Try your hand at Kiwi law!

[fragment]

I don't know any Kiwi lawyers and this is purely out of curiosity, so I'm hoping that this query can be answered well enough by some of you on the basis of common legal tradition.

What do you make of court decisions that a section of legislation "should [not] be subjected to strict rules and principles of statutary construction which aim to extract a precise and unique meaning from the words," but should be read to "allow the application of policy in a general and broad way"; and that this approach "alllows for comparison of conflicting considerations and the scale or degree of them, and their relative significance or proportion in the final outcome"? That's from two different decisions on the same section. Reasonable or not? Statements of commonplace legal principle or denials of the abillity of legislators to actually legislate? Does it depend on the nature of the legislation and/or the purpose of this section within the legislation?

[California Tanker]

That is a discussion which by no means is constrained to the borders of Kiwiland.

NTM

[D. Scarlatti]

Hard to say, without reading the decisions and seeing which words someone's trying to "extract a precise and unique meaning" from. All manner of hell breaks loose among judges where there's ambiguity -- real or imagined -- in statutory language.

[fragment]

The section is this.

Purpose
(1) The purpose of this Act is to promote the sustainable management of natural and physical resources.
(2) In this Act, sustainable management means managing the use, development, and protection of natural and physical resources in a way, or at a rate, which enables people and communities to provide for their social, economic, and cultural wellbeing and for their health and safety while—
(a) sustaining the potential of natural and physical resources (excluding minerals) to meet the reasonably foreseeable needs of future generations; and
(b) safeguarding the life-supporting capacity of air, water, soil, and ecosystems; and
(c) avoiding, remedying, or mitigating any adverse effects of activities on the environment.

It's the definition of "sustainable management" that's at issue, and I'm particularly interested in the introduction of "conflicting considerations".

[California Tanker]

That strikes me more like a pre-amble than part of the operative legislation.

"The purpose of the act is..." means that you need to go somewhere else to see what the law actually says.

I guess it helps if there is conflict over the meaning of the main body of the legislation, but that section you quote should not be the first port of call for the court.

How high up the system has the case gone?

NTM

[fragment]

The rest of the act contains a bunch of references like "the consent authority must, subject to Part 2, have regard to...", Part 2 including that section.