New Zealand is officially no longer subject to the rule of law.
We thought the behaviour of the judges in the Supreme court was leading to this, but we naively lived in hope for a while.
Not many options left now, short of revolution. Is that what they wanted?
Monday, 6 August 2018
The last chapter.
We asked the Supreme Court to reconsider the judgment of the Court of Appeal in which it overturned a High Court Judgment that found the Northern Regional Council had failed to set valid rates year after year.
Instead of agreeing to allow our appeal (or not) on the papers the Supreme Court put us to the huge expense of going all the way to Wellington, where our counsel was abused and bullied by a bunch of legal gangsters posing as jurists.
Then they took a further five weeks to release their “decision” which was to throw us out on every point we made.
The Supreme Court of New Zealand has formally declared that Local Government does not have to comply with the law.
The only people who have any enforceable obligations under the local government acts are ratepayers.
As our lawyer has told us “If a ratepayer comes to me, now, with an allegation that their council has failed to comply with any aspect of the law that we used to think applied to them, I would tell the ratepayer whether I agreed with them or not, and then I would tell them not to take any legal action, regardless, because there is no law that is actually enforced against councils in New Zealand”.
We thought that the Court of Appeal Ruling that partially overturned the rulings of Justice Duffy was, up to then, the shabbiest piece of legal incompetence (or worse) that we had ever seen. The Supreme Court was not to be outdone. Its ruling is a blatant repudiation of the rule of law. Just one example will suffice. The law says that no council may delegate the assessment of rates to anyone else. The Court of Appeal and the New Zealand Supreme Court both say “It does not matter a twopenny stuff what the law says, if a council wants to let someone else assess its rates it can just go for it”. Expect your rates to be assessed and collected by the Mongrel Mob in the near future, and FORGET about trying to prevent that.
We’ll put the judgment up on the website for those with strong stomachs. If you fancy living under the rule of law, give serious consideration to moving to Zimbabwe, or Eritrea. Countries like that are rapidly moving ahead of this place when it comes down to protecting the legal rights of citizens.
More to come, but not much more.
To read the Supreme Court's Decision, see the .pdf file attached to this page.
To hear Radio New Zealand's announcement of the decision click here :
P.S. The formation of a nationwide Ratepayers' group is currently being discussed and a meeting for representatives of groups is being planned ( provisionally for 21st of September 2018 in Nelson )