Darleen Tana outside the High Court at Auckland earlier this month. Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
A High Court judgment clears the way for the Green Party to use the waka jumping legislation to evict Darleen Tana from Parliament, a legal expert says.
Tana took the party to court in an attempt to stop them ousting her from Parliament after she was suspended from the party after an inquiry into migrant exploitation.
She resigned from the party in July, but wants to remain in Parliament as an independent MP.
In a decision released on Friday, Justice Johnstone declined Tana's application for judicial review.
Professor Andrew Geddis said Tana had little ground to challenge the Greens on and that it would have been difficult for Tana to prove that her resignation from the Green Party was forced.
"The outcome isn't particularly surprising. In order for Darleen Tana to have succeeded, she was going to have to show that something had gone very wrong with the process the Greens followed and that at as a result, she has basically been forced to resign from the party rather than voluntarily doing so.
"That was always going to be very unlikely for the court to find, given that the process had been quite a lengthy and involved one, that she has voluntarily agreed to take part in."
He said the judgment cleared the way for the Greens to use the waka jumping legislation to evict Tana from Parliament if they chose to do so.
It was unlikely Tana would be able to successfully seek another interim order to stop the Greens from holding a meeting to vote on her fate, Geddis said.
She was earlier successful in getting an injunction order to delay a Green Party meeting, where they were going vote on whether to invoke the waka jumping legislation.
If she attempted this method again, Geddis said there would be more scrutiny of its appropriateness.
If the court issued another interim order, it would intrude on parliamentary privilege - the right of Parliament to decide its own affairs, he said.
"She could try to appeal to the Court of Appeal in the hope that she might get some interim order preventing that from happening, the problem with that is that it starts to intrude on the ability of Parliament to decide who its members are. So whether a court would say to Parliament, actually no you can't consider the party hopping issue until we've finished with this issue, that starts to bring in complicated questions of well, should the court interfere with parliamentary process in that way?
"I suspect if there was another attempt to get such an order a lot more attention would be paid as to whether that's proper to do."