Hon Christopher Finlayson

CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (National) : What does the Ministry of Justice do? Although with a Minister of the calibre of this one in the chair, the Hon Damien O’Connor, we will not get any answers, we will certainly be asking the questions. The Ministry of Justice plays a fundamental role in maintaining the rule of law in this country. It is extremely important that we have a civil and criminal justice system that works adequately. Much of the work that this ministry does is not simply party political; it is black-letter law, and it is of fundamental importance.

It goes without saying that this ministry has failed in relation to the electoral finance legislation, but if we look at some of the other work that it is doing, we see that its record is very poor indeed. The Ministry of Justice is a very large department that is soon to move to a splendid new building on Kate Sheppard Place. As Mr Power has observed, it is employing increasing numbers of consultants and civil servants, but its work product, as identified by the Justice and Electoral Committee, is very poor indeed, and I intend to look at a number of those issues right now.

I think it is rare, when one goes through this bundle of reports of select committees, to see a report that is more critical—and bipartisanly more critical—than the report on the Ministry of Justice. Let us look at few issues. The first is court workloads. The reality of the matter is that we have courtrooms in this country designed for a population of about 3.5 million people, and there are now about 4.3 million. Some courtrooms in this country are bursting to overflowing. Let me tell the Committee that just last week in Auckland a judge was available to hear a case, lawyers were ready to argue it, but there was no courtroom because the High Court in Auckland was full to overflowing. As the select committee’s report says, providing court services is fundamental to the ministry’s rule. Good services provided in a professional and timely way are vital in ensuring that justice is accessible to all. It is simply unacceptable that we have a situation, like we had in Auckland last week, where courtroom facilities are now so poor in the High Court in Auckland that a certain case could not be dealt with.

Time and time again, when we deal with some of these black-letter, non-party political questions, we are fobbed off by the Ministry of Justice. What about electronic filing? Every country has it, but we do not have it. That is a question I have been asking for some time. What about the Court of Appeal? Why has the Court of Appeal not got a permanent presence in Auckland to serve the Auckland people? It does not mean appointing any more judges; all it means is finding a building and putting a courtroom in it, in order to service, for example, the commercial community in Auckland. These fundamental issues are not being looked at.

Let us look at the Law Commission, because the reality of the matter is that the Law Commission has had to take over the law reform responsibilities of the Ministry of Justice. What we have with Sir Geoffrey is some kind of latter-day Cardinal Richelieu doing an enormous amount of work behind the scenes, because the ministry is simply not up to it. The role of the ministry is to peer review the work of the Law Commission, to ensure that the work product is acceptable. I take issue with just one thing that my learned friend Mr Power said. Some of the work product of the Law Commission is not all that flash, and it requires the ministry to take a good look at it. There is an argument that sedition laws should not have been passed in the way that they were, but rather, that they should have been part of a comprehensive criminal law reform. The Minister should look at the exposure draft of the Law Commission on the proposed law of limitation, which we have been waiting for years for. He will find it to be a very poor piece of work.

Just to show the failure of the ministry, we should look at the final point that was raised by the Justice and Electoral Committee, which concerned the Evidence Act. The Evidence Act was enacted on 1 August 2007, and there have been no Orders in Council yet under section 51. This was a report that the select committee made following hearings on 15 and 22 November. The ministry said this was an issue that was actively under consideration, but we have almost come to the end of March and we still have no Orders in Council under section 51, so foreign practitioners cannot be deemed to be people whose advice will be subject to legal professional privilege—a very real practical problem for the New Zealand legal profession.