Benson-Pope's problems far from over

Cabinet minister David Benson-Pope considers the police decision not to prosecute him over allegations of assault when he was a teacher more than 20 years ago means the matter is closed.

Others don't, and the release of the police report into the allegations, expected this week, is going to ignite further opposition attacks.

The police found there was a prima facie case against him concerning claims that he taped a student's hands to a desk and pushed a tennis ball into his mouth, and that on a separate occasion he struck another student on the face.

"The case clearly fails to meet the public interest requirements outlined in the Solicitor-General's guidelines," said the District Commander of the Southern Police District, Superintendent George Fraser.

That is an understandable conclusion, and despite what National and Act MPs say it was probably what they expected.

But right from the beginning, when ACT's Rodney Hide raised the allegations in Parliament, it was recognised that Benson-Pope's most serious potential problem was that he denied them in the House.

"I have not been guilty of, or involved in, any inappropriate behaviour in my 24 years as a secondary school teacher," he said.

Benson-Pope three times refuted the allegations, and because all MPs are considered to be Honourable Members and their word must be accepted, Hide withdrew his claims.

The question now is whether Benson-Pope misled the House. That is a serious offence, and if proved usually leads to resignation.

Michael Laws resigned from Parliament, not because he personally misled the House but because he gave untrue information to his party leader, Winston Peters, which caused Peters to mislead the House.

These matters are dealt with by the Privileges Committee, and Hide has twice tried to have the case referred to it.

He has failed. In the first instance Speaker Margaret Wilson decided there was no evidence supporting the allegations -- that was before the policy inquiry had taken place -- and his second attempt, last week, failed on a technical issue of timing.

Hide has one tactic left, and when Parliament sits again on December 6 he will propose a motion asking the House to refer it to the committee. That is easily blocked, however, and Hide will almost certainly fail for the third time.

In his latest letter to the Speaker, Hide wrote that as the police had decided there was a prima facie case, then there was clearly a prima facie case that Benson-Pope misled the House.

"That matter needs to be resolved. The only place that can happen is at the Privileges Committee," he said.

If, as seems most likely, the matter is not going to be resolved then that leaves Benson-Pope and Parliament in an unsatisfactory position.

His accusers will feel they have not been given a hearing in the only place that matters, and the minister will not have satisfied them that he did not mislead the House. He will not have cleared his name, and the allegations will continue to hang over him.

This situation caused two newspapers to publish editorials on the matter last week.

"Mr Benson-Pope has dug himself into a deeper hole with his outright denials of the alleged incidents," said the New Zealand Herald in an editorial under the headline Minister Needs to Come Clean.

"The police report has made it much harder to accept his outright denial that it happened."

The Dominion Post echoed Mr Hide's words: "A prima facie finding that the events complained of occurred is also a prima facie finding that Mr Benson-Pope misled Parliament. That should be a matter of concern not only for the minister and his Labour colleagues but also the wider Parliament...The public cannot have confidence in a minister unless it knows it can take him at his word."

Precisely what prime facie means is at the centre of the issue.

Benson-Pope, in a somewhat flippant remark on Friday, said he considered the police had been "a bit bozo-ish" in their use of it.

"It is simply that someone has laid a complaint and there's no guilt presumption or anything else," he said.

Professor Mark Henaghan, Dean of Law at Otago University, put it this way: "They're not saying they're sure these things happened, but they are saying they believe there is sufficient evidence to say these things could have happened."

Since the allegations were first raised in May last year, there has been overwhelming testimony from former pupils praising Benson-Pope's excellence as a teacher.

The pupil involved in the tennis ball incident has been described as a violent bully, and that has been supported by some of his former classmates.

In Parliament last week Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen said the boy "regularly kicked students in the spine, hung a student out an upper storey window, repeatedly broke the boy's glasses and physically assaulted teachers".

Some of the opposition criticism of the incident have contained blatantly self-serving lamentations about the impact the tennis ball incident had on the pupil concerned.

They are hard to take seriously but, as the Herald put it, Benson-Pope dug himself into the hole he now finds himself in.

When Cullen was defending the minister in the House, and describing the behaviour of Benson-Pope's accuser, he said "if that is what Mr Hide is relying on, good luck to him".

The police report could give Hide more than that to rely on as he pursues a Privileges Committee inquiry.

The actual words used by Benson-Pope when he responded to the allegations can be picked over, and the meanings of "not been guilty of" and "inappropriate" debated, but there isn't much doubt that Parliament believed he was saying he didn't do it.

- NZPA