Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill

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

DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative—[Interruption] Quiet. That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon NICOLE McKEE: I move, That the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

I would like to begin by acknowledging the Justice Committee for their examination of this bill. My appreciation also goes to the submitters who took the time to participate in the select committee process and for their contributions. This Government is committed to reducing delays in the courts system. We are very conscious of the fact that many New Zealanders are waiting too long to achieve justice and get closure through the courts. That is why this bill is so important.

The amendments in the bill are necessary to support the efficient, fair, and timely resolution of court proceedings for all court parties and participants. The bill increases the cap on the number of High Court judges, enabling two additional judges to be appointed. More judges will help the courts better manage the growing workload.

One thing that has been heard through the select committee process, and other comments on the bill, is that the increase of two additional judges may not be enough to meet the demand for judicial resource. The Minister of Justice has, therefore, introduced an Amendment Paper to be considered at the committee of the whole House stage, which will enable the appointment of a further three judges. This will bring the total of potential new judges to five so that our senior courts can more effectively manage the workload.

The court system is complex, and more judges alone cannot address the timeliness challenges. That is why this bill also improves various court processes so the courts can run more efficiently. The bill makes changes to improve pre-trial case management so there is less duplication, it ensures appeals are heard by the most appropriate court, and it gives judges better tools to manage proceedings that plainly abuse the process of the courts. It also allows coroners to close certain inquiries when it is no longer appropriate to conduct these.

The Justice Committee has made recommendations that clarify and refine the bill. This includes changing the commencement date to 1 February 2026, enabling an order that deals with plainly abusive proceedings to be made on the papers, and ensuring consistency across the Coroners Act. I support these recommendations, which will help improve efficiency in the courts. Justice delayed is justice denied, and this Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill goes some way to addressing this. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

There are a couple of truisms in the justice system. One of them is that you can’t hide the bodies, and the other is that whatever else you try and do with crime statistics, look at what happens in the courts, because that also tells you the truest story. When I look at this bill, there are two things I look at. Yes, we do need some more High Court judges. There’s no doubt about it. We certainly agree with that. But you’ve actually got to look at why we need more judges. Yes, we need to speed up things, but, actually, have a look at the cases that are going before the court where the increase is. The increase is actually murder, attempted murder, and manslaughter, which are category 4 offences.

Now, we often hear—and every Government’s guilty of this—the Government talking about how it’s great we are doing well on crime. Often, it will involve a different way of looking at crime statistics, and they will always be presented in a manner which makes the presenter look best. I always remember visiting New York at the time of all the reforms over there, the Bratton reforms, and that was when, all of a sudden, each city looked at what New York had achieved, and they had a thing called CompStat, and it was where they actually started counting the crimes. They made each precinct actually responsible for the crime that happened in their precinct. This caught on right around the States, and it exposed a few things. One of them, Philadelphia, was the city that had these wonderful results—“Boy, hadn’t crime gone down?”—and in every category, it looked like they had basically solved the problem for ever of crime, except for the murders, because they couldn’t hide the bodies.

That’s why we have a look at the statistics. We have a look at what’s happening in our courts, which, of course, is what this bill is about. Rightfully, every speaker should be concentrating on the bill. I’ll promise you, Madam Speaker, that’s exactly what I will be doing.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: That’s exactly right, Mr O’Connor.

GREG O’CONNOR: That’s why this is a very good idea that we actually do increase the number of judges. How high? I’ve actually got a tabled amendment. It’s interesting that here we are again. Many of our speakers tonight have spoken that we are very, very late on a Tuesday night, speaking about this. We actually wonder why we have to come back here to increase—in one of the provisions of this bill—the number of judges by two. I have a tabled amendment that says, “Let’s have a range of judges so that, as crime goes up and down and as the number of bodies perhaps go up and down, we can actually have some flexibility in the system.” Of course, it being a second reading, I won’t spend too much time on that tabled amendment. I look forward to about, perhaps, 11.30 tonight when we’re in the committee of the whole House on this bill. It will be a shame for anyone to be wasting some good sleeping time.

This comes to the second part of this bill, in particular, where we actually talk about the cases. There’s been some sort of—I won’t say playing with statistics—obfuscation around the statistics. But one thing that is clear is that the cases that are coming to court are actually taking longer to resolve. They’re more serious. You can put that down to something. I spent some considerable time as a detective. In fact, I trained detectives. I look, now, at the sort of evidence that comes before trials compared to, perhaps, when I was training detectives. I look at, I suppose, the complications. Things like DNA weren’t available. Cellphones weren’t available. CCTV wasn’t available. These are all the things now that, if you go and sit through any serious trial—certainly any serious criminal trial—you’ll very quickly see that that’s where the first of the evidence is. For any detective and any police officer going to a crime scene, the first thing they do is look for a phone. The first thing they do is look for CCTV. The first thing they do is look for DNA. As you can imagine, these are a little more complicated than things like fingerprints, a little more complicated even than perhaps getting a confession or other ways and means of taking cases before the court.

You’ve got this combination where you’ve got more serious crimes, more, as I say, murder, attempted murder, and manslaughter category of offences going through. They’re all taking that much longer. Again, these are the things that are putting considerable pressure on the criminal justice system, and, very sensibly, this will attempt to resolve some of those issues. Again, it’s not going to, because the other thing you do need, of course, are courtrooms. None of these things by themselves will work, because the bottleneck in the criminal justice system is almost invariably the courts. Periodically, you’ll see that police, for various reasons, will be taking action on any particular sort of crime, and it might be several months down the track, but the bottleneck will occur when they all need to go through the criminal justice system.

An attempt was actually made to solve that. In fact, the National Government in 2012 introduced a system called tag and release. It was, actually, quite an interesting system where they actually had a strategy of reducing the entries into the criminal justice system by 19 percent in a year. Well, that just meant that the bottleneck was moved from the courts back to the police station, so as people were arrested, they would come through, and they would be tagged and released, pre-charged, and warned, and they would never be in the system again. There would be very little paperwork involved, and they’d be back out to do their deeds again. It worked quite well for about two or three years until, very quickly, the offenders cottoned on to the fact that it was a risk-free occupation to go and play up on a Saturday night down in the local city centre, because, at worst, it might cost you a couple of hours sitting in the watch house or sitting in a cell. You’ll be very quickly back out. There’ll be no court appearance in the number one court on Monday or Tuesday morning, and so you very quickly realise it was consequence free.

When we introduce any new strategy, it’s almost invariably about three or four years down the track before you really do understand the impact of it. We’re in sugar-hit country; we’re in politics, so, often, we’re all looking for some new strategy that is going to solve everything from the common cold to AIDS, and we’ll stand on every mountaintop and talk about it. Any of these new strategies that come in—again, I’m looking at strategies like this that we’re talking about in the bill here, Madam Speaker, which you, rightfully, are looking at me to make sure that I am referring back to the bill—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: You haven’t strayed too far.

GREG O’CONNOR: Well, I’m just making sure that you didn’t feel any need to actually point me back to the bill there, Madam Speaker.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, you stayed on tag and release for a while, so I knew you were on the bill.

GREG O’CONNOR: I know what an extremely difficult job it is to sit to where you are, Madam Speaker. You’re doing a fine job.

So, anyway, coming back, I may have just lost my train of thought there as I went through that. I’ll just moved through this—I do notice the time has moved on a little. Another important part of this provision, too, relates to the coroner’s court.. Now, this is also something that very much relates to what I was talking about before, because the coroner’s court traditionally is that which reports last in the whole process. Again, typically when there’s a homicide, it will be the job of the detective who’s in charge of the body—one of their jobs—to go along and open the inquest. That will then carry on through the trials, and way, way down the track, finally, it will be closed by the coroner. The best thing you can ever do is get a certificate as to cause a death, which means that the coroner doesn’t need to be involved. Often these deaths do go into the system, and having an off-ramp for the coroner, where new evidence becomes available, that precludes the need for what is often a very expensive and complicated process of having a coroner or having an inquest. Again, it’s quite a sensible provision. It’s hard to see where it would be used. The initial thought would be that, perhaps, it’s used for where it becomes obvious that there may be a self-inflicted death. That’s actually not the case. Self-inflicted is one of the exclusions to this. Self-inflicted deaths will always go through the system.

So I realise that there will be other opportunities, later on tonight during the committee of the whole House, to talk about some of these issues. Again, we won’t know for three or four years down the track whether some of these things have worked, because it is a grindingly slow system, the justice system. It does get there at the end, but really evaluating the success of things like this is usually where, say, a five-year review would be a good idea. We’re commending this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I thank the previous speaker because, again, I think that the previous speaker, Greg O’Connor, is absolutely spot on when talking about the fact that we seem to be in this sort of sugar rush in the sense that we keep on chasing what is the short term as opposed to seeing some of the longer-term impacts that we have on some of these matters. But in terms of the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill, the Green Party does support this bill because it does make some good progress in that sense, towards both timeliness and also access to justice, and also in terms of addressing some of the issues within our court system.

I want to first just address probably one of the more significant sections of this bill, which is the increase in the number of High Court judges from 55 to 57. But I think it’s also really important to acknowledge as well the Minister of Justice’s Amendment Paper 443, which further increases that number, from 57 to 60, and I’m sure that this is something that we’ll be discussing in the upcoming committee stage.

With that being the first major section of the adjustment made in this bill when it comes to the Senior Courts Act 2016, the other significant part in the other half of this bill is the changes to the Senior Courts Act, which are around plainly abusive civil proceedings. This is the sort of functioning that we’ve seen with a few of these bills coming through the House. It’s from a court perspective on, for example, vexatious litigants, etc., and this is very similar to that in the sense that the registrar is able to inform or is able to refer the plainly abusive civil proceeding to the judge, and the judge will have the power to make orders and give directions in respect of plainly abusive civil proceedings.

This is something that the Justice Committee did flag to officials on this bill, mainly because of the fact that it is unclear what the plainly abusive civil proceedings would entail, and then whether that is going to inadvertently prevent or deprive areas for some of the genuine issues that we’re seeing, or for people who are scarred—for example, who are either from disabled communities or who are neurodivergent, who may simply not understand some of the nuances in terms of vexatious litigation. However, I think that overall, during the select committee stage, this was something that was discussed, and additions were added into it as a sort of safeguard, and I wanted this to be mentioned. That is an area, which is the new section 164B(2A) in clause 7, which also covers some of these in terms of what judges have to record and how judges will be able to make some of those rulings. That’s the first major part of this bill.

Actually, before I move on to the second half of the bill, regarding the Criminal Procedure Act and the Coroners Act, it’s also important to mention some of the submissions process as a part of this. In terms of the select committee process, we could see that there were not as many submissions as we thought for a bill that increased the number of judges, which does have, I guess, a budgetary implication. Again, this bill was one of the bills that was brought to the House under urgency in May, and we’re getting around to this bill now, as well. So—

Tamatha Paul: A bit of a backlog.

Dr LAWRENCE XU-NAN: There is a backlog of bills, yeah. In this case, in terms of the select committee process, there were 28 submitters on this, with wide-ranging opinions, and there were broader things, as well. I think, in general, there were concerns raised by some around whether this is prioritising timeliness over fairness and how that was going to be addressed.

I do think that as we are starting to see an increased number of High Court judges, particularly when High Court judges are also increasingly more diverse—actually, in general, our senior court judges are becoming more diverse. In saying that, I would like to bring it to the House’s attention that although in the latest census, we’re seeing that there are 19.2 percent of the people here in Aotearoa New Zealand are people of colour migrants or colour, the number of High Court judges, or judges in general—not simply High Court judges, but the number of judges—who are, for example, of Asian descent is less than 4 percent. The number of High Court judges of Asian descent—which is the District Court and above—currently, I think, sits at one. So, despite the fact that we have this enormously diverse population, our higher court judge appointment processes and our higher court judge demographic hasn’t necessarily reflected that or kept up with the changes in our demographics.

It’s also important to mention that one of the things that is recommended in terms of the fact that we are looking at increasing the number of High Court judges is also to do with the simple fact that as the population is increasing, the number of cases is going to be increased and a number of cases are going to be more complex, not necessarily in the sense that there are more complex laws, but, again—like I mentioned before—the nature of the cases will be more complex. One of the things which we are, unfortunately, seeing is a reduction in funding around the section 27 reports, which is incredibly crucial when it comes to the timeliness of our judicial process.

Especially, like I said before, when the judges themselves do not necessarily have the same lived experience or share the same experience as those who are in front of the court, it does cause certain delays if there isn’t a robust cultural report or process. I do draw the House’s attention to some of the latest issues and the latest work that’s been done by, particularly, Chinese lawyers around contractual agreements within Chinese communities, which has been hugely complex and has also meant that cases become more complex, the rulings become more complex, and there are more reasons, then, for people to appeal to a higher court. I think that for something like that, in terms of whether we want to address judicial timeliness, we should also really be looking at whether some of those matters meant that we are seeing more appeals happening further and further, higher up into not just simply the High Court but also the Court of Appeal, as well as the Supreme Court. All of that tied together is one of the themes that did come through in terms of the submitters.

The other thing that did come through in terms of the submitters—and this is, again, similar to what I mentioned in the second reading of the previous bill on the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Funds) Amendment Bill, as well—was that there is this general undertone of concern that people have in terms of equity for Māori within the justice system. I think that this is also a feature that we see here within this particular bill. Again, although that particular feature may be embodied as part of the timeliness of the court system that we’re hoping to see going forward, the specificity of how that provides equity may not have been covered or addressed in this bill. That’s unfortunate, but it’s also understandable, and we’re hoping that the Government is able to bring something that would be able to allay some of those concerns that the community have in the future.

Moving on to the second part, Part 2 of this bill, it is also an equally important section, and it actually comes out from beyond, I guess, the court system, but it is also involved within it, and part of that is around the Criminal Procedure Act 2011. I want to start by addressing some of that in terms of the Criminal Procedure Act 2011, and for this particular part, one of the things that is most important is the pre-trial processes if the defendant is being charged in respect of two or more offences in different District Court offices, and how the processes will be managed for that. We will have some other questions on this during the committee stage as well, because I think this is really important, and one of the things that we did discuss was how that’s going to be coordinated and managed between different District Courts.

There is also the other one that I mentioned before, which is how the Court of Appeal judges may remit first appeals to the High Court. This, again, comes back to what I mentioned before, which is that cases are becoming increasingly complex. We do allow people the right of appeal, and it is about how that process is going, as we see, further and further into the Court of Appeal and also the Supreme Court.

Finally, we’re seeing an amendment to the Coroners Act 2006—who knew that I might be running out of time? I think that the most concerning part of this—and it may be discussed a little bit further—is the retrospective element of this. For example, as of 30 June, there are 3,240 active coronial inquiries, and so how is that going to be managed as part of this?

The Green Party does support this bill. We do have some amendments on this that we’ll want to seek guidance on, but—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Surprise, surprise!

Dr LAWRENCE XU-NAN: —they will wait until the committee stage.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in support of the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill. The ACT Party does love efficiency, and we are backing this bill because it will bring efficiency that can be made across the judicial system. This bill will improve timeliness in the judicial system by appointing more judges, giving courts better tools, reducing duplication, and supporting our coroners. For those reasons, I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill. It’s probably one of those bills, actually, where if we could change the title, it would be quite good for some of the members. But anyway, we’ve got past that.

The major parts of this bill are changing the number of High Court judges from 55 to 57—a lot of that is about the complexity around cases now and, also, the obvious thing around population growth of New Zealand—striking out plainly abusive proceedings on the papers—that just makes sense; it’s no different from us striking out submissions when we get abusive language—streamlining criminal pre-trial processes, so if you’ve got a number of different trials or cases across the country, putting them all into one court or one place just makes sense.

What I do want to highlight is the coroners being able to close inquiries. That was something that was quite debated within the process of the submissions through the select committee process. Looking back retrospectively at something is, often, something that we don’t change or allow to be changed. But we’ve got over 3,200 cases sitting there; it only makes sense if we can give closure to families with some of those cases that have been sitting there for nearly up to three years.

On that, I look forward to the committee of the whole House. I commend this to the House.

E tū ana ahau ki te tautoko i tēnei pire, engari e kōrero ahau i te reo Pākehā mō tēnei pire.

[I stand to support this bill, but I will speak on this bill in English.]

I rise to support the Judicature—I’ve never seen that word before in my life—(Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill. We agreed to support this bill to select committee. We had some parts about the bill that we wanted to explore around the vexatious litigation element because we didn’t want there to be any provisions that dismissed claims in the court that might have been legitimate but complex, and we wanted to make sure that everybody has that access to justice.

We supported it with reservations, but now that it’s gone through that process and the select committee has happened, we are happy to support it through its second reading—yeah, woo hoo! Our main concerns were around vexatious litigation within the High Court, and we felt that these safeguards against that kind of behaviour and conduct were already in the High Court rules. But we can see that there is some merit to transferring these to the Senior Courts Act, and we’re pleased that standard discretion by judges apply. We’re particularly pleased about this given the different bills that have come through this Parliament in this term which have had a significant impact on judicial discretion, which I’ll talk about later on, if I have time.

This bill, we hope, will address the backlogs that currently exist in our courts. We know that they are quite big. We know that according to the latest New Zealand Law Society report, there were over 140,000 court appearances that were delayed because of COVID-19. We’ve mainly resolved a lot of those—a lot of that backlog now—but, still, there are delays. As everybody says—and I wonder if people have said it today—justice delayed is justice denied, which is a great saying that really encapsulates parts of this bill.

Obviously, the bill does more than amend the Senior Courts Act. It does some other things to other Acts, including the Criminal Procedure Act and the Coroners Act. Now, I’m not going to talk about the Coroners Act because I don’t know a lot about—

Tom Rutherford: The law.

TAMATHA PAUL: —the coronial inquiry. I’ve amended a law, have you?

Tom Rutherford: I didn’t say anything.

TAMATHA PAUL: Good. Anyway, back to the bill. One thing that was also raised in the New Zealand Law Society report is that the cost of civil jurisdiction within the High Court has increased over time. They’ve found that cases going through the High Court have become more complex and have taken a longer amount of time to litigate, and so allowing the number of judges to increase from 55 to 57 will really help with those lengthy cases that are really chewing up the High Court’s time. We think that it’s a good thing to have more and better judges within our justice system.

The other thing is that delays in courts are really problematic because they really erode the public’s sense of confidence and trust in the justice system, particularly for those individuals who have got cases before them that are really traumatic or personally affecting—whether they’re dealing with, say, a violent partner or someone who is abusing them or something like that. The fact that they have to wait so long due to backlogs is really not a good thing, because they’re, obviously, waiting in fear. I think that whole part around public confidence and rebuilding that back from those hundred thousand - plus court appearance backlogs is a good thing—for us to do everything we can to reduce that wait time.

Again, we could get into judicial discretion in depth, and I’m thinking in particular about the changes to the sentencing law reforms, which really erode judicial discretion when it comes to sentencing and things like sentencing discounts. Also, my colleague Lawrence made a really good point around section 27 reports and how that has also contributed to the lengthiness of the courts because the judges don’t have a full picture of the person who stands before them. Ironically, removing section 27 reports has actually made everything more expensive, because now lawyers have to get psychological assessments and drug and alcohol assessments to give the judge a full picture of the person who stands before them. I could go on and on, but sadly—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: But your time is running out.

TAMATHA PAUL: —I cannot. My time is done. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is a Government that is tough on crime. In the past year, there have been 182 patches seized, 643 insignia items seized, 178 firearms seized, 856 charges for the prohibited display of gang insignia in public places, 255 finalised charges, and 188 convictions. In order to make sure the system works and that these can go through the courts, we need to make sure there are enough judges. Therefore, I commend this bill, this evening, to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. That is the kind of depth of analysis we expect from Carl Bates. It got us all the way there, didn’t it?

This bill is another “access to justice” bill. Sadly, it’s a bill that’s here because this Government seems to think that the only way to address problems in our society is incarceration. We’re tough on the causes of crime on this side of the House, and we want to address the problems and we want to “fix up” people rather than “lock up” people. That’s the fundamental distinction between our two approaches to criminal justice.

Tom Rutherford: What about ram raids?

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: Well, someone—some young person over the other side—talked about ram raids. The fact of the matter is that we addressed ram raids, and thank you to the National Government for doing at least one thing and picking up one of our programmes, which is the fast-track programme, wrapping around families with troublesome young people.

Rather than boot camps, which do nothing and which are an abject failure, the Fast Track programme, which was to address those young people doing things like ram raids, said, “What are the problems in these families that are giving rise to this kind of behaviour?” We looked at it, and it was problems like health, problems like drug and alcohol addiction, including in the family, problems like not having enough money or even enough food, or young people not going to school and not engaging with services. Thank you to the National Government for picking up and, in fact, expanding our Fast Track programme. The reduction in the number of young people offending is largely built on the back of the programme that we started, so thank you for that. It’s one of the kinds of things that we could do that would not necessarily require an increase in the number of High Court judges.

I’m not begrudging a High Court judge the amount they get paid. I can’t remember the exact number, but it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s actually not the cost of a High Court judge, because, on top of that, you’ve got to accommodate them, you’ve got to give them an executive assistant, you’ve got to give them a judge’s clerk, and you’ve got to give them all of those other things that go with. It’s well over a million dollars, and if you think of that million dollars, in terms of what you could do elsewhere in the system, it’s worth thinking about. Having said that, I want to be clear that we want to make sure that our justice system is properly resourced. For that reason, we’re supporting this bill. It’s important to note that there’s no obligation to appoint the number of judges set out, and maybe there should be a minimum number of judges to make sure we’ve always got enough. The last thing we want is the executive nickel and diming the judiciary by not appointing enough judges. That hasn’t happened to date, but it’s a protection that we might want to consider.

Lifting the cap is appropriate. Having said that, I also want to look at the other things that are in this bill, which some of the other speakers have skimmed over. In fact, National Party members skim over everything, because the backbenchers—I mean, at least their Ministers engage with the issue, but the backbenchers aren’t actually engaged with the very tricky issues that present themselves. If you look at, for example, the powers given to registrars and judges to dismiss out-of-hand claims on the basis that they are an abuse of procedure, it’s actually kind of both conceptually and practically challenging. If we think of some things that have happened recently, there is a real danger that someone comes up and presents themselves and they don’t present themselves well and they are a difficult person and they present themselves and present their case in intemperate language. They may even do it in a way which has all the hallmarks of not just an annoying person but a person who’s a little bit—I want to be careful with my language—not balanced. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s not something to the allegations they’re making.

When we come to say that a registrar can refer a matter to a judge on the basis that it is plainly abusive, we need to exercise real caution. There has always been a power for the court to dismiss matters which are an abuse of the process of the court. It’s always been there, but there have been protections there. The protections have always been: if you file a case—and it’s inevitably a lay litigant, and they could have a claim which is not well formulated, not put in legal language, and it might have all kinds of things in it, some outrageous allegations and some language which is not appropriate, but sometimes in the middle of it, deep down, if you look hard enough, there’s a kernel of truth. That gets tested in court, and it might get thrown out at the first instance, but there’s a right of appeal. You can go upstairs, go to the Court of Appeal, and you can argue it there, but here, if you look at it in this case, this gives the power to judges to throw out, essentially, proceedings which they think are plainly an abuse—and this is important—without hearing from the person who filed that claim. They can look at something and go, “Oh, that’s got nothing to it.”

The general test for an abuse is that it has a collateral purpose: that it’s not brought for the legitimate purpose of vindicating some legal right but is, in fact, brought, for example, to harass or to damage the reputation of another person. They are classic collateral purposes. Many a time, it’s often said that there are many open and shut cases which are not open and shut. There are many cases where there is no reasonable defence where, all of a sudden, there is a reasonable defence. I guess, when we come to look at this in committee—and the select committee report rightly reflects these views—we need to approach this with real caution. We talk about access to justice and, at the same time, what this does is limit access to justice by giving the power to the court to shut down without a hearing a claim that they consider, that the court considers, that the judge considers to be plainly abusive. We just need to be really cautious there. As it happens, it’s an issue; vexatious litigants are an issue that I looked at closely: the number of times, with vexatious and abusive litigants, where their behaviour is appalling but the acclaim has something to it, and it’s easy to conflate the two. It’s easy to conflate poor behaviour, appalling behaviour, appalling language with the fact that underlying it all is a genuine grievance that deserves to be heard.

I guess my point, as we come to this bill, rushing it through the House, of course, as is the wont of this Government, when the courts come to exercise this power is always to pause. One of the kinds of practical things is this: vexatious litigants in particular don’t go away easily. In fact, one of the hallmarks of them is that, when they are turned away in one sense, in one forum, they will open up another litigation in another forum. There are few useful strategies to address this problem, but one is to actually give them a fair hearing, to follow the rules, to listen and to give reasons. One of the challenges of the framework proposed in this bill—and I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it, but we should exercise it cautiously—is that that is not the case. You don’t give a hearing, you don’t hear from the person involved; it’s done on the papers. Think about it this way: if you were a difficult person who felt you had been aggrieved, what would most wind you up? Your claim being dismissed out of hand, never having the chance to eyeball a judge and say, “This is what my problem is.” and being talked to respective respectfully by a judge.

That’s what people want. That’s what we’re denying. That’s why, in respect of that abuse of procedure, we need to be very cautious indeed.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Indeed, this bill does deal with a number of changes. For me, one of the main ones I’d like to highlight is that after the amendment is passed, we’re going to be getting, hopefully, five more judges. On this side of the House, we don’t give $2.75 million to the Mongrel Mob, who provide meth to destroy families; we actually get judges there so that we can get our victims heard. I’m so proud of the fact that under our Government, there are 38,000 less victims, and we look forward to making that number even higher. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to also take a short call and say a few words about this Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill, which I always thought was pronounced somewhat different, and when I say always, my whole life I’ve been pronouncing it incorrectly—at least since when I first was aware of it, which dates right back to about first reading.

Labour is going to support this bill because we do believe that New Zealanders deserve a justice system that doesn’t leave victims waiting years to have their day in court. But we do need to be honest about the bill. Adding more judges is essentially the legislative equivalent of putting out the buckets when the roof is leaking. It’s necessary, for sure, but it’s hardly some bold system-strengthening approach—and certainly not this bold approach, this silver bullet, this big fix that the Government likes to pretend it’s taking.

This is what happens when the Government confuses being loud about crime with being serious about crime. They can talk about cracking down until they’re blue in the face, but without the workforce, the rest of the workforce and the infrastructure and the basic supports to actually move the case through, nothing much changes.

I thought it was interesting, my colleague Greg O’Connor talked earlier about the category 4 cases and how that now makes up 76 percent of the High Court inflows, and that’s, you know, clearly not just a flip; that’s actually a structural shift. We heard that trials are longer, that they’re more complex, they’re also more frequent. So, you know, yes, increasing this cap is appropriate for now, but it’s hardly bold and it’s the very least this Government could be doing to get to the bottom of this problem.

More importantly, I think the Government also owes New Zealand a bit of an explanation, as my colleague the Hon Dr Duncan Webb just said, for why the most serious violence cases are spiking and why they’re not doing anything to actually address the drivers of crime. If you’re going to brand yourself as tough on crime—“law and order Government”, as has been branded in the contributions to date—you actually need a bit of a plan to stop harm from happening in the first place, not just react to it after it does happen. That’s a little bit half-baked—half-baked at the very least. The Government can keep pretending and absolutely put their head in the sand.

Well, after two years, the Government has made a very small change to try and address a problem that they claim to be a big change. It’s a little bit hypocritical that they’re here making a big deal about it. You certainly don’t clear a backlog by ignoring the people—all the rest of the people that run that system, do you?

As I said, we are going to support the bill. We do fundamentally believe that victims in every community deserve to have their day in court, and you can’t deliver timely justice and fair outcomes if you don’t have a system that does so in a timely manner. But again, I don’t want to—and I don’t think that we should be overstating what this bill actually achieves. It’s modest at best. It’s practical for sure. We’ve got no qualms about the practicality of it.

Noting again, as colleagues have done, we are in urgency. If the Government was on top of their legislative programme, we wouldn’t be sitting here at this very, very late stage of urgency suddenly getting to grips with this very simple change that’s apparently going to make this very big move. Let’s not overstate it.

The Government continues to choose—and it is a choice, absolutely—not to confront the wider problems in our system. That is why so many people are ending up in the system in the first place, and why those violent crimes and those serious crimes like murder—and as my colleague Greg O’Connor very eloquently said earlier on, “You can’t hide the bodies.”, and the Government certainly can’t hide from the fact that they’re not doing bold things in this space.

We do need our justice system strengthened from end to end. On this side of the House, we will certainly continue to keep advocating for a much more comprehensive evidence-based approach that actually delivers the things that people in this country deserve.

It’s my pleasure, nōku te whiwhi ki te tū kia kōrero ai e pā ana ki te Judicature (Timeliness) Amendment Bill [it is my good fortune to stand and speak about the Judicature (Timeliness) Amendment Bill].

So he aha te Māori mō Judicature (Timeliness) Amendment Bill? Te Pire Whakatikatika i te Tōmuri o te Pūnaha Whakawā. He rongo pai ake. Ka tuku au i te pire nei ki te Whare.

[So what is the Māori term for Judicature (Timeliness) Amendment Bill? “The Bill that Corrects the Belated Judicial System”. It sounds better. I commend this bill to the House.]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. [Interruption] Thank you. It’s a pleasure to rise and speak in support of this bill at second reading. We are supportive of it because it is an access-to-justice bill, as colleagues have said.

I hate to start with a negative but it’s a bill that also perplexes me because I feel a little bit like the Government are doing the access to justice hokey-tokey when it comes to decision makers in the justice space. I say that because in—

Hon Member: Hokey-pokey.

VANUSHI WALTERS: —hokey-pokey, hokey-tokey, say it five times fast!—the draft bill we have the additional two; the Amendment Paper’s going to, hopefully, change that. I’m very supportive of a change in terms of an increase, but I will be supporting changes that my colleague is making in his Amendment Papers, as well, but, in the same year, the Government have also reduced the number of decision makers on the Human Rights Review Tribunal.

The Human Right Review Tribunal currently has, I believe, the two chairpeople but also the three deputy chairpeople. The deputy chairperson can hear the case with a community panel on their own, and that speeds up the system, essentially; it means that you don’t need to have the chairpeople there at every case. However, in this year’s Budget, those additional deputies have not been extended. So it takes the Human Rights Review Tribunal down from five, to two decision makers. Now, if you speak to people involved in the tribunal, these are sexual harassment claims in the employment space, these are discrimination claims, these are also health claims that go through the Health and Disability Commissioner, and they’re Privacy Act complaints as well. Some of them will tell you that it can take two to three years to get to a final decision—two to three years when we have five decision makers. So it begs the question: why would you reduce the number of decision makers there, when clearly there are already delays, if your theory of the game is that increasing the number of decision makers is going to help with the system? So access to justice hokey-tokey aside, a little bit of consistency would be very much appreciated. But we are supportive of this bill.

I think what the Government tend not to do is see the access-to-justice space as a whole. I do think that that’s part of the problem. I will speak to other things that they should be doing to achieve the goal of this bill later in my speech or, if I don’t get the opportunity to, in committee of the whole House.

I did want to, first, touch on a point that the Hon Dr Duncan Webb raised, which was self-represented litigants. I do think that that is something we’re going to have to watch in terms of what this bill does, to ensure that the vexatious provisions aren’t used outside the scope in which they were intended to be used. The first thing is the problem of the way in which the litigants can behave, and Dr Webb made the point that their behaviour can become conflated with the issue itself. But I also think the other problem is the scale at which we’re seeing a growth in self-represented litigants. So I do have some helpful data here which shows that at the end of June 2023, we had more than 70 percent of civil cases in the District Court involving a self-represented party—70 percent in the District Court; now, that’s compared to 52 percent at the same time in 2015, eight years and a massive increase in self-represented litigants. The Family Court: you have a doubling in the last 10 years of the people who represent themselves. So it’s not an issue we can ignore; we really need to make sure that we find a way for the courts to recognise these people will not have the same set of skills, necessarily as a legal representative.

Interestingly, the community law centres—we’ve, obviously, just passed a bill about community law. Community Law Auckland did have a system where they would go into the courts and assist self-represented litigants and just help them understand court procedure. But I think the question is: well, how do we expand a model like that so that if we are going to bring in provisions that may potentially be quite rights-damaging for self-represented litigants, we’re also providing them with the support and, maybe not legal advice, but, certainly with some legal support at the front end so that they are able to support themselves while they are in court?

We had a number of submissions that we heard at select committee on this. The Law Society is always extremely comprehensive. They raised the issue of the definition of “plainly abusive” and the fact that, again, in regards to self-represented litigants, that may present as a problem. I may speak to a few more of the issues that they raised, in the course of the committee stage.

There are also amendments to the Coroners Act which allow the coroner to close cases. Now, when I read that provision, my mind went back to the last term of Parliament where we had a petition in front of the Justice Committee about the slow pace at which coroners cases were proceeding. So I do think this goes some way to addressing that. But what was also clear when people were submitting to us is that it was a very emotional process. Some people were waiting for considerable amounts of time for very personal decisions for them to be able to access life insurance payments, as well. We have to remember there will be people who would like their family member’s case to go through a coroner’s hearing, who will be confronted with a coroner’s decision to close a file instead of investigating. I do have an amendment on this point, which just asks that if the coroner is deciding to close a file, they turn their minds to precisely the same factors as they would have to if they were opening a file or opening the initial file, as well, which I think is a sensible change and, hopefully, one that the Minister will agree with. I will speak more to the amendment when that comes through the pipeline.

I’ll just mention, briefly, Greg O’Connor’s amendment which is looking at setting a range of judges, as opposed to a cap or a lower threshold. So the problem with a lower threshold, if you said that there always had to be, say, 60 judges, is that, at any given point, you would have to have appointed more than that lower threshold. That’s obviously because there may be unforeseen resignations, for example, so you couldn’t dip below the statutory provision, or there may be a debt, in which case you would also be below the statutory provision. So a low threshold is somewhat problematic. Having a high threshold in terms of what the cap is is potentially quite useful; although, again, what I would suggest—and this is the amendment that has been tabled—is that a range would be the best option. The reason why you might not also want a minimum is that you may not want unconstrained powers of appointment.

The thing about the High Court judges is that those are very serious, sensitive, important decisions that are being made at the High Court—judicial reviews go to the High Court, which is, of course, a case about whether the proper process has been carried out in public institutions, and by Government Ministers. Certainly, within that delicate balance that is Parliament and the discretion of Ministers versus our judiciary—not that this would ever happen—but you would never certainly want to provide for the powers for someone to stack a court by making a large number of appointments in a short period of time.

Just in my last 30 seconds—I did mention there are other issues that ought to be addressed in this space, as well, that just feel like they’re being ignored. This morning, on RNZ, we heard about the poor state of our courts and the fact that in some of them, I think it was Rotorua, that there were cockroaches still being seen climbing the walls; certainly, in Waitakere, there’s mould and there are leaks; and I’ve had to interview clients in the hallways, as well. So all of this is part of what true access to justice means. I look forward to speaking more about that at the committee stage.

Mr Speaker, this is great legislation increasing the number of High Court judges. I commend it to the House.

It is interesting that we have such in-depth and insightful contributions from the Government side. They last all of five seconds. I would try to reach the brevity of my good friend Greg Fleming as well, but unfortunately, I have a little bit more time on my hands. So we’ll give it a bit more attention because the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill is actually a small bill, but it’s a small bill that we are paying attention to. We do support it, but it is also a bill that really does show that this Government is a Government that mistakes busyness for action: simply trying to get stuff done without really doing anything. That’s the nature of this Government.

We don’t need to be too concerned with this bill. What we need to do is consider the pipeline to the courts. We really do need to consider the pipeline to the courts. We need to get tough on inequality. That’s what we need to get tough on, and that’s the focus of the Green Party, Te Pāti Kākāriki: guaranteed minimum income to reduce desperation, cleaner, cheaper, smarter power to reduce power bills; public transport for affordable mobility; the provision of jobs through our green industrial strategy. All of this will have a positive impact on the numbers entering the court system. This bill is a bill that’s dealing with the symptoms—it’s dealing with the symptoms; it’s not dealing with the cause.

As my colleague Tamatha Paul mentioned, 140,000 court appearances were delayed through COVID and we’re now doing catch-up. That’s why we will support this bill. We will support this bill, but there is also that question that my colleague Lawrence Xu-Nan mentioned: how do we do things a bit better? How do we get more diversity and representation in our High Court? Because that’s something that we know we’re lacking. We’re currently lacking this at the moment. We do have a very diverse society and a multicultural society. That’s really valuable. How do we get that diversity and representation in our court system and in our High Court? That’s one thing.

We’re also pleased that this bill increases the number of High Court judges, but what it doesn’t do is meet the request of the Chief Justice who said that we needed to have a 25 percent increase in our High Court judges. So it’s not quite getting there. It’s not following the recommendations from our Chief Justice. So this is problematic.

We also heard that things are getting a bit more expensive and a bit more complicated because there’s that lack of section 27 reports. By causing a whole lot more problems in society, we are creating the need for a bigger court system. Again, we’re addressing the symptoms, we’re not addressing the problem and we’re not addressing the cause. That’s the problem, really, that we’re facing here. We’ll support this bill because we do need that representation—we’ll certainly support this bill—and we do need courts that work and we do need access to courts, but, and I’ll say it again, we cannot ignore the causes that drive people into desperation, that drive people into our courts. That’s why we need to be focused. We need to be tough on inequality much more than focusing simply on the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan: Landlords.

SCOTT WILLIS: That’s exactly right. As my colleague Lawrence Xu-Nan said, one of the things we could definitely do is get tough on landlords and put $3 billion into our court system. Now, that would be very helpful.

Our concern is this bill is a small bill. It is helpful. It doesn’t do a great deal, and it doesn’t go far enough, according to the Chief Justice, but it does do something. However, there is so much more to be done, and we are very focused, on this side of the House, on getting tough on inequality and not giving away more to the tobacco companies. Thank you.

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 Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill.

In Committee

Part 1 Amendments to Senior Courts Act 2016, and Schedule 1