A win for Pike River families and open justice

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

A High Court decision that reverses a long-established legal privilege has produced a rare victory for the Pike River families and given them new hope that someone might face prosecution for the deaths of 29 men in the West Coast mine in 2010.
High Court judge Jillian Mallon ruled that the families may now see the privileged material that led to the decision by WorkSafe to drop 12 charges brought against the Pike River Mine manager Peter Whittall.
In her decision, she said transparency through open justice outweighed factors pointing against disclosure of the documents which were claimed to be privileged.
Without transparency there was scope for false speculation and misunderstanding which could undermine confidence in the administration of justice, she ruled.
The action was taken by lawyer Chris Harder with the support of families’ spokesman Bernie Monk and Dean Dunbar whose 17-year-old son Joseph also died in the mine.
Former Ombudsman and legal advocate for the families Leo Donnelly said the balance previously sat with legal privilege but this tipped it the other way. 
“It has opened up the argument that confidence in the administration of justice means that you should have disclosure not just to show that something wrong happened, but also that people are confident that nothing untoward did happen — which is a much wider argument,” he said.
The decision reverses one made by the Supreme Court in 2017 in a case taken by Sonya Rockhouse and Anna Osborne, when the court ruled WorkSafe’s decision to withdraw its prosecution of Whittal in return for payments made to the victims’ families was lawful.
Rockhouse said she did not think the High Court decision changed the situation a great deal and her focus was on the police prosecution case which had been collecting evidence in the main drift.
Monk, however, said the families had fought for 10 years for truth and accountability and he believed the decision had taken them a big step forward. They were now awaiting a date to travel to Wellington where they would get to view and listen to the previously privileged information.
The stalwart families have suffered so many disappointments in their fight for justice, most recently in 2021 when after $50m was spent to reach 2.2km into the mine, Pike River Recovery Minister Andrew Little decided it was too hard and too costly to go any further.
The High Court ruling is a welcome and much deserved win for them.