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  "description": "The disgraceful dropping of the Te Papa vandalism case.",
  "path": "/why-cant-the-public-decide-public-interest/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-12T19:30:07.000Z",
  "site": "https://goodoil.news",
  "tags": [
    "**Peter Williams**",
    "_check.radio_",
    "author’s Substack"
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  "textContent": "**Peter Williams** \n_Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on www.reality_ _check.radio_ _three days a week._\n\n“Not in the public interest” is one of those phrases which means essentially nothing.\n\nIt’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.\n\nSuch 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.\n\nThe installation damaged was Te Papa’s Treaty of Waitangi display.\n\nHe was due to face trial by jury in just a few weeks.\n\nTrial 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.\n\nAll in front of an interested public.\n\nBut this impending trial was not, according to the Crown Solicitor, in the public interest.\n\nHow can she say this? How does she know this?\n\nDid she ask the public?\n\nOf 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.\n\nBut that evidence should have been irrelevant and a strong judge would have made it inadmissible. The case should have been about two questions.\n\n1. Did Ratana damage the installation?\n\n2. Did he obstruct police trying to apprehend him?\n\nWhy 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.\n\nThen into the rationale behind the Crown Solicitor’s decision is something decidedly worrying.\n\nThe 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 Māori Party and the Auckland flanker who played against the Springboks in 1981, Te Ururoa (Jim) Flavell.\n\nI included the irrelevant line about his rugby career because it’s about as important as tikanga is in this case.\n\nThis 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.\n\nI don’t think anyone should be allowed to do that and get away with it.\n\nYet 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.\n\nIt is a blight on our justice system and on the government, which oversees the Crown Solicitor’s office.\n\nThis case was most definitely in the public interest.\n\nI’m embarrassed to live in such a corrupt country.\n\nThis article was originally published on the author’s Substack.",
  "title": "Why Can’t the Public Decide Public Interest?",
  "updatedAt": "2026-03-12T19:30:06.919Z"
}