Franks Stephen: Coroners Bill — First Reading 
Franks Stephen: Coroners Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:622;Page:18096] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 The Coroners Bill deals with a matter that may seem very remote to most people and nearly everyone would want it to stay remote. But it touches one of those assurances of probity in public and private life that a country like New Zealand has taken for granted for many years. I think of the contrast with for example the Ukraine where the presidential candidate who might have been the successful candidate if there had not been electoral irregularities had to go to Austria to find people who could be trusted to investigate his poisoning. My concern about the bill that has come before us is that it may be part of a trend to centralise and streamline—as the proponents of the bill think it is—functions that have been powerful simply because they are distributed because they have been on occasion amateur or quirky and because there is room for coroners around the country to pursue matters that might not necessarily have been seen by a central authority as the priority as popular or even as desirable. 
My concern about the bill is that the appointment of a Chief Coroner which is seemingly an efficiency measure to provide someone to coordinate and represent coroners as a body and the reduction of the number of coroners to 20 full-time equivalents could end up giving us—I will not say a coronary—a system of coronary inquiries that would be less reliable than what we have now. That is not because the system is not technically improved by the bill and I am sure there is room for that but because that quirkiness that independence and that character of having been drawn from the community and being part of the normal networks of gossip of social contact that coroners have at present may not be replicated if coroners become professional and much more clearly agents of the State. 
In particular I am concerned that the bill represents a triumph of political correctness and that that may be a foretaste of the kind of approach that coroners will be directed to have by the Chief Coroner. The position of Chief Coroner will be very very important because it appears on the drafting as I read it that it is the Chief Coroner who decides whether there is an inquiry. Therefore coroners are subordinate to the Chief Coroner in a way that I think could be dangerous to our liberties at some stage in the future. While it may seem extremely remote at the moment the question of whether a coroner’s inquiry is held could be central to the satisfaction of people that there is not something untoward going on. 
The Chief Coroner’s function is described in clause 5(a) as being to oversee coroners’ investigations. So it is not simply an organising and case allocation role; it looks as if there is a supervision function. It is not clear whether the Chief Coroner can terminate an inquiry and assign someone else—in effect take over if he or she wants. Clause 5(a) provides that the Chief Coroner facilitates the provision and coordination of support services and other services but it does not give the Chief Coroner a budget as I read it. That is held by the relevant department. This bill follows the modern drafting convention of not stipulating the department itself and the relevant Minister that being left to the whim of the Prime Minister from time to time. 
In a country that has such a long tradition of public integrity and lack of corruption in these matters it is easy to say that fears might simply be paranoia. It is easy to say that but in the last few years we have been going headlong into abandoning some of the institutional constraints and protections that we have had against it being worth our even considering corruption. We lost the Privy Council as our obvious independent umpire and now we have our Chief Justice raising concerns about the subordination of her office and of the judicial office to the Ministry of Justice through its control of their budget their communications and their computer systems. Well it seems that coroners are intended to be in every way as subject as the courts and perhaps even more so. The Chief Coroner is to perform the functions of a head of bench. The Chief Coroner authorises coroners to open and conduct inquiries. I hope the select committee will look at that centralisation with a very suspicious eye indeed particularly as it is allied to the absence of any apparent budget for the Chief Coroner. The Chief Coroner could be simply a toady for the department. It is not at all clear that there has been a sensitivity to the risk of that happening. 
I also give notice that the select committee ought to look very closely at the sand being thrown into the gearbox by this bill in its exaggerated respect for so-called family. The definition of “immediate family” in clause 7 is: “(a) … members of the dead person’s family whanau or other culturally recognised family group who—…had … an interest in the person’s welfare and best interests;”. Well who would not be able to satisfy that requirement? That could be an enormous group of people. Paragraph (b) of the definition then goes on to say that to avoid doubt it includes brothers stepbrothers stepsisters step-parents or guardians grandparents and so forth. That definition of so-called “immediate family” will impose on coroners an obligation to try to identify what could be a very large group. 
The bill then goes on and requires them in essence to seek objections to the carrying out of a post-mortem and gives 2 days for those objections to be made. If the objectors then go to the High Court to pursue their objection it could take at least another day and probably more. So we end up with a situation where before a post-mortem can be ordered the deceased person might have been dead many days. Is that safe? What objective is being satisfied by allowing that kind of delay when post-mortems are really a protection against foul play? For example with many poisons with many causes of death the post-mortem should be done immediately for it to be satisfactory. The longer the delay the harder it is to identify exactly what the cause of death was particularly with substances that decay. 
When I look at these provisions I can see that the intent is to encourage more respect for and less brusque treatment of family concerns. But I think that in this country it is competent for a Government to say that irrespective of someone’s superstitions natural feelings towards the deceased and unhappiness about interference with a body the community for decades has had an interest in overriding those concerns in order to make sure that everyone knows that a death is unlikely to be covered up for want of a post-mortem. Just introducing these provisions reduces that certainty. A potential wrongdoer might be able to bank on being able to delay—or even avoid entirely—a proper investigation into the cause of death. 
So I want to know exactly what evidence the promoters of this bill have that post-mortems are a major cultural or spiritual problem; that these delays are not seen as problematic by the few pathologists that the country has managed to keep; and that the process of delay will not end up being overridden anyway so that all we would have done is raise false hope in the minds of family members—that their wishes will be overridden and a post-mortem ordered anyway. In other words this bill may be a solution looking for a problem that hardly exists and it may create more of a problem than it deals with. The kind of political correctness that infuses this bill is a worry as to the quality of the thinking behind it.