Franks Stephen: Supreme Court Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Franks Stephen: Supreme Court Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:612;Page:8989] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT NZ) 
: 
 The debate on the title of the Supreme Court Bill has attracted jibes from Government members across the Chamber that those opposed to the Privy Council are standing for the rich and powerful. The Privy Council has stood up more often against powerful interests in this country than any other separate court as far as I can see. 
The Privy Council I say to the Minister in the chair Mr Tamihere stood up for Maori in 1901 and stated that the Court of Appeal was wrong in 1877. The Privy Council stood up for taxpayers against the oil companies 12 years ago when it stated that our Court of Appeal had been far too solicitous and careful about offending oil companies when the oil companies were trying to claim that the Government could not retain the rights to petroleum prospecting in contiguous blocks. The Privy Council stood up for 2000 offenders who had been denied natural justice by the Court of Appeal— 
Dail Jones 
: And legal aid. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: —and legal aid. It stood up for a Samoan overstayer who was claiming New Zealand citizenship against the might of the Government. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: The member needs to refer to the title; that is what is being debated. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: I am leading to the title. I am responding to the sole argument we have had from the Government side of the Chamber against the Opposition speakers who have been debating the title. 
This bill might perhaps have been called the “New Supreme Court Bill”. When I started practising law the Supreme Court was subject to the Court of Appeal. That was bizarre; it was an odd way for the Supreme Court to be described. Its name was changed to the High Court and that was more logical. But now we have legislation that sets up a court to be called the Supreme Court and it will probably start with less public respect than a court was ever started with in this country. This court will be born in controversy. The so-called Supreme Court will be born in the midst of a campaign for signatures to a referendum to end it. The court will have no mandate. To give the Supreme Court that name in a situation where the people will be reposing in it the least confidence they have ever managed to repose in a court is a constitutional tragedy. This court will not be seen as supreme but as subject to the whims of a tiny socialist academic establishment that controls the Labour Party. 
This bill is a “trash the constitution” piece of legislation. The Attorney-General Margaret Wilson is reported in today’s  
New Zealand Herald  
as saying when asked why this proposal is going ahead without a broad consensus “That’s just the way we do it. New Zealand has this wonderful fluid constitutional arrangement.” So we are setting up a court intended to be our supreme court and to carry all the moral authority of New Zealanders looking for independent judgement and a level of dispute resolution that cannot be impugned as being subject to any kind of unfortunate influence. This legislation sets that court up in an environment where a good number of decent New Zealanders fear that a stacked court is being set up. A cosy academic cabal wants to make sure they can have in our top court only folk who feel and think like them. 
This is a court that is being established to do what Lee Kuan Yew’s Government did when Singapore got rid of the right of recourse to its supreme court. I heard members of the Government jeering at that—jeering at our concerns as being concerns for the rich. That is not what the sole representative of the Workers Party in Singapore thought when the right of appeal to the Privy Council went so that Lee Kuan Yew and the Singaporean Government would no longer be embarrassed by the Privy Council overturning its tactical defamation writs designed to quash independent politics in Singapore. The Singaporean Opposition small and feeble though it may be did not see the Privy Council as a colonial relic; it saw it as a defender of independence. It saw it as a defender of the reputation of the judiciary in Singapore and as being genuinely impartial in its judgments. Yet the Opposition members in this Chamber scoff and say the Privy Council is a rich person’s court.