Tanczos Nandor: Judicial Matters Bill — Second Reading 
Tanczos Nandor: Judicial Matters Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:617;Page:12800] 
NANDOR TANCZOS (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party very strongly supports the intentions of this bill. In particular we support the move to develop a more transparent and robust way of investigating complaints against judges. Up until now the process has been extremely confused and inadequate. In fact the Justice and Electoral Committee found it difficult to discover even how many complaints had been made against judges. The confused and overlapping nature of the different routes for such complaints is itself indicative of how overdue these changes are and how much we need them. 
We do not hold to the view that judicial independence means a licence to behave without restraint. That cannot be what it means. Judicial independence is about judges being fearless in making findings without regard to political favour. That does not mean there should be no sanction for misbehaviour or licentious behaviour. 
This bill establishes a new office of Judicial Conduct Commissioner to receive complaints and to undertake preliminary investigations. Those complaints are either dismissed or referred to the head of bench if they are of a minor nature or a recommendation will be made to the Attorney-General to establish a Judicial Conduct Panel which would conduct an inquiry usually publicly into the conduct. If the panel then decides that removal of the judge should be considered the Attorney-General would determine whether to initiate removal directly by communicating with the Governor-General or by a motion of this House for an address to the Governor-General. 
The National Party in its minority report and in the speech of Mr Richard Worth—and Dail Jones echoed some of those comments—made the point that because no judge has been dismissed in New Zealand the system is working fine. Mr Worth made the point that legislation should be remedial in nature and should seek to deal with a mischief. Mr Worth then pointed out the case of Justice Edwards in 1913 who clearly should have been removed from office because of his outrageous behaviour. He never was removed from office. The point is the system did not work. That was a perfect example of a man who should have been removed from office. In fact not only was he not removed from office but he ended up resigning on full pension with £1000 compensation. That is a perfect demonstration of how inadequate the present process is for dealing with those issues. Just because we face no similar scandal today in the newspapers those members say the legislation is unnecessary. Clearly the current procedure of a motion in the House does not work and we would be quite wrong to wait for a crisis in the judiciary before a transparent and formal process was implemented. That would be extremely short-sighted and an example of the kind of crisis thinking that pervades the National Party. 
The problem is that Parliament is naturally—and rightly—hesitant to question the judiciary. That is a convention and it is quite right. One noticeable exception is Mr Stephen Franks who makes personal and hostile attacks against the judiciary whenever he disagrees with their judgments. He even attacked the Chief Justice because she does not defer to what he considers to be his superior legal intellect and learning. But generally we have a convention that this Parliament does not attack the judiciary. Parliament is naturally hesitant to interfere with the judiciary and that is right. Therefore it would take an extremely blatant example of misbehaviour to precipitate a motion in this House to remove a judge. 
This legislation introduces a process that is much better. It depoliticises the process. It removes it from the hands of politicians in the first instance and it allows a formal and transparent process for genuine and serious complaints to be investigated properly if necessary and for action to be taken if necessary. 
The Greens are disappointed with one aspect of the bill. It does not address one important area which it could have done because it is an omnibus judicial bill—namely the appointments process. One reason the Greens did not support the introduction of an affirmative resolution process for raising the cap on judge numbers is that although we believe there is some sense in having such a process so that the Government does not have to introduce legislation every time an increase in the cap is needed such a process carries some dangers while judicial appointments are made in such an opaque manner as at present. The Green Party support for the Supreme Court Bill last year was at least partly contingent on the Government conducting a public dialogue on an independent judicial appointments commission. 
The original understanding was that that debate would be in parallel with this bill. That has not happened but we are pleased to see that that discussion document has now been released. The discussion document is now in the public domain. It is out there and people are reading it and preparing submissions on it. We are looking forward to participating in the process of evaluating the feedback on that document. The Green Party takes great pride in being instrumental to the development of that paper. That would not have happened without Green Party agitation. 
We also take pride in our advocacy in this Parliament of lay participation in the judicial appointment process—an area where I have to say we agree with United Future whose members are also supportive of that proposal. I have just come back from the United Kingdom where I had discussions with various British MPs academics and policy people about the judicial reforms that are going on over there. One point made to me was that to some degree the proposals for an independent judicial appointments commission have been strongly supported by many in the judiciary because they see it as a way to remove political interference in or influence on judicial appointments. The Green Party considers that such a process is necessary in this country also. We believe that it is necessary in order to maintain the confidence of the public in the judiciary. 
My last point is about part-time judges which is something the Green Party does support. We believe that it allows the judiciary to be more representative of the community in which it is situated and that that does lead to better justice. Richard Worth raised concerns about that issue. His main argument was to do with the difficulties in scheduling cases and things like that and that is a fair comment but we have to trust that judges are intelligent enough to work out their scheduling problems by themselves and do not need 120 MPs to sit around this House to tell them how they should schedule their cases or organise their workload. They are very experienced. They know how those things work better than we do—even such experienced lawyers as Mr Worth—and I am sure that we can leave it in their capable hands.