Monday, July 07, 2025



Another attack on the rule of law

Over the past few years New Zealand fisheries ministers have been repeatedly found to have acted illegally in their quota decisions, ignoring the Fisheries Act's environmental and information principles and setting quota at unlawfully high levels to pander to the fishing industry. But current fisheries minister Shame Jones has a solution: ban court cases:

But a “frustrated” Jones is signalling a dramatic response: he’s considering changing the law to limit such court action altogether.

In an interview with The Post, Jones said he had asked officials to review the Fisheries Act to determine whether it had become “weaponised” by environmental groups.

[...]

“The frequency of this litigious activity has caused me to explore with the officials as to whether or not the law is fit for purpose,” he said.

“We cannot have a situation where we’re outsourcing to litigants and the judiciary the statutory role of resource management on behalf of the citizens of New Zealand.”

But of course that wouldn't be happening if ministers were obeying the law in the first place. The problem here is not the courts - it is consistently unlawful behaviour by ministers, who seem to regard the whims of their fishing industry donors as being more important than the law.

More generally, interpreting the law and ensuring that the government actually follows it are key duties of the courts. When you remove that, you don't have legal government in any real sense. Instead you have the arbitrary whims of a dictator. That may suit Jones very well - he's made no secret of his authoritarian and autocratic inclinations. But I don't think it suits kiwis at all. But if Jones goes ahead and pushes this through in his narrowing time window before the election, it will simply be another piece of bad law to be nuked in the next government's Omnibus Repeal Bill.