By: Mike Hosking | Monday, May 14, 2012

I have some sympathy for the Chief Coroner’s call for their recommendations to have a little more weight than they currently do. The coroner’s reports, like many, don’t have to be responded to. You don’t have to take their recommendations and he wants that to change.

Commissioners have similar problems. They can highlight issues, they can make recommendations, put forward ideas, they can advocate, but at the end of the day if the recipient of the report or advice doesn’t want anything to happen, it generally doesn’t. So you can understand Neil McLean’s frustrations.

Here’s one example. That case the other week of Darius Claxton, the 12-year-old in Christchurch who died of inhaling butane, or huffing as they call it. That was news, that would have been the first time many of us had heard about huffing and yet the coroners have dealt with 28 deaths in the past four years. And not just that, they’ve put forward a bunch of recommendations surrounding it.

So they see things we don’t. They see trends unfolding and they’re clearly warning about them. But unless the media pick it up and make it an issue or a politician or an activist group run with it, it goes nowhere. If you’re the coroner and you’re seeing case after case, you’d be getting pretty frustrated.

It does raise the question if you’re going to have these officials, whether they’re ombudsmen or commissioners, why have them if they have no teeth? What’s the point of report after report if nothing happens? It’s a sort of legislative sop. You can say you have people who look into these matters, knowing full well that if they end up saying something you don’t like, you don’t have to do anything about it.

I suppose that’s the flipside of it all. If you had to act, to respond each time a coroner made a recommendation, you’re open to a lot of cost and time and energy on matters you might well think are wasteful, and you’re open to activist officials who see rules and regulations as the answer to everything. Before you know you’ve responded to so many recommendations you’re tied up in knots of red tape and complex law. Given that, my gut feeling is that Judge McLean’s proposal is going nowhere fast.