Bishop takes aim at activists using the courts to subvert Parliament

Summarised by Centrist

Attorney-General Chris Bishop says the government should act more quickly when courts interpret laws in ways Parliament did not intend.

“When the law takes the wrong direction, we should say so clearly and deliberately through legislation,” Bishop told the Law Association.

He said he would recommend that ministers legislate “more clearly and more deliberately”, while responding faster to judgments that take the law in an “unhappy direction”.

“That, after all, is what parliamentary sovereignty means,” he said.

Bishop pointed to the government’s decision to create a statutory bar preventing Smith v Fonterra and similar climate litigation from continuing.

The Supreme Court had allowed the case to proceed beyond an initial strike-out application. However, Bishop sided with the Court of Appeal, which said the plaintiff was effectively seeking a “court-designed and court-supervised regulatory regime”.

The Court of Appeal argued judges lacked the expertise and democratic accountability to weigh the social, economic and distributional consequences of climate regulation.

Bishop said Parliament could either wait years for the litigation to reach a final conclusion or make clear that climate policy should be handled through the Climate Change Response Act. The government chose to legislate.

His wider message was a warning against using litigation to achieve political outcomes that advocates had failed to secure democratically.

“The courthouse remains an attractive forum for those who have yet to persuade the public, and therefore Parliament, of the merits of their cause,” he said.

Bishop said judges must guard against attempts to use the courts to “relitigate Parliament’s choices”, arguing that major policy decisions belong to the only branch of government directly elected by the public.

“If voters don’t like the choices made by Parliament, they can vote to change Parliament’s composition,” he said.

Read more at The NZ Herald