 Rai, te dinau roi pa rata'n zelaidu te m"! A zelaidu zelaidu te m! A tyntu te da! Rai pa i a p! A pa i tu ta i a napiazai& Mae an Taga mahi te pas balema A kui minu maha stori Ma'i rau te rai A kui Rai i te ba maha i te kira A mahi te pa mahi te pa sa mahi te pa sa Maia jia mahi te ta a pala mahi te blessu Maia jia mahi te ka maia te ba maia jia mahi te ba maia mahi te ba maia jei mahi te lau I feel like I've had a funny old career path to the job which I think surely is one of the most interesting jobs a lawyer can have in this country and it's certainly turning out to be that. What I'll talk about is something of that career path and how I got to where I got to and my role in my life as a public servant. I'm really proud to be a public servant. I think it's such an important calling to be a public servant in New Zealand. And then I'll talk about my role as Solicitor General. What does it mean? What do I do? What is the function? I hope we'll have time for questions. I will and you might have to remind me to weave it in or maybe I'll weave it in but I will talk to you about the GCSP. Because that year was one of the most significant years for me yet and what I learned about myself actually not what I learned about the intelligence agencies but we'll get there. So I didn't want to be a lawyer. I went to law school. I don't really remember why but probably I was no good at maths and science and I could talk the legs off a table and I was good at debating in English. And my family expectation was that I would go to university so all of those things played into sort of pretty obvious calculus. Do a law degree. My brother did a law degree too so that made some sense. But I thought what lawyers did when you finished law school was what I saw lawyers on television doing, working too hard, drinking too much, having sex with each other in the office. That was sort of like what it seemed to me was the public available version of lawyering, something I wasn't very interested in. And also the idea, no, maybe that came later but the idea that you worked for somebody else's bottom line, not sure if I had that quite so clearly as a young person that I didn't want to do that. But anyway, so I finished law school and I went around all the law firms in Wellington looking for a job and unsurprisingly they didn't want me and I didn't want them back and that was probably obvious in the interview. So that was like whuh, didn't get any of those jobs. I don't think I would have thrived in a private sector firm but we never know or maybe it's not too late, never say never. I think I would do differently now. But anyway, one of my friends said, oh this agency of public service agency is recruiting, why don't you go and see them? So I went along to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs and got a job. And my job then was to answer the telephone, oh 800 numbers, they still exist, toll free phone calls to my desk and a few others of us from people who had consumer problems. You didn't have to be a lawyer to do this job and it was a bit like the Citizens Advice Bureau sort of advice line but government used to run it. And we used to do some great things in that job, people who needed help, who didn't know how to get help, who didn't understand the law, who didn't understand they were being ripped off and buying rubbish cars on punishing high purchase and illegal credit deals. I really enjoyed that work and I realised that my lawyering could actually do something useful and I didn't have to be like the lawyers that I saw on television but actually I was something else. I was really helping and it gave me a great buzz to help individuals in that way. Also I had some very dreary times in that job, one of my sort of famous or maybe famously recorded or recounted stories is that I had a phone call from a woman who said, I've got a complaint, yes, my husband and I are counting the matches in a box of matches. Yes, having a good day. And there are only 49 in the box but the box says a prox 50. I wonder if I should be doing something different with my law degree. But I knew that I was really enjoying other aspects of this, helping these people that needed help. And I moved over into the policy function of my agency of consumer affairs. And that was when I realised that actually being involved in how government makes rules to help everybody and I didn't just have to do this one on one thing. I could be involved in law reform in a way that meant that I felt like I was doing something good kind of like for the community or for the society involved in consumer affairs, sorry consumer law reform, high purchase reform. In fact I think that's when I came across you May and high purchase law reform. In fact I remember May finding my approach to the Official Information Act refreshing because she would ring me up and ask me for something and I would send it to her. It was shocked. So always been my approach to the Official Information Act because that's how it should work but anyway it gets complicated sometimes. So that was a really great experience and also the experience of, I'm only three or four years out of law school, being in the House of Representatives, sitting with the Minister just before the line where the Minister sits above the line and you sit below it. When he, in that case, he was in the chair leading this legislation through the House and questions would come up or proposals for amendment would be made on the floor of the House and the Minister would turn to you, the lawyer, for assistance about can we do that, how can we do that. You'd scurry off and talk to the drafters. We were making law like really in the moment, it was really exciting and a very exciting new idea for me that that's what lawyers could do. Probably after a couple of years, or maybe not two years in that job, I thought, now do I want to be a policy adviser or do I want to be a lawyer proper? Like I still had this idea that there was a proper lawyer that you might be. So I applied for a job at the Ministry of Fisheries and got that as a solicitor. And that was, boy, working in fisheries was fantastic. It was so interesting again. I was involved in, of course, fisheries law and sort of the animal husbandry regulatory framework around fishing, but also treaty settlements, also devolution of fishing, non-commercial fishing rights to iwi, drafting up the regulatory framework that would support that. It was really a huge range of things that we did in an agency that you might have thought was a bit narrow, fisheries. But a couple of things also started to happen to me. When I was at Consumer Affairs, I was asked to manage a small team and then I was asked to manage a slightly larger team. When I was at Fisheries, I came in not as a manager and then was soon asked to manage the legal team. And I also realised that I had something of a propensity for managing people and process, and I quite like that too. So now I'm collecting up ideas that this thing that I thought was a lawyer is wrong and I can be a lawyer in my own way as a manager of people, of a legal adviser as I was. And then I started to watch in those days fisheries was highly contested as fishing quota was allocated based on fishing history and it was all very contested and there was a lot of litigation. And I used to go along and sit in the back of the courtroom and watch Crown lawyers represent the Ministry of Fisheries and that started to key into my old habit of drama and acting that I'd done all through school. I thought that looks pretty cool. Excuse me, and could I do that? I wasn't sure that I could, but I applied for a job. I got a job at the Crown Law Office in 2002 as a Crown counsel. And I thought stop this management business, be a proper lawyer. Stop getting involved in management which takes you away from lawyering. And sure enough soon I was asked to manage a small team at Crown Law and I finally stopped resisting that part of my skill set which was about dealing with people. And I should, well I'll come to it now because I might forget. I think one of the critical things about lawyering is that you need to be good with people. To be an effective lawyer you need to be able to be clear to somebody you're talking to, you need to be able to work with them, they need to be able to see that you can understand their context, that you can understand their business priorities or their risk tolerances. If you're only good with books, you might not be so good with people and that is a skill you should think about working on and developing. In my view that makes you an effective lawyer when you're good with people. So I stopped resisting this idea that I was good with people and flung myself at also management roles. So I became a team leader in Crown Law, the Deputy Solicitor-General. It was about then that I started to think, well, I think it was before I became the Deputy I started to be sort of clear about this. Until now I hadn't really thought I wanted to do this, then this, then that. I had just done jobs that I thought were interesting and I thought I wanted to be challenged in my jobs. I didn't really particularly care where I ended up. My interest was in, perhaps in a slightly shallow way, having a good life where I did something that I thought was valuable and important and I never wanted to give up my whole life to my work. So a couple of sort of strong values for me that led me to take different roles. But at Crown Law I thought maybe I could be the Deputy Solicitor-General. I started to think in a career planning way. The Deputy then was Matthew Palmer, now Justice Palmer. He was a great mentor to me about helping me be a bit more structured about thinking about what did I want, what did I want to do and then what gaps might I have that I needed to fill. So he was very good to me about making me work through a process of thinking. Was it leadership? Was it management? Was it different law? What about the private sector? Did I want to think about that? Anyway, I became the Deputy Solicitor-General after a process. At some point in there I thought, well, if I'm going to aim to be the Deputy, why not aim to be the Solicitor-General? And even now I feel like that's slightly embarrassing that I thought that because certainly then I thought that I shouldn't tell anybody else that because they would think, well, you know, what sort of a dickhead are you that you think that you can become the Solicitor-General? So I kept that really quiet for a long, long time and it was part of my own kind of lessons about myself that needed some courage for myself to say, I'm going to try for that. And I set my sights at thinking one day I want to be a credible applicant. I want to be an applicant who doesn't get laughed off the page when she applies for that job. And that was sort of how high I set my standard then. So Mike Heron was the Solicitor-General when I was the Deputy. He's a barrister here in Auckland, QC here in Auckland now. And he was another great mentor to me about helping me kind of undo this crazy view that I had of myself that I wasn't capable of doing what he was doing. And he was very, very good and very generous with his time and we cooked up this plan together that I needed to find a way to go out and do something different. I'd come up through the Public Service, as you've just heard. I've been at Crown Law since 2002. Everybody was telling me, well, not everybody, but the Public Service kind of centre, the State Services Commission, the Leadership Development Program that I was doing, was saying, you need to do something else. Show us that you're capable of something a bit more broad because people often think that lawyers have a very narrow skill set. It's absolutely wrong, but that can be of you, especially if you have just come up in a certain line of lawyering. That was the plan that I would look for an opportunity to show that I had a bigger skill set. And I went along... Ah, this... It's a common opportunity came up where the DPMC, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, who has an intelligence function, wanted somebody, they said they wanted a senior public servant to work with intelligence agencies to determine what the intelligence agencies might strive for if they wanted to be an agile, joined-up intelligence community. And they wanted sort of a think-piece. I thought, well, I can do that. And it hits a few things for me, senior public service, sort of centre role, being exposed to a wider range of senior public servants, showing I can do something other than lawyering. Best of all, it was an eight-week gig. And I really liked my job as Deputy Solicitor-General and I didn't really want to do this thing to show I had breadth. I have got breadth and I like it here. I don't want to go and do something different. So the eight-weeks was very attractive. So I went and did that piece of work. It was great. It was really interesting. I wasn't being a lawyer. I realised I had other skills. It was great. Best of all, eight-weeks pass, and I was heading back to the Deputy Solicitor-General role. When somebody said to me, the director of the GCSB role has just become vacant and we're looking for a short-term secondi, are you interested? And I thought at the time I was interested because, even though I wasn't interested, I thought it was a good opportunity to say, I hope nobody, you know, sensible in power watches this video. But anyway, I thought I should say, you know, show willing. Like, yeah, okay, I'm interested. So I said, yeah, I was interested. And I was very shocked and slightly horrified when I came down to, Yesuna, could you please be the director of the GCSB? What was I thinking? I thought I... You know, I'm a lawyer. What was I thinking? I was very anxious. And I won't bore you about that, although one of my lessons is that if you have this internal narrative, and you should listen to it, that tells you that you are not good enough or that you're not able to do this or that somebody else should do that because you might muck it up, ignore it if you can. You know, like, I'm a confident person and I've always been a confident person. It took me until I was about 46 in that job, and I realised that I also had a really unhealthy internal narrative that was telling me I wasn't capable of stuff. When I said being in the Bureau was the biggest year of my life, it was realising that. So I go along to the Bureau. I'm incredibly anxious, just anxiety and sort of worrying about whether I was going to be any good. It was all very well to now have a gig where I was going to show people what I was capable of, but, you know, like, the opposite was possible too, right? That this was going to be the end of my career. And I would really muck things up. And I had just been on a course. I think it was called Leading for Strategic Success and it was a really great course and it revealed one thing to me, what revealed a few things to me, the one thing it really revealed to me was that my approach to life was that if I didn't know what was happening, if I didn't know what was coming next, I didn't like it. I felt nervous and anxious about not knowing what came next. And as they often do in these courses, they got me to write to myself. What was the revelation that you've had and what is the thing you're going to do differently? And three months later, they sent it to you. And it just so happened that my letter arrived the day before I started at the Bureau and it was such a relief to read in my own handwriting that I had learnt this blessing. I had forgotten it, of course, instantly in all the fuss and anxiety that, ah, you're worried because you don't know what's going to happen. Just don't worry about it. And for some reason it just made me utterly calm and off I went. In the first week in that job, the litigations came out in the media. So, ah, OK. Good, oh. But, you know, I know about preparing for litigation. I know how to prepare to front what I had to do in my second week, which was appear in front of a select committee in a public hearing about what the hell is going on in the Bureau. So it was a real baptism of fire and I learnt that I had to rely on my skills, that I had some, that I wasn't just a lawyer. Actually, I was also eloquent. I was smart. I was tough. You know, I learnt all these things about myself in that year. And to answer the person's question about what else did I learn in the Bureau, what I learnt was the Bureau is full of really dedicated public servants who work for the government like any other public servant. And just because we can't always see what goes on below the radar, they're working to government priorities. They're working according to law and the oversight that the Bureau and the SIS have over them was then and is now more so stronger than any other public servant. They've got the Ombudsman, the Privacy Commissioner, the Auditor-General, like everybody else. The Courts, like everybody else. They've also got the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security who has complete power to come in, look at anything, ask for anything. I think her powers have actually just been increased in the new legislation although I'm not as familiar with that. She had the past to the building and she could and did walk in to anything at any time. You know, that doesn't always mean she can't see everything, but actually just like having an awareness that a judge is looking over your shoulder when you're an administrative decision maker thinking about how do I do things, having the Inspector-General on the other shoulder was a really good discipline. So what I learnt was that what we needed to do about that those agencies was talk to people. I spent most of that year out in a different advocacy role talking to people, regular people talking to select committees, going on the radio going on the television, talking about what does the agency do that I can tell you you have to trust us that there's stuff you can't see but the Inspector-General can see it and the select committee of Parliament can see it Ministers and the Prime Minister see it and authorise it through a warranting process you should trust that process. The other thing I learnt there was that I was a really good leader Anyway whether it was a surprise to me or not I don't know but I ended up in a job for a year it was supposed to be for two months it ended up just on a year running an organisation where I pretty much knew nothing about the subject matter I had said in my job interview for that temporary role that I did know something about the Bureau which I did I had been a lawyer for the Bureau in the SAS before but was only when I got there that I realised I actually know nothing about what goes on here what my job was to lead people was to make sure that the right people were making the right decisions, the right advice to me if I had to make a decision and so on. Another point about that agency was that the Snowden revelations spying on Kim.com unlawfully those had been huge hits to that agency's kind of sense of its own place in the world and the SAS had always been under the radar and they liked it that way the cultural change of coming out into the open in a way that had never been before was a really uncomfortable thing for lots of those intelligence practitioners and so I thought that it was part of my function to really push that helping them see that openness was a strength and helping the community see as much as they could and that was a strength for us so that's what I learnt from the Bureau when then Michael Herron a couple of times in my career and I know this is not very helpful career advice luck played a part and I don't say that in a disrespectful way to myself because I've worked hard and I'm here because I'm the right person to be here now but going into the Bureau it happened that the director left out of sort of sequence so the system wasn't ready with the new set of people to consider and I was lucky to be really at a place in time with a career development plan that said do something different so career plans can be useful even though I haven't had one thinking about what is it that I might want to do next in those last few years when I've had that it has served me well the other bit of luck was that Michael Herron left slightly also out of sequence so when I was coming to the end of my year in the Bureau and thinking what do I do now do I really go back to being the Deputy Solicitor General or do I want to apply for the permanent director of the Bureau role and it was really clear to me just in how I felt about that that my passion job was the one he had just left I really like my time in the Bureau it was a really cool job I actually want that one it was really powerfully clear in me and so I learnt all this stuff about myself all these insights into myself and I felt much better prepared ah those people were right all along and I needed a bit of breadth and a bit of distance from what I had done for the last 12 years to kind of really draw out of myself what I needed to be the Solicitor General so I went through that process I hadn't cracked the you know don't be anxious I was very anxious you know and still am from time to time about what the things I have to do but we'll get to the bit that we all know that I was appointed into that role at the beginning of last year and so now if I may I'm going to segue on to talking about what that role is all about so there's several functions in the Solicitor General you probably know or maybe you don't that the Solicitor General is something called the Junior Law Officer of the Crown and the Senior Law Officer of the Crown is the Attorney General the Attorney General currently the Honourable Christopher Finlayson, Attorney General Politician, Junior Law Officer Public Servant and this Law Officer concept is the idea that successive governments in a democracy like ours will always operate according to law and part of their part of government's credibility and legitimacy is that they govern according to law and it is the law officers function to make sure that that happens so subject only to what the Attorney says the Solicitor General's view on what the Crown's view of the law is authoritative and determinative as within the Crown so to the Solicitor General's view of how the Crown needs to behave and argue in the courts I'll come to that advisory role in a minute I'll just run through what the other functions of the Law Officer are oversight of all prosecutions so the Crown of course is the prosecutor of crime through the Crown Solicitor's Network the Crown Solicitor's are private sector lawyers 16 of them in firms all around the country who act on warrant and under Solicitor General guidelines to conduct prosecute crimes so violence, murder, sexual violence those big tariff crimes are the ones that the Crown prosecute through Crown Solicitor's also in the Crown's prosecution function are regulatory crimes if you like public prosecutions so MPI, breaching fishing rules say or discharging water where you shouldn't those sorts of regulatory crimes are also done by prosecutors and the Solicitor it's actually the Attorney General who constitutionally has that function of oversight and responsibility for all prosecutions but because of the fact that that person in our system and has been for the last 180 something years been a politician it tends to get left to the independent public servant and there's a couple of things there that you might think are intention you know how can a minister who presumably has responsibility collectively for advancing government's policy interests have the independent function to be able to say how you can't do that the law says you can't do that or you need to do that in a different way in practice it gets left to the Solicitor General not because I think any attorney, not just this one but not because I think necessarily that they won't be able to think independently in their law officer function but partly because it might look like they can't think part of our country's constitutional framework sort of constitutional credibility is about people being able to see the frameworks and that people can see, oh right I don't have to think I can't think New Zealand is a corrupt place or that government is corrupt and just does what it likes and it rides over laws and it doesn't care if they can see the functionaries who are there to say this is what the law should be I'm one of those functionaries it's a pretty exciting and demanding role for me obviously I don't do it myself I have a whole office of people who assist me in that and more than that we now operate very much as a network throughout the government lawyer profession being a lawyer in government now, much more so than when I started where you'd be a departmental lawyer your loyalty would be to that department is trying to assist that department achieve what it needed to achieve we are now working in a very much more networked way so that we are making the best use of some 800 lawyers that work in core government if you add Crown entities, about 1200 lawyers and you know the idea that in-house lawyers bring this particular benefit to lawyering which is that they in-house firm you're employed in the business that you're advising the in-house advantage is that you understand the context, you understand that business or agencies objectives you understand what risks they are prepared to take lawfully and you understand what opportunities they'd like to pursue so the Crown's in-house council cohort is 8 or 1200 lawyers and we have to harness that to make sure that the Crown through executive government what each individual government wants to achieve but also bears in mind the Crown's long-term interests and obligations and it is critical that we have that wider view that we don't get caught up too readily in transactional arrangements to make sure that I'll help you achieve that and I'll help you achieve this my brother is a lawyer he was just sworn in as a high court judge yesterday and he'll be sitting here in Auckland from Monday but he was a lawyer and he was telling me one day that when he was in practice he was arguing for a point for a client X arguing this point he argued the opposite of that same point for a different client a few weeks later and it just seems so bizarre to me that the Crown can never do that even if just using examples even if the Ministry of Primary Industries wants to win this case and by arguing that point my function is to make sure that it will not be allowed if that point is not something that serves the Crown's long-term interests and obligations it's quite challenging and this idea that you come I often say to people Crown Law and the Solicitor General we're your worst kind of lawyers because you have to come to us on lots of things since 1950 there have been a set of rules called the Cabinet Directions for the conduct of Crown legal business certain types of things if a department needs lawyers to help it outside of its own cohort of lawyers it has to come to the Solicitor General and it's things like the criminal law revenue, exercise of power most litigation you have to come through the Solicitor General and it's not that we do it all ourselves but it's that supervisory function that's so important so that we do have this view about the Crown and what it's up to so I say to people we're your worst kind of lawyers because we have to come to us on certain things and when you do we might not do what you want us to do because we might say you can't argue that point even though in your moment you might win because either the Crown's already decided the right view of the law is something different or for another long-term reason we don't think that's right and the best example slightly related point I think is easier to explain in the prosecution function now there's this expression that the Crown enjoys no victories and suffers no losses and I used to think that we just said that to ourselves to make ourselves feel better when we've lost a case and certainly we do say that but actually it means something else the Crown's interest is different from any particular individual decision makers immediate interests in the moment take prosecutions for example the function of the prosecutor is not to win the function of the prosecutor is not to get a conviction the function of the prosecutor for the Crown is to make sure trials are fairly held and conducted that defendants have fair process applied to them as they are brought before the court for the court to determine what happens in the application of the criminal law and we do our job well when we recognise that the Crown has a particular function there and yes of course we can argue well and forcefully for a particular conviction or a particular outcome we don't have to be supine about it but unlike the defense lawyer the function is to avoid the prosecution for their client our client is and this might sound a little bit knobby actually the people of New Zealand our client is the Crown our client is this bigger interest not just the individual agency that's in front of us that's a real you know that's a great thrill what a crazy mad job it is that that is my function but it's also a real burden too and I've said this before and you might have heard me say that and a huge privilege it's a huge privilege to be continuing my public service career in this job which is just absolutely about how does this country continue to have legitimate government and an obvious constitutional structure that people can trust and it's a burden in that as I've said sometimes we get to say to people yeah I disagree and we're not going to argue that point or you can't take that point and as ever how we go about that how we discharge that burden is critical to me anyway and a successful tenure for me as Solicitor General because what I need to be is influential and called upon and if every day I'm saying to people no you can't do that and oh the rule of law says you can't do that people are going to stop calling me and so it's this real tension of being a good practical and being able to identify where is the line that I need to make sure that nobody goes past it's sort of really quite easy to say it to you today it's actually really hard to achieve in practice and I will not get it right every time in some ways the litigation part of that is easier because there is somebody else there who determines what is the meaning of the law the court of course gets to determine what is the meaning of the law in some ways it's the advisory function because like that old saying you know the real character of a person by what they do when no one is watching I think the real strength of the of my what's the word of my allegiance to the rule of law is what we advise and how we can achieve rule of law compliant decisions by successive governments when no one challenges it I have had an example where a person said when I was saying well you can't you know you actually can't do this that way we can help you find a different way the answer came back well it doesn't really matter because by the time anyone finds out that it's not right it'll be too late saying it's too late I've already found out and you can't do it and most times I must say they are pretty rare you know ministers do not want to break the law ministers and governments also legitimacy that comes to them from operating according to law but sometimes they need help and vigilance to spot where is the line where is it coming and as we see I was talking to another group of people this morning saying we haven't seen the New Zealand Bill of Rights completely flex its muscle yet I don't think we are anywhere near through seeing how far the Bill of Rights will take us in what we will understand to be the legal framework and so some things that the Crown does and argues are may seem unpopular they may seem strange and that is when the Solicitor General should be turning up in the courts to explain why the Crown is taking an argument that you know people might argue up hill and down dale about whether or not it's right and one thing you'll have learned as law students and lawyers is that the law is contestable right you can always find somebody who will argue the other point maybe successfully and it's so obvious when you're in litigation that you might persuade one person the High Court judge that to go with you you might not be able to persuade all three at the next level and that might go the other way and you can have another crack perhaps at the next five and you might get a different result we were counting up recently a case what's been in the newspaper the Minister of Conservation Ru'utanawha Dam Challenge went right from the High Court to the Supreme Court when we counted up which judges went which way I think we had five judges that overall agreed with the Crown's position four judges that agreed with the Crown's position and now the law is that the Crown's position was wrong but I think it's useful for us to think about that because sometimes the Crown will have to put points push points argue for an extension of the law argue for things that might not seem attractive if you see them in the newspaper and we've got to have the kind of internal fortitude to know why we're arguing it what purpose we're serving and make sure that when the Court is dealing with it they get everything from the Crown and they get to determine what the law is and then if it's a change then that is the law and we comply with the law and on we go so my functions are advisory advocacy appearing in the courts and running the Crown Law Office as the Chief Executive but also being the professional head of those 800 or 1200 depending how you cut it lawyers that we have working government and the really exciting thing for me and then I'll stop in a moment and you can ask me some questions the really exciting thing for me is being able to harness that whole Crown capability I mentioned before you might sort of think there's a bit of attention here about politician, senior law officer and maybe even public servant junior law officer have we really got the independence that we need for law officers to look at what's going on I'm not appointed into my role I hold it at the Government General's pleasure so I can't be sacked or promoted by Government I don't get paid by Government I get paid by the Independent Remuneration Authority well that's who sets my salary and I don't sit within the usual structure of Chief Executive performance pay and I don't get paid by the Government so these are the features that make sure that the role holder is independent and can fearlessly advise Governments that is the critical, that ability to fearlessly advise Governments I think it's a huge advantage that I sit right within the system of public service lawyers because it means that people have access directly to the solicitor and I think that's a real advantage in other jurisdictions Australia for example the solicitor's general there are ones for every state and then a Commonwealth one they are private sector lawyers I'm at the bar usually sometimes in firms who act on instruction and I think this is just my own view distance that ability to not ask the law officer a question might not be a great advantage because I don't have to wait to be asked a question and I do and people find it annoying I know poke my nose in where I know or think that I need to be either informed or there's risk arising that's not being managed or as I was saying to Amai and Andrew before listening to the radio in the morning is now sort of like a health hazard because you listen to the radio and you think I need to know about that and you can and you are entitled just to go in and I think that's a great advantage for our system so is that a good place to see if there are any questions all right? Let me ask you a question about your vision so you just started in this role so it's a hugely important role and you know sometimes crown law can appear just to be the ambulance at the bottom of the case it's interesting to hear you talk about your advisory role but quite a lot of times you know before it comes to you and it's a mess and you end up in court and that's what you do and I just wondered if part of the vision that you had for crown law going forward was to think more about how these amazing lawyers that you've got it's a huge resource just think about how different that is to private practice I mean the difficulty for private practitioners is that your clients never have the money to be able to, I mean even listening to the sorts of general talking about oh well you know take it to the high court and then you can always go to the court of appeal most private sector clients if you can't get there on the high court that's it, I mean they've spent all their money there isn't any more so I'm just wondering whether there's a vision on your part to have more of a proactive role in problem solving Yes you would think that was a patsy question that it asked me to ask me because I've got an answer to that but I didn't ask you to ask me that but I absolutely, I didn't bring my A3 of my vision but we absolutely have a really clear vision about what we're doing when I started in the Crown Office my pitch to the agent, to the place that was doing the first of all the shortlisting and then the interviewing and then to the minister was to say my vision is that the Solicitor General has to be able to harness the capability of all of the lawyers in the Crown in order to allow the Crown and through executive government to do what it wants to achieve its policy aims lawfully with a view to the future and in a way that means that you're not constantly having to battle backwards through the courts to achieve what you want to do and if I put it on a bumper sticker it would say lawyers, ask us early because if you wait till the end and ask lawyers to help yes of course lawyers can help and we can say oh yeah you've gone terribly wrong and we can help you and you know it's pretty like nice Superman complex to be able to help but actually if we can show that we can help or if you start us here then if you come when things have gone wrong all the better and we're all on the one Crown I mean as madness that we would wait till the end so when I got into the Crown law office I started to ask this question what is the Crown law that New Zealand needs and we had never asked that question before we had often thought why we're here and what are we about and we served the rule of law and we served the Crown actually if you went out to suburbs in Auckland, Cambridge where I grew up and said we're a department and we served the rule of law and we served the Crown like they have no idea what we did so we started to ask what is the Crown law that New Zealand needs and we came up with three outcomes that we are now entirely focused on the first, demonstrably better Government decisions we argued long and hard with each other about whether or not we should be saying what we wanted was to achieve better Government process we think nah bugger that we want actually better decisions out of Government and yes process is a big part of it but you can conduct a process that looks nice and that you might not have a decision that's compliant with the law or that actually advances us in all sorts of important areas like recognising rights of the Bill of Rights like advancing the Crown Maori relationship all these big questions for New Zealand as a society might not be answered by good process we think we're about one of our outcomes we don't control these outcomes, lots of people contribute to them demonstrably better Government decision increasing the credibility or enhancing the credibility of the rule of law now my bumper sticker version of that as I said to the Chief Justice the other day is making the rule of law cool again she looked a bit anxious but when lawyers come around this is maybe from my own history of being in the Crown law for a long time when lawyers come around and say the rule of law says you can't do that actually most ministers and other decision makers think what a load of bosh I want to do that and you're not helping me by talking about this thing that I don't understand we must make sure that people understand that the rule of law is a benefit, it is not a burden it is a huge benefit if people can see that that is how this country runs we can see democracy right, it happens right in front of us can we see the rule of law? I don't know, I want and so in my role one of my visions is that the Crown speaks more about what it's doing and why and in the past it's always been very much we don't talk about what's going on often we can't because it's in front of the courts and I think we owe it to people to say the reason that that decision perhaps for agreeing that we won't proceed with the murder charge but that we would accept to please a manslaughter was for these reasons you might recognise that story from last year where we did come out and say why that had happened the third thing we're doing is contributing to better criminal justice outcomes as I said before making sure that we understand our critical role in the criminal justice system being a fair process by which we hold offenders to account Please join me in thanking the solicitor for speaking to him Thank you