope it’s not—an excuse to say that the ministry will no longer be looking at what the total legal need is. So I am very perplexed at the entry of this bill. That remains my concern—that that is not what the Government should be doing.

So I will be seeking assurances during the committee of the whole House stage that the Government understands that its obligation is to look at access to justice across the board. I’ve just made reference to one part of our justice system which isn’t operating as it should. It must then provide the funds to ensure that people can access what they need to.

I would also say, in terms of that slightly arm’s-length nature that community law have, the special fund funding does give it that. I was troubled when I was at community law when we had Ministry of Justice contracts that had a “no surprises” clause in them. From time to time, when we were doing law reform work, I would advise the ministry that we were about to release a paper or come forward with a policy proposal. On one occasion I had a response that said, “Yes, that’s fine with us. Go right ahead.” Of course, that’s not what a ministry should be doing. A “no surprises” clause means that you inform, but there is no permission. That happened under the last National Government, as well.

So, again, in the committee stage I will be looking to ensure that it’s very clear that the Government understands the independence with which community law centres need to continue to work, and that the pot of funding that is the special fund is earmarked for Community Law Centres of Aotearoa. While administratively it comes through the Ministry of Justice, it is earmarked by statute for Community Law Centres of Aotearoa and, therefore, protects their independence.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Look, it’s really a shame to hear that on the other side of the House, they think it’s a waste of time to work a few extra hours to give our community law centres access to more funds. We don’t think it’s a waste of time, and I commend this bill to the House.

I commend this bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

This bill is set down for committee stage immediately. I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill.

In Committee

Clause 1 Title