Morning News Roundup + (BONUS!) BK's Opinions

Video-Link Courtroom Proposal

Simon Power stepped into the Justice Portfolio last year, inheriting a substantial problem: huge backlogs in the Courts.

A defendant can wait a year for a District Court jury trial, and the average delay is increasing by a week each year. High Court trials are 16 months behind and the average delay is increasing by a month a year.

The number of cases dismissed because of excessive delays has tripled to 19 in three years, and the number of remand prisoners awaiting trial has risen from 534 in 1998 to 1771 last year.

As it stands, there's a law saying you must be present in the hearing-room for every procedure about your case; Power would change that, requiring only that you could watch and participate via video link. Eminently sensible. It's estimated to save the taxpayer $20m over four years (that's over and above the cost of setting it up). Hell, even transporting prisoners from jail to the courtroom costs $131 a pop.

This is one of a string of ideas Power's floated around to shake up, modernize, and improve the courts. The others include: raising the threshold over which defendants may demand a jury trial; allowing convictions in absentia if defendants are guilty but don't show up; tightening the legal aid system, which some think is being gamed by lawyers; expanding the jurisdiction of the Disputes Tribunal; expanding the Public Defence Service.

By the way, can anyone remember who was Justice Minister in the last Government? I think this is a pretty clear case of falling asleep at the wheel.

Salmond: Open Entry For Maori A Near-Miss

You should probably read this thoughtful take from Anne Salmond on Pita Sharples's call for open university entry for Maori. Salmond identifies one issue which I think is absolutely critical:

Third, while Starpath researchers have found high levels of satisfaction with NCEA, they also found that NCEA is so complex that students and their parents often don't understand the consequences of the decisions they are making.

Schools also play a powerful role in mediating these choices, determining which subjects are available and how they are timetabled, whether achievement or unit standards are offered, and which students are selected for different versions of core subjects.

As a result, while most Maori, Pacific and low-income students aspire to gain university entrance (78 per cent in one study), it is too easy for them to find themselves on NCEA pathways that foreclose this option.

I tutored Certificate of Uni Prep math for a while: kids who basically "just missed out" on university entrance. The standards were all over the place, but this I can say for sure: about a tenth of the students in that class easily could have skipped it, and gone straight onto first-year courses. (In one instance, I would have recommended he even try skipping first-year math, but it wasn't really my place to do that.) What did these students, the one-tenth, have in common? Age/ethnicity/gender? No. They were all given pretty bad advice at school about the number, or the type, of credits to take. Consequently, they had to waste half a year just getting into university. So you can see this is a bit of a hobby horse of mine.

Like Salmond, I'd be very supportive of a general university-entrance exam for those who miss out on the NCEA route for whatever reason.

Govt should pay more for Treaty bills, says Tamihere

I'm with JT—err... not this one—here. Basically, I'm of the view that the Treaty settlement process is something the overnment should do once, and do right. I don't care if more money than strictly necessary gets spent along the way, so long as that basic goal is achieved.

Outcry on scrapping over-65s study aid

I don't know much about this—although an acquaintance was interviewed for the article—, so I really can't comment much. I didn't even realize you could get the student allowance if you collect superannuation: doesn't super take you well over the threshold?