Franks Stephen: Appointments — Deputy Police Complaints Authority 
Franks Stephen: Appointments — Deputy Police Complaints Authority 
[Volume:627;Page:21939] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I too will take the opportunity to comment on the general issue that overhangs the proposed appointment of John Gibson QC to this post. Mr Gibson is a man of considerable experience. He has a very extensive knowledge of the criminal law. He has held semi-judicial offices and will be very experienced in dealing with the kinds of issues and procedures that will be involved in this office. 
But the office is under a cloud. To appoint someone to a position like that for 2 years raises the whole problem that our legal traditions and conventions try to avoid—that of officers in judicial roles looking as if they might be beholden to the Government. A man who has a 2-year appointment and who thinks it is a job he would like to keep will obviously be suspected of kowtowing to those who appoint him. It is completely wrong to appoint someone to that position for a 2-year period even though the Government has done so probably not because of a deliberate expectation that it will be able to suborn or influence him—I do not think that it will and I doubt whether that was the Minister’s intention—but because of utter incompetence in deciding on the future of the Police Complaints Authority. 
Three and a half years ago when the Police Complaints Authority was very much flavour of the month there was grave concern that it had lost its public reputation. People had lost confidence in the authority and nothing whatsoever has been done to repair its reputation. At the very least the Government could have resourced the authority enough to make it administratively efficient. 
If there is one group that ought to have been out there campaigning to keep the Police Complaints Authority in its current form it is the police because it has offered them something that I think is of value. It has offered the police a modicum of self-regulation: the police have provided the staff for the Police Complaints Authority and its investigative work has been done by senior respected men from within the police. Any disciplined uniformed force should value that because it means that its members know they will be judged by people who are equipped to understand the pressures on them. 
But instead of enabling the Police Complaints Authority to have champions even within the police the Government has allowed it to get into a position where it is hopelessly overwhelmed. Certainly the appointment of an extra authority in the person of Mr Gibson should help. But many complaints actually result from inattention failure to act lost evidence and other mistakes—possibly even disciplinable mistakes—that are inevitable in a service that deals with the volume of crime we have. 
 The Police Complaints Authority itself must feel embarrassed at having no moral authority to criticise. How can the authority come out with robust findings on some of the complaints made against the police for inattention oversight or delay when the authority itself must know even as it is writing reports that it can be rightly criticised for the same problem—for the inability to put the right resources on to the job? I respect the people who man the authority and I respect the judge. I am sure that he agonises but there can be no doubt that he must feel squeamish when he writes reports knowing that his own office were it to be subject to the same kind of review would be unavoidably in the position where it could not perform to the standard he would want. 
The Minister has left this bill languishing not because Parliament would not have passed it even though I expressed the ACT party’s reservations about moving to a system that was completely divorced from the police. We have those reservations for the simple reason that although it sounds great in theory to have an entirely independent authority it is very easy for disciplined forces to close ranks against outsiders. 
One of the advantages of the current Police Complaints Authority regime is that investigations have been done from within. That is a disadvantage as well because it means there has been a fear that perhaps those inquiries might have been influenced by too much of the “there but for the grace of God go I” idea. That is the price we have paid for having a tradition of cooperation from the police with investigation. 
That bill has been sitting there and those proposed reforms were issued with his usual throbbing intensity by the Minister of Justice in vowing he would get on top of it—and nothing has happened. Nothing has happened in the whole area of— 
Ron Mark 
: Police! 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
:—reviewing police injustices—the police—but that is due not just to the gormless and hapless Minister of Police but also to the foaming and gormless Minister of Justice. 
Members might remember that we heard there would be a review of the exercise of the royal prerogative. We heard we were to have an independent authority that would be a little like the British criminal review body—which examined cases where the watchdogs had failed and where the watchers watching the watchdogs were under suspicion—but nothing has happened. We have not heard a thing about that for nearly 2 years. What have been the Government’s priorities instead? 
Ron Mark 
: Civil unions and prostitution. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: Civil unions as Mr Mark points out and the Prostitution Reform Act. But of course there have been far more urgent items in the justice portfolio—the New Zealand Council of Law Reporting Amendment Bill and the Oaths Modernisation Bill which was introduced to change the word “honest” into the word “faithful” in our oaths and declarations. 
Ron Mark 
: They don’t want to be honest. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: No the Government does not like being honest. Those are the sorts of priorities that Mr Goff’s team has managed to bring into this House. [ 
Interruption 
] They want faithful servants! 
It is interesting that our poor candidate Mr John Gibson QC will probably be one of the last ones to swear an oath—if there is an oath and I am sure there is—that he will be honest because by the time that this Government is through we will probably have people swearing to be faithful. I ask: faithful to what? They will be faithful little lapdogs to their appointing masters. That is what a 2-year appointment does. 
In fact the same Minister George Hawkins has done this before. That Minister has made a whole series of short-term appointments to the Film and Literature Board of Review. The Government has been tinkering around with the appointment provisions of the Waitangi Tribunal too so that the chairman of the Waitangi Tribunal can stack divisions as he sees fit. 
The attitude in this Government towards judicial office is destroying the need for the mana and authority that is derived from public trust and respect. The Government does not actually give a toss about whether the Police Complaints Authority is chaired by people who can feel proud of what they are doing. If it did it would have added more money to its budget than it has. I think that the increase in the budget for the authority if I recall rightly is $29000. I mean that is absolutely trifling. The Government has given $454000 to the Human Rights Commission to develop our national plan of action for human rights which will be a whole farrago of— 
Judith Collins 
: Let’s export it to China. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: We should export it to China as Judith Collins said. The Government has given $454000 to that commission but it has given only $29000 to a body that is really defending human rights—that is going right to the core of our confidence in the integrity of policing that reassures people who complain that their suspicions were unfounded and that is doing the real work of defending citizens—the Police Complaints Authority. The Minister can correct me if I am wrong but my recollection from having flicked through the Budget was that it received only $29000 extra or maybe that was $29000 for new initiatives. But if I am correct whatever the figure was it was absolutely derisory. 
If Mr Gibson is listening to this debate I would tell him to think again before accepting office for a body that is set up to fail under the current regime the current budget and the current priorities. The Human Rights Commission bunch of tossers will get half a million dollars but the body to which Mr Gibson is going will not have enough money even to pay for extra staff.