However, there is also no doubt that the process whereby Ms Collins — a lawyer, former president of the Auckland District Law Society and one-time vice-president of the New Zealand Law Society — became the future president of the Law Commission has been deeply flawed.
The Law Commission is an independent Crown entity which plays an important role in New Zealand’s law-making process, mainly through identifying areas of our laws which require reconsideration or reform and providing in-depth reports on them.
This is no once-over-lightly exercise. The Law Commission invites public submissions on its work and has produced 120 weighty volumes on significant topics such as contempt of court, the Evidence Act, surrogacy, and class actions and litigation funding.
Now it is considering the fraught topic of hate crime laws, directors duties and liabilities, and a subject of increasing significance, a review of adult decision-making capacity law.
Although there will be only a short intermission between her political career and her returning to the law, it is drawing a long bow to assume that Ms Collins’ recent past renders her incapable of taking on her new role in the future.
The Law Commission is independent: its focus is the law. While trials can be adversarial and partisan, lawyers are trained to assess arguments and legislation in a dispassionate and analytical way. Ms Collins well knows that she will be under great scrutiny as Law Commission president and will no doubt be scrupulous to ensure that her neutrality is not impugned.
However, all that being said, the fact that there was no recruitment process for the position and that no selection panel was formed to consider any other candidates for it, is lamentably poor.
While everything may well have been done in an above board manner and — as noted earlier — Ms Collins’ qualifications are indisputable — simply naming her via Cabinet affirmation to fill an important role smacked of what University of Otago legal academic Andrew Geddis termed a ‘‘nakedly political’’ process.
Of course it was, and any government will make appointments with its political beliefs in mind.
But it would have been far better in this situation for a transparent and open process to be followed so that both Ms Collins and the commission can continue in their important work beyond reproach.
Wanaka wonder
Zoi Sadowski-Synnott may not have won the gold medal we and no doubt she craved at the Winter Olympics, but the region could not be any prouder of the Wanaka snowboarder.
Winning any Olympic medal is a phenomenal achievement. At Milan Cortina she has won not one but two medals, silvers in the big air and now in the slopestyle in the early hours of yesterday NZT.
It was Sadowski-Synnott’s fifth medal; other Kiwi athletes with that many Olympic medals include kayakers Ian Ferguson and Paul MacDonald and equestrian Mark Todd: that is the rarefied air the snowboarder soars in.
For good measure, her fifth medal makes Sadowski-Synnott not only the country’s most successful Winter Olympian in terms of medals won, but also represented the most Olympic medals won by any snowboarder in the world at the top tier.
Making Sadowski-Synnott’s achievement remarkable is that she arrived in Italy after a long injury lay-off, and did not have the normal preparation she would have had for a pinnacle event.
However, she was determined to get to the Games and she has been richly rewarded for doing so. While the Olympics have not delivered the medal bonanza that New Zealand had hoped for, Sadowski-Synnott’s silvers and Luca Harrington’s bronze in ski slopestyle are meritorious efforts.
Most of our snow athletes have made finals and some, such as Queenstown skier Alice Robinson, have come agonisingly close to winning a medal.
Many of the team are young. With Olympic experience, there is promise of more success in 2030.
