Government jumped gun on Privy Council

By HELEN TUNNAH deputy political editor

Treasury officials warned the Government its plans to scrap appeals to the Privy Council had not been properly costed and advised Attorney-General Margaret Wilson to delay the policy until the work was done.

Cabinet and policy papers released to the Institute of Chartered Accountants show there was no full cost-benefit analysis completed on ending Privy Council appeals and setting up a domestic Supreme Court before Ms Wilson recommended the change to the Cabinet.

Institute chief executive Diana Pryde said a Cabinet paper, released under the Official Information Act, also wrongly said accounting firms neither opposed nor supported the scheme.

In fact, the major accounting companies have opposed abandoning the Privy Council as New Zealand's final court of appeal, because of concerns about the impact on commercial law cases.

The plan has also been met with alarm by commercial lawyers and some Maori, and the papers released to the institute reveal that the Treasury warned the Government it might not have consulted properly on the policy.

Ms Pryde said Ms Wilson had failed to listen to concerns about abandoning Privy Council access.

"The onus is on the Government to clearly demonstrate ... the need for reform. To date it has not."

The Labour-led Government has pursued the policy since late 2000, when it released a discussion paper on proposals to review appeal structures - which did not include a Supreme Court option.

In August the following year, Ms Wilson presented a paper to the Cabinet's policy committee seeking agreement in principle to replace the Privy Council with a domestic court.

She later set up a ministerial advisory group to look at how a New Zealand-based final appeal court might work but not comment on whether the Privy Council should be retained.

The papers show that last year officials were preparing more detailed data on the proposal for the policy committee to consider.

However, before that work could be considered, the Government announced Privy Council appeals were to be scrapped and a new Supreme Court be set up.

Treasury officials had asked almost a year earlier that more work be done on costing such a plan.

They also asked, in July 2001, that Ms Wilson delay recommending in principle to scrap the Privy Council until a proper analysis had been completed.



The Treasury said the Cabinet paper lacked "substantive discussion" and had "no meaningful comparison with results under the Privy Council model".

Officials said consultation recommendations in the Cabinet paper did not appear to go far enough and exposed the "Government to risk of partial or inappropriate consultation".



The Ministry of Economic Development also worried there had been insufficient work done on cutting ties with the Privy Council.





Of the 70 submissions received on the 2000 discussion document, 32 supported ending appeal rights to the Privy Council, 32 were opposed and the other six expressed no opinion.

Although the Cabinet was told the discussion document prompted strong support for the local Supreme Court option, Ms Wilson's office was not able to say how many of the submissions supported that idea.