“..Frankly, there is a case for Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias to be banged up in the slammer herself, along with some of her colleagues.
Not for challenging the size of the jail population and suggesting a prisoner amnesty..
.. but for presiding over the outrageous waste of public expenditure involved in the new $80 million Supreme Court building in Wellington.
Restoration of the old High Court building, to house a Supreme Court of only five judges, was initially to cost $20 million.
That was exorbitant enough.
But now the cost has gone from $4 million a judge to $16 million a head.
The judiciary and the last government decided that the renovated old High Court would not be grand enough ..
.. and that they could not fit the five judges, with their court and chambers, into the old category one-listed historic building.
So taxpayers were then landed with funding a new structure for the Supreme Court .. while still restoring the old High Court building.
A bit of double-bunking in one of those flash new container prison cells sounds like just the thing to bring the judiciary down to earth.
If anyone had the slightest inkling of this runaway cost of a Supreme Court..
.. who would have voted for cutting our links with the Privy Council?
That gave us an alternative final court of appeal on the cheap –
- in a manner more befitting our circumstances ..
.. as a tiny, hugely indebted country..”
go to source/story>>Time to contain court’s cost – opinion | Stuff.co.nz
