PETER WILLIAMS: Disgraceful dropping of the Te Papa vandalism case

Why can’t the public decide public interest?

“Not in the public interest” is one of those phrases which means essentially nothing.

It’s a cover all or more likely a cover-up on the part of the government, civil service or judiciary for a lack of action on an event that the public is actually very keen to see happen.

Such is the case in the extraordinary decision by the Crown Solicitor to drop charges against Te Wehi Ratana, a 31 year old from Nelson, who was charged with damaging an art installation and obstructing police following an act of vandalism at Te Papa two years ago.

The installation damaged was Te Papa’s Treaty of Waitangi display.

He was due to face trial by jury in just a few weeks.

Trial by jury eh? You know, justice in front of your peers. In public. Where the people can see and hear the evidence and where a panel of the public can decide whether or not the alleged actions took place and whether or not they were a crime.

All in front of an interested public.

But this impending trial was not, according to the Crown Solicitor, in the public interest.

How can she say this? How does she know this?

Did she ask the public?

Of course not. She made a unilateral decision because the trial would become an intensely political event. There was sure to have been evidence presented which would have contested the meaning of the Treaty and whether or not the exhibit correctly portrayed what was meant when it was signed in 1840.

But that evidence should have been irrelevant and a strong judge would have made it inadmissible. The case should have been about two questions.

1. Did Ratana damage the installation?

2. Did he obstruct police trying to apprehend him?

Why Ratana did what he did is essentially unimportant. The charges he faced where not about the reasoning behind the alleged crimes. They were about the alleged crimes themselves.

Then into the rationale behind the Crown Solicitor’s decision is something decidedly worrying.

The Crown in recent weeks had reportedly been presented with “expert evidence” on tikanga from the defendant’s uncle – who just happened to be a former MP, one time leader of the Maori Party and the Auckland flanker who played against the Springboks in 1981, Te Ururoa (Jim) Flavell.

I included the irrelevant line about his rugby career because it’s about as important as tikanga is in this case.

This is a criminal case about vandalism to an art installation at a museum owned by the people of New Zealand. As a person of New Zealand I don’t want Te Papa exhibits damaged.

I don’t think anyone should be allowed to do that and get away with it.

Yet the Crown Solicitor, for reasons based purely on political timidity, has allowed an act of vandalism – for which there is photographic evidence of it in progress – to go unpunished.

It is a blight on our justice system and on the government which oversees the Crown Solicitor’s office.

This case was most definitely in the public interest.

I’m embarrassed to live in such a corrupt country.

Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Subscribe to Peter William's Substack here