Prebble Richard: Supreme Court Bill — Second Reading 
Prebble Richard: Supreme Court Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:612;Page:8909] 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (Leader—ACT NZ) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the ACT party to totally oppose the Supreme Court Bill. It will abolish the right that New Zealanders have had throughout our history to be able to appeal to the Privy Council. There is no doubt at all that the courts are part of our constitution. It is an abuse of power for a minority Government to change by a simple parliamentary majority of three an important part of our constitution. I am pleased to see that the United Future party has come out against the bill but every member knows that if there were to be a conscience vote this bill would fail. The Labour Party has had to whip its members. There are members of the Maori caucus in the Labour Party who are opposed to this bill. If there were to be a free vote in the House this bill would not pass. This is part of our constitution and a true majority for it does not exist. One can tell that I am right by Government members’ reactions. I challenge them. If that is not so we should have a conscience vote. 
We do not have a written constitution. Our Westminster constitutional conventions are guarded only by the willingness of the Government of the day not to change the constitution unless there is an overwhelming parliamentary majority—members suggest that that should be at least 75 percent of all MPs—or by the New Zealand tradition of having a referendum. This Government is not following either. Our Attorney-General Margaret Wilson is the most dangerous politician not just today but in this country’s history and I include among those Sir Robert Muldoon. 
 Margaret Wilson has her own agenda which the public of New Zealand does not support. She is seeking to create the socialist republic of Aotearoa and honourable members should make no mistake about it that abolishing the Privy Council is an important step on her agenda. That is what we are facing. Labour is now going to put through this bill—and it is a minority Government—with the help of the extreme left Green Party. They have no moral majority to make this stance and I say that it is an affront to our Westminster democratic system. 
Let me turn to the merits of the Privy Council and I can speak with some authority because I am the only member of Parliament who has taken a case to the Privy Council. I have actually been there. Members might say that I am biased because when I went to the Privy Council I won. But I want members to consider this matter including the members interjecting— 
Hon David Cunliffe 
: Prove it! 
Jill Pettis 
: You can’t win elections though. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: I say to those two members who are interjecting that I did so as a member of Parliament. I had a situation where Television New Zealand a State institution published a lie on television. The lie was that it was claimed that I as Minister for State-owned Enterprises had gone to the State-owned enterprise unit and deleted a whole lot of information from that unit’s computer that would have shown I had been up to naughtiness. In fact that was a fabrication. I had never logged on to that computer and I went to the Government computer service which said that no files had ever been deleted. The service actually kept a record. So it was a lie from day one but State television repeated it. I then went to the Court of Appeal which said that as I was a member of Parliament I could not have my day in court because of parliamentary privilege. 
I appealed that to the Privy Council which overturned the decision of the Court of Appeal unanimously. Since then there have been dozens of academic articles written and every one has said that the Privy Council was right and the Court of Appeal was wrong. I say that there will be a future member of Parliament who will have his or her career destroyed by a local New Zealand court just as I had—or would have had. Why did I win at the Privy Council? In this country—[ 
Interruption 
] The member may not know this but in this country I am a controversial figure. The Court of Appeal is a local court but the Privy Council had never heard of Richard Prebble so its members just looked at the case’s merits. What do we want from our final court? We want an unbiased professional court that will look at merits not personalities. That is what the Privy Council does. 
But let us take a more recent case. What members are asking is whether what the Court of Appeal has said in the Marlborough case is what we want from our judges in future. Here is a New Zealand court deciding to overturn a decision that is not just 40 years old. It does not go back to 1963; it actually goes back to 1877. I tell members that if that case were appealed to the Privy Council we know that the Marlborough court case verdict would be overturned. It is wrong. We have a Court of Appeal with unelected judges engaged in activism. 
I say that to members opposite who have had to have 10 or 11 huis and who have had to have their whole programme disrupted by a court suddenly deciding something that no Government would have done—that the Crown no longer owns the foreshore and the seabed. Would a Labour Government have introduced a bill like that? No it would not have. No party in this House would have introduced it but we now have unelected judges prepared not to interpret the law but to make it. I say to members of Parliament that this is a crucial point they have to consider. Do we want to live in a parliamentary democracy where members of Parliament pass laws and have to face the people every 3 years on their stewardship or do we want a system where unelected judges—appointed by Margaret Wilson the most dangerous politician in New Zealand—believe that they have a mandate to pass laws that Parliament would never pass? 
I have no doubt in my mind where I stand on that. I am in favour of democracy; I am in favour of Parliament; I am in favour of the people of New Zealand being able to pass their laws. I say that Margaret Wilson and Helen Clark when putting forward this Supreme Court Bill know that they are establishing a court that will pass laws that even they cannot get through the Labour Party caucus. That is the reality and this legislation is a challenge to our constitution. It is a challenge to our Westminster parliamentary system. 
Margaret Wilson’s agenda is to create a socialist republic of Aotearoa—something that she could not get the public of New Zealand to agree to. How do we know that? Because if this Government thought there was support for this bill who would doubt that the Government would call a referendum? Of course it would. It would love to have a referendum but it knows what the result would be. The Government knows that a majority of New Zealanders do not support Margaret Wilson’s socialist agenda. It knows that a majority of Labour voters do not support Margaret Wilson’s agenda. I say to this House that the Marlborough court case will turn out to be just the start of a series of cases by unelected judges not interpreting the law but creating it. 
We have in the Privy Council a safeguard—a constitutional bulwark against judges deciding that they do not want to interpret the law any more but to make it. The Privy Council has had a proud record of providing sound impartial lawmaking and it is reckless for the Government to do away with that. But it is worse than that. It is a constitutional outrage to do away with it by a slender parliamentary majority of three and to do that only by applying the Labour Party whip to those members of the Labour Government also opposed to it. There is no parliamentary real majority and the Greens should vote against this bill.