I do not intend to speak for a long period of time, but I want to make some follow-up comments to the comments made by my colleague David Garrett. It was very sad, to be honest, that no sooner had David Garrett made his comments and sat down, he was followed by the Hon Lianne Dalziel, and if I heard the Hon Lianne Dalziel correctly, she said words to the effect that she could not possibly agree with anything Mr Garrett had said.
I guess the point Mr Garrett was trying to make was that the Government has a fixed budget for legal aid, that the first charge on that budget is for criminal legal aid, and that what is left over is for civil cases. What Mr Garrett was saying was that the more we spend on criminal aid, the less there is for civil cases. What made Lianne Dalziel’s comments surprising to me was that she then went on to talk about the coroner’s inquiry into deaths at Christchurch Hospital in 1996. Clearly, as a Christchurch MP she is aware of the parties involved. She would be intimately aware of the distress that was caused to the families of the victims. She talked about the legal resources—the legal aid—that was available to the hospital, the legal aid that was available to the doctors and to the registrars. The point I took from Lianne Dalziel’s speech is that the only parties that were not represented by lawyers were the families of the victims. Am I correct? Lianne Dalziel is acknowledging that the point she was trying to make is that the only parties not represented by lawyers at that coronial inquiry were the relatives of the victims. The point Mr Garrett was trying to make is that it is those very people, those very ordinary citizens, who have a need for legal assistance and cannot get it under the current arrangements. They cannot get it, because the more money that is spent on criminal legal aid the less money there is available for civil legal aid.
I thought Mr Garrett’s points were very well made, and it was disappointing to hear them so ridiculed and dismissed by Lianne Dalziel when she rose to speak. She is clearly concerned that the people who most need legal representation cannot get it when they need it. Had legal assistance been available to the families of the victims, they may have had better
representation at those coronial inquiries.