The Hon Judith Collins justifies the ordinary voter's support for National. Her  preparedness to establish a register of convictions is another example.

Let's hope that she makes it simple. The current system has converted "open courts and justice being seen to be done" into a hollow slogan. A Press editorial advocates simplicity as far as it goes – but that is not far enough.

The record should be open. What happens in open court should be on that record. It should mean that people 'live down their crime' if people who know their offending gain confidence in them from long term reliability. That is not the current version. System defenders claim without research evidence that not being caught and living among unwitting associates is rehabilitation.

Minister Collins should at the same time straighten out name suppression.  Lawyers and judges claim  public or victim interest justifications for name suppression. From  years as a MP, watching the cases closely, that claim is often spurious. Even the claim that it is necessary for the rehabilitiation of offenders is undisciplined, not supported by robust research.

Many court lawyers are more clerical than logical in their reasoning and their intuitive default positions. They are like the priests who hated Luther for allowing the common people to know what the Latin mumbling meant. They sense a loss of power when ordinary people are allowed to have as much knowledge as them. So losing the power to keep names secret is opposed from instinct, not rational evidence.

Take for example, the almost universal suppression of names pending trial. It is allegedly to protect victims, and the trial process.
I’ve seen no research evidence that routine suppression actually protects many victims. There will undoubtedly be some who would want it but often almost everyone close to a victim (those whose reactions will matter)  will know of the misfortune before the offender is apprehended. Those more distant may get garbled rumours. Rumours may be  as bad or worse than the truth that disclosure would reveal.

The claim that suppression is for victims (rather than to feed the status interests of justice system insiders) is exposd for what it is by the system’s usual refusal to drop suppression even when the victim desperately wants full exposure of the offender, and sees knowledge of their suffering and role in that exposure as worth it, or even as rehabilitative.
 

The claim that suppression is necessary to protect against contamination of the trial process is:
 

• Ludicrous in relation to judge alone trials. Are the judges saying they will be unable to overcome their own prejudices established by early media coverage?
• Untested against the reality that many if not most internet savvy jurors regard doing their own google research as a basic right. I understand that jurors commonly ignore judges’ prohibitions. It is long overdue for the Courts to recognise that we are now well back into the ‘village’ environment in which the jury system emerged. At that time jurors were the accused's peers. Their background knowledge of the accused was required to help judge truthfulness. It is a recent development that jurors are meant to be empty vessels, to have in their heads only the software and database poured into them by the court. Time to adjust to reality.
• An excuse that relies on not measuring or having confidence in the impact of the slow and careful testing and challenge process to evidence in a modern trial. If the jury cannot put their own pre-knowledge to test then we have much good reason to dump the jury as a fact finder.
   

IMHO solutions are staring court lawyers in the face:
 

• Stop suppression unless victims ask for it;
• Ask jurors to identify at the beginning of a trial all the pre-knowledge they come with, and any theories and provisional conclusions they start with, including sources, so that counsel and the judge can test them explicitly if they seem sufficiently influential; or, if juries are still not trusted to overcome preconceptions
• End their role as finders of guilt or innocence and give them the role they are better suited for – to express the community view in sentencing with a residual protection function in an ability to come down with a nil or negligible sentence if they have concerns about the judge’s finding of guilt