Tolley Anne: Coroners Bill — In Committee 
Tolley Anne: Coroners Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:633;Page:4681] 
ANNE TOLLEY (National—East Coast) 
: 
 I also want to speak to Part 4 of this bill. I say to the Minister for Courts that I do not want to play games in Parliament by joining the dots because this part of the bill in particular has serious consequences for some very able members of the community throughout New Zealand. They deserve more than the sort of nonsense we have just heard from the Minister in charge of the bill. 
I want to talk seriously to the Minister about transition provisions for the disestablishment of coroners. I particularly want to talk about the East Coast. I was not on the Justice and Electoral Committee but I understand that the Law Commission began this process with a review and that it specifically mentioned areas like the East Coast and the West Coast to which my colleague Kate Wilkinson has referred. They are unique areas. I brought Kate Wilkinson up to Gisborne and we met with two of the three coroners there and discussed some of their difficulties with the proposals in this bill. The coroners in Gisborne and Wairoa are part-time. The Gisborne coroner is a well-respected barrister and solicitor who has been in the job for decades. Gisborne is 2½ to 3 hours travelling time from the nearest larger centres either side. The idea of losing that member of the community and the work he does is causing quite some dismay in Gisborne. 
But the area I really want to bring to the Minister’s attention is the coast. Up there based in Ruatoria is a part-time coroner—he is not a practising barrister or solicitor; he is a JP—called Hughie Hughes who is a very well-respected member of the community. He is based in Ruatoria and as the Minister knows that area of the East Coast has large tracts of land between very small and very poor communities. The roads are bad. Members might ask why on earth that would be of importance to a coroner. We actually said to him: “So what? Travel time doesn’t seem to be a huge issue.” He made the point that not only are the townships small and quite a number of hours distant from each other but they are manned by single policemen in one-person police stations with no back-up and often an inability to deal with all the cases. So the coroner travels and is a huge aid to the police up and down the East Coast. 
The example he gave of the position he holds in the community which is almost a unique position for a coroner was the tragedy in Ruatoria of the death of five young people in a car accident. The community was in shock and there was considerable angst between the local police and local families who of course wanted the bodies of their young and who were in a terrible state of grief. The coroner played the part of a totally independent person who had the respect of different iwi and hapu and of the police. The role he played there was one of a community service. 
The service of those sorts of people in some quite specific areas in New Zealand is important. The role cannot be played by a person who comes in from the outside—maybe from Hawke’s Bay which would be 5 hours’ distance—has no knowledge of the people concerned and does not have the confidence of the local people who are mainly Maori people and therefore may not have the respect that is given to a person such as Hughie Hughes. I say to the Minister that these are unique cases. They are not something that will be found right throughout New Zealand and the Law Commission made that point itself. So my role here is to ask the Minister that when he is looking at the transitional provisions and thinking about how he is going to put this law into place he considers the uniqueness of the situation of those part-time coroners on the two coasts.