Mike's Minute: The Goldsmith scandal is no scandal

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

It was never five percent, it was always spit balling.

Paul Goldsmith as Treaty Negotiations Minister is in a meeting with the seafood people, who are not happy about their lack of input into the government's foreshore plan to revert a court ruling back to the original intent of the law as passed in 2011.

Goldsmith, it was reported, said customary title will drop to 5 percent. 1News fell over themselves breathlessly reporting this as some sort of scandal on Sunday.

Come Monday in the Prime Minister's post-cabinet session, they try and get more detail. The Prime Minister quite clearly says the reason the government are doing what they are doing is because the court has overreached and what the government of the day intended has been distorted. An amendment of section 58 is how they are going to fix this.

The original law was simple. If you can prove you have had uninterrupted access to foreshore since 1840 you got a case. If you can't, you haven't.

Groups who didn’t like the law or the government went to court. The court being activist got overly involved and we've ended up where we have.

All of the government, as the Prime Minster was at pains to tell the assembled press, wanted to do is make the law the law.

Why? Because they are the government and that’s what governments do.

As far as I'm aware as a consumer of news, that bit wasn’t reported yesterday by some media. I note both state-funded were still banging on about Goldsmith and his 5 percent comment.

The point they are missing, and I suspect deliberately, is courts don’t make the law, governments do.

If you want to mark Goldsmith down a bit, maybe he shouldn’t free wheel with numbers. Given if you apply some brain power to it, no one knows what the actual number by way of a percentage will be when it comes to access.

But it wasn’t a scandal and it wasn’t a gotcha moment.

It was a passing comment in a meeting about the intent of the government of the day and what they were doing to address what they see as an activist court that had distorted intent around an increasingly fractious subject.

This would be another example of an activist media taking the side of an activist court and trying to drum up scandal around a government they don’t like on a law they like even less.

And if you apply logic and follow it as I have, they're failing.

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