Heather du Plessis-Allan on the Supreme Court's decision on the Marine and Coastal Area Act

The judiciary think that they are the ones writing laws, and they can just ignore what parliament wants, and they can call all the shots, and they act like parliament is full of a bunch of idiots and we need to be saved from them. The court of appeal decision was only one of the examples of this.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're gonna have to indulge me on this one because
I haven't been here all week, but I need to
talk about the Supreme Court decision that came out earlier
in the week, because I think it was actually probably
one of the most significant things to have happened in
the last few days. If you don't know what I'm
talking about, I'm referring to the Supreme Court decision on
the Marine and Coastal Area Act, and it was important
mainly because it overturned a Court of Appeal decision, and

(00:23):
that Court of Appeal decision was widely seen as one
of the most egregious cases of courts basically ignoring what
Parliament wanted and just doing what they wanted to do themselves,
because Parliament in this particular case had been very very clear,
very clear that here we could only claim rights over
certain parts of the foreshore and seabed and very specific circumstances.
And what the Court of Appeal had decided was that

(00:44):
Parliament didn't really mean that. No, it said that, but
it didn't really mean that. So it was just going
to write some new rules and it's what it did,
and it was completely bollocks and nuts everybody looked at
it and went, how can anybody think that this is okay? Well,
thank god that the Supreme Court did not think it
was okay. And these guys are more senior judges obviously,
and they came out this week and said to the
lower Court, no, you're wrong, you erd in that decision,

(01:06):
and they set the thing right. Now, why I think
this is important is because this actually goes beyond this
one piece of law. Right. This is actually a significant
problem we've got at the moment where the judiciary has
basically just gone off on this really weird tangent where
they think that they are the ones writing laws and
they can just ignore what Parliament wants and they can
call all the shots, and they act like Parliament is

(01:27):
full of a bunch of idiots and we need to
be saved from them. The Court of Appeal decision was
only one of the examples of this. It was the
most high profile, but there are heaps of other examples,
for example three strikes where they just ignored the three
strikes law in so many cases, or even more recently,
the cases you know those forty two k c's who

(01:48):
wrote the open letters to the government about the Treaty
Principles Bill. They actually said in that letter, we're not
sure that you actually can pass laws like this. Hello,
Yes you can your parliament. It's bizarre cases even would
say something like that anyway. Mainly, the point I'm trying
to make is that the overreach from the judiciary has
gone way too far and has got to stop. It's

(02:10):
actually a real problem for democracy because democracy relies on
Parliament being able to call the shots and everybody just
about going. We might not like the law, but that's
the law now. So I'm pleased to see that the
Court of Appeal has been put back in its place
by the Supreme Court this week, and I'd like to
see more of that. Please. For more from Hither Duplessy
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