Legal Aid Changes

Simon Power has just announced some changes to the system. The two major ones are:

  1. A new quality assurance framework where legal aid will have to demonstrate competency to a selection committee on objective criteria.
  2. Expanding the Public Defence Service to Wellington, Christchurch, and Hamilton.

The Public Defence Service has been quite successful, so good to see it is expanding.

Hopefully the competency demonstration requirement will help solve the problem of delays caused by incompetent counsel (which it seems is mainly a South Auckland problem).

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