Parker David: Appointments — Judicial Conduct Commissioner and Deputy Judicial Conduct CommissionerText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Appointments — Judicial Conduct Commissioner and Deputy Judicial Conduct Commissioner[Sitting date: 02 July 2015. Volume:706;Page:5073. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour):I rise to take a brief call. Can I begin where the Attorney-General left off and add my thanks on behalf of the Labour Party for the service that Sir David Gascoigne has given across a number of Governments over a long period of time both in important regulatory roles such as this but he has also given a lot of service to the arts at his own cost and also commercial service including as chair of Transpower for a while.In terms of the appointment Alan Ritchie is well-known to most lawyers in New Zealand having been the chief executive officer of the Law Society for a period of more than two decades which was long service indeed. I am sure he will be a very very capable Judicial Conduct Commissioner having served already in the role of Deputy Judicial Conduct Commissioner. I know less well the person who is being appointed as the deputy Kathryn Snook but I accept the Attorney-General’s recommendation and acknowledge that he has consulted with me in respect of both of those appointments.I will not take a lot of time. I will say that we do have to be careful that we do not allow vexatious litigants to be the bane of judges’ lives. The Judicial Conduct Panel is not an appeal body. It is not a way to relitigate decisions that litigants are dissatisfied with. I think that there is a worrying tendency for some vexatious litigants to take things too far. I see in the latest annual report of the Judicial Conduct Commissioner that there is an increasing incidence of judicial review of the Judicial Conduct Commissioner’s decisions. So not only have litigants had their appeals finished in the judicial system; they have had a complaint to the Judicial Conduct Commissioner and that has gone against them as well and not satisfied with all those steps they are now starting to take judicial review proceedings against the Judicial Conduct Commissioner’s decision. It can go too far in those situations.Sometimes I feel that some of those litigants are themselves being used by interest groups within society that favour longer sentences for example or that are all too willing to challenge bail decisions that occasionally have adverse consequences even if the bail decision was right. The only way to avoid some bail decisions going wrong is to have no bail which of course causes other injustices by having people who are not guilty of crimes lose their liberty. It would also of course put a huge cost on taxpayers to be locking everyone up on remand rather than having people getting bail.It is a difficult job that the Judicial Conduct Commissioner faces because the people who are complaining are sometimes very distressed. They are sometimes right but more often they are wrong—as the statistics show—as to the outcomes of most of the complaints that are made. Most complaints are not upheld and most of them do not get to a panel and I think that that is the right outcome.So with those brief comments I endorse the Attorney-General’s recommendation of Alan Deans Ritchie as Judicial Conduct Commissioner and Kathryn Mary Snook as deputy.