JOSEPH MOONEY: —community magistrates sit in the District Court—and the member opposite asked what did I do? Well, let me tell you what I did! Ha, ha! "Community Magistrates sit in the District Court and hear matters that would otherwise come before a District Court Judge. Community Magistrates are required to have the personal qualities, experience, and skills needed to deal with lower-level criminal matters." Now, I cut my teeth as a lawyer in the Manukau District Court, spending about two years there—the busiest court in the country—and a lot of that I cut my teeth on, so to speak, was as a duty lawyer. When you have a huge volume of work coming through the court, a lot of it needs to go in front of the community magistrate because, frankly, the judges just don't have the capacity to deal with it. So you'd actually have one lawyer who was on duty; they'd have to sit in the court, and all the other duty lawyers would take instructions from the defendants, get the information from the police, information from the court, get instructions on what the defendant was going to do, and then give it to the person sitting in court. The job of the duty lawyer giving the information to the duty lawyer sitting in court was to make sure they had clear instructions and to write them out. Having said that, I spent many a long day in the Manukau District Court sitting in the chair and being given instructions, and sometimes instructions were better than others.