Tisch Lindsay: Supreme Court Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Tisch Lindsay: Supreme Court Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:612;Page:9003] 
LINDSAY TISCH (NZ National—Piako) 
: 
 The Hon Dr Lockwood Smith has asked me to take his place and that is significant because National has opposed this bill right through the first and second readings. During the Committee stage the National representatives who were on the select committee the Hon Georgina te Heuheu and my colleague Richard Worth made that opposition very evident. I was a member of the select committee and from my office I have been listening with great interest to the way the bill has been proceeding. I know that Opposition members have been putting up a very strong argument that this bill is an abuse of privilege. It changes the constitution and has no standing at all. It has not gone to the public where the majority of people should have been able to have a say as to whether they believe that this sort of change to the way we have donethings should happen. 
I want to start by just setting the scene under Part 1 about where this highest court we will have—the appellant court the Supreme Court which we are opposed to—actually fits into the bigger scheme of things. The courts are one of the three essential institutions of New Zealand’s democratic form of Government. The other two are the legislature and the executive. Our constitution recognises the importance of the independence of the judicial powers from the legislative and executive powers but this bill will compromise those powers. We want to make sure that we highlight those points during the Committee stage. We would ask the Minister to take a call to explain why this measure is necessary why there is so much misunderstanding of it and why its interpretation will be so fraught with difficulty. 
The importance of the judicial functions of Government and of their independence from other forms of Government applies to all the courts and that is a very important point. But with this bill there is also an added dimension because of the proposed changes that are concerned with the ultimate judicial power—the final appellant court or Supreme Court. Most of the decisions of the final appellant court in a country with a constitution like ours have a very wide effect. They have an effect outside New Zealand on the foreign institutions that we might be dealing with. What this court will do has far-reaching implications and that is something the Government has not taken on board at all. It is very important that the existing appeal structure is not altered unless what is put in its place is of the highest quality and we have some doubts about whether that will happen. That is one of shortcomings of this bill. We do not believe that we have here the expertise we have enjoyed in the past by being able to take our cases to the Privy Council. 
David Benson-Pope 
: Oh! They can’t even choose a leader. 
LINDSAY TISCH 
: I hope the member over there takes a call because it is all very well to sit there and interject. We are talking about a major constitutional change and what does that member want to do? He wants to sit over there and glibly make stupid statements when this bill is making major constitutional changes. Government members do not want to stand up and debate the issues. 
I refer also to the separation of powers. If we look at the commentary on the bill at page 10 we see that the legal profession made some very important points. I want to highlight what it said and I quote: “The Criminal Bar Association of New Zealand submitted that the bill proposes to ‘replace a top free system with an expensive inferior system’ ”. That is what the Criminal Bar Association said and National supports that system.