PM's chief repels foreshore attacks

By AUDREY YOUNG political editor

The Prime Minister's chief official, Mark Prebble, resisted attempts to get him to criticise the Government's foreshore and seabed policy when he appeared at a Waitangi Tribunal hearing yesterday.

Dr Prebble was one of only two Crown witnesses at the hearing to determine whether the policy breaches the Treaty of Waitangi, and he is the closest the inquiry will get to decision-makers.

But the chief executive of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet was an unwilling lightning rod for an array of opposing counsel.

"I can't be dragged into questions of what ought or ought not to be," Dr Prebble said when invited for the umpteenth time to comment on implied criticisms of the policy.

He would not even accept the notion put by lawyer Tim Castle, that it was not the duty of officials to fully inform their minister but, rather, to keep them as reasonably informed as possible.

There was no one formula for policy-making, he said.

Judge Carrie Wainwright eventually invited the lawyers to conclude that they were "flogging a dead horse".

She also made her own criticisms of the Government in her introductory remarks to Dr Prebble, saying the tribunal had thought it was "fairly self-evident there were shortcomings in consultation" over the policy.

But the tribunal felt that given the limited resources and time, it would be better to concentrate on the policy itself "than to go down the track of telling the Crown it went the wrong way about coming to the policy".

Dr Prebble was appearing on the third day of the hearing.

The policy was developed in response to a Court of Appeal decision saying Maori may be able to have customary title on the foreshore and seabed converted to freehold title in the Maori Land Court.