Worth Richard: Judicial Matters Bill — Second Reading 
Worth Richard: Judicial Matters Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:617;Page:12795] 
RICHARD WORTH (National—Epsom) 
: 
 National is opposed to this legislation. The Associate Minister of Justice has given a very fair summary of the principal matters that occupied the time of the Justice and Electoral Committee which heard submissions on the bill. I agree with her also when she said that the diagram in the bill is to use her phrase “a valuable addition” but from that point on I fear we part company. I see nothing of merit in this legislation at all. 
I would like to pick up some of the primary concerns that troubled National members as we heard submissions on this bill. I am bound to say that we had concerns right from the outset. A good starting point I suggest and I am sure most members of the House would agree is that legislation should be remedial in its purpose. That means that there must be some mischief that needs to be remedied otherwise why are we here? Surely it is not simply to pass laws. We should be passing laws that advance a cause and advance it for the good. That is a primary concern that National has with this legislation. 
The primary focus of the bill is a more formal structure for the removal of judges so the assumption of course is that the current procedures are not working well. The reality is that we have never removed a judge and never really come close to it. The closest we came was many years ago in 1913 and it involved Justice Edwards. He was a member of the Supreme Court and became the resident judge in Auckland in 1903. By 1913 his courtroom behaviour had become intolerable to the legal profession and was the subject of widespread comments. Newspapers carried reports of his attacks on counsel and there was a cartoon in the  
New Zealand Observer 
 that suggested that the judge was biased towards a female respondent in a 1913 divorce trial. 
The lawyers of the Auckland District Law Society gathered. They recorded in a resolution that the administration of justice had been imperilled and that the judge had shaken public confidence in the then Supreme Court. He was transferred to Wellington and never sat in Auckland again. In 1919 there was a resurgence of opposition to the judge with the result that he resigned in 1921 on a full pension with £1000 compensation. That is as close as we ever got to the removal of a judge so we do not need a formal process to deal with what is really a non-issue. 
I resent the loss of a right that I and other members in this Parliament had to move our own motion if events showed that it was necessary to take action against a particular judge who had crossed the line and whose conduct called for the highest form of sanction and removal for judicial misbehaviour. But this Government has decided that that right should be taken away. Instead this costly and complex statutory process has now been set up for the removal of judges. It must be complex because it needs a detailed diagram to explain it and we see that in schedule 1AA under the heading “Overview of process for Judicial Conduct Commissioner and Judicial Conduct Panel”. 
That is the first objection that National takes to this legislation. There is no need for it so why do it? There is already a perfectly adequate existing pathway. The Justice and Electoral Committee did not really hear any evidence of substance relating to the removal of judges. What we were treated to was instance after instance where the behaviour of the judge fell short of the standard that the particular complainant required. This legislation does not deal with that at all. If a mischief was to be remedied it was a mischief that was concerned with the circumstance that a judge was intemperate with counsel intemperate with witnesses or failed to get on with the job—the sorts of complaints that fall short of removal. This Government has decided that it will not deal with that issue. It could have but it has not. 
The bill does not propose to alter the test of misbehaviour or incapacity. It fails to deal with conduct that falls short of those standards. There was an opportunity to address those issues which are quite clearly of concern to the public. We have just heard the Associate Minister of Justice saying that she did not want the head of bench to be burdened with those sorts of things at any particular level of the court system. Things could have been done—censure public apology required counselling but this Government did not have the appetite to take that step. 
The second point is that the bill does not deal with the appointment of judges and if there are problems in the legal system they are more about the process of appointment and issues of transparency of process than the removal of judges. The committee was very much aware that a discussion document was coming from the Government on judicial appointments. We signalled that in the commentary on the bill where we noted that the Associate Minister of Justice was releasing a public discussion document to canvass views on the introduction of an independent body with a role in judicial appointments. Of course that discussion document came almost at the same time as we reported to Parliament on this bill. 
I would like to deal with two further matters that I think are important in the context of the House’s consideration of this legislation. We should I assert be very cautious about the appointment of part-time judges. Judging is a full-time business; there is no doubt about that. It is not for part-timers. It is not for people who are convalescing. It is not for people who can give only a small part of their time to the process. 
That proposition can be simply tested. It is not uncommon for criminal trials to run for let us say 4 days so we will have to confront the situation of the judge who says: “If this is a 4-day case I can’t start on it because on Wednesdays and Thursdays I can’t be available to sit.” It is not practicable to have jurors hang around for 2 days waiting for the judge’s pleasure so that the case can be resumed. This is an example where it is foreshadowed in advance that a case will take 4 days but there is another class of case that I know of—from my experience working day in and day out in the courts—that is not uncommon. That is where a case is scheduled for 2 days and it runs on. It starts Monday and it goes through Tuesday. The expectation of the counsel at the beginning is that it will take only 2 days but it trickles into Wednesday and then next thing it goes on until Thursday. 
How is this part-time judging system going to work? I invite members of the House who might have colleagues friends acquaintances or relatives who are judges to sound them out on what they think about it. They will think it the load of rubbish I think it is. There may be a case for judges to take unpaid leave in particular cases— for example the pregnancy of a judge but that is a matter that should be managed within the judicial process. 
The final point I would like to make is on this whole issue of judicial numbers because this bill substantially increases the ability for more judges to be appointed. There are amendments to clauses 41 and 51 that increase the number of District Court judges from 123 to 140 and the number of High Court judges from 37 to 55. We have enough judges at the moment. The issues do not lie in more judges; they lie in more money better resourcing and improved case management.