Judge receives knighthood

When Judge Bruce Robertson received recognition in the New Year's honours for services as a judge of the High Court and the Court of Appeal, he also became the second milk monitor from the 1954 standard 3 class at Wakari School to be knighted.

His classmate and fellow milk monitor and judge, Sir John Hansen, received a knighthood for services to the judiciary in 2008.

• New Year Honours list

Sir Bruce is one of four people to be made Knights Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (KNZM).

The others are film-maker Sir Peter Jackson, distinguished Maori academic and leader Sir Mason Durie, and businessman Sir Douglas Myers.

•Click here for southern recipients 

American billionaire Julian Robertson was made an honorary KNZM.

Advocate for children Dame Lesley Max becomes a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (DNZM).

Three-term Labour prime minister Helen Clark topped this year's list of 193 appointments and awards, receiving the Order of New Zealand (ONZ).

Five firefighters have been recognised with the Queen's Service Medal (QSM) for their roles during or after the explosion and fire at the Tamahere coolstore in Waikato which claimed the life of a colleague and seriously injured seven others.

Sir Bruce, who lives in Wellington, said he felt humbled and honoured to receive a knighthood, and considered it was a way of the community acknowledging and affirming the importance of the rule of law in a free society.

In accepting the knighthood, he felt he was doing so on behalf of a team and that it was an acknowledgement of the role played by all court staff.

He described his 22-year career as a High Court judge as exciting, but while he had presided over high-profile cases including that concerning the death of Peter Plumley Walker, such cases were not the most important or the most satisfying.

"I think the great challenge of law is that it doesn't become an end in itself.

"It is merely there to help people deal with problems they can't deal with.

It worries me when the law starts to get feet of its own and a life of its own."He was known among his colleagues for insisting on reality checks when hearing cases, he said.

The highlights of his career as a judge had been those cases which were not terribly high-profile.

In civil cases, they were the occasions when he had been able to help parties reach an outcome both could live with and, in criminal cases, those when at the end of a trial "everybody feels they got a fair crack of the whip".

Sir Bruce said the law was not easily accessible to people and "none of us should run away from the fact that the current system is too expensive, too slow and operates at a level people feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable with."

In his time as president of the Law Commission, between 2001 and 2005, he had spent much time looking at ways to improve access to justice, although he noted that many judges and lawyers were not "terribly keen" on changing.

There had been a revolution in the criminal area where, instead of crime being considered an offence against society, there was a focus on issues of victims' rights.

Sir Bruce will retire from both the High Court of New Zealand and the Court of Appeal at the beginning of February, but he anticipates continuing judicial duties in the Pacific.

He said he felt a real obligation to help the rule of law there, which was "pretty fragile".

He has served as president of the Court of Appeal of Vanuatu since 1996 and has also sat on the Court of Appeal of Samoa.