Peters privacy case takes aim at ministry
Former Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters’ years-long legal pursuit over the leaking of his superannuation overpayment now rests on a single claim: Government chief executives breached his privacy by speaking his name.
Peters was revealed to have been overpaid a pension for seven years in 2017, because of an error in which he failed to declare he had lived with a partner, Jan Trotman.
An anonymous tipster informed the media about the overpayment weeks out from the general election.
An incensed Peters sued over the claimed privacy breach, taking to the High Court former National ministers Paula Bennett and Anne Tolley, and the Attorney-General on behalf of the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), the ministry’s then-chief executive Brendan Boyle, and the Public Services Commissioner.
He lost, and was ordered to pay more than $317,000 in legal costs.
Yesterday, six months after being voted out of Parliament, Peters was across the road from the Beehive trying to overturn the High Court’s judgment at the Court of Appeal.
Peters’ lawyer, Brian Henry, yesterday shifted the focus of the case to MSD, for its disclosure of the details to the ministers under the ‘‘no surprises’’ policy.
He said the ‘‘repugnant’’ breach of privacy occurred when Boyle verbally briefed Tolley, the social development minister at the time, on Peters’ overpayment. He asserted that Boyle was right to brief Public Service Commissioner Peter Hughes, but Hughes was also wrong to brief Bennett, state services minister at the time.
Both MSD and the High Court determined Peters had not defrauded the organisation, but that the overpayment was the result of an error in completing a written form.
Henry said Peters sought a declaration from the court that briefing the minister was a breach of his privacy.
This information was ‘‘too personal for a minister to know … It should not have left the control of the civil service.’’
Justice David Goddard, one of three sitting judges, questioned Henry’s claim.
‘‘They [the chief executives] clearly recognised that it was private when they briefed the ministers, they asked everyone else to leave the room,’’ he said.