Jimmy Daisley was awarded $5.7 million damages following Whangarei District Council incompetence in dealing with a quarrying consent, including award of extra damages for misfeasance. The High Court ordered payment of a further $510,400 as contribution towards his legal expenses.
In 2004, Mr Daisley purchased a rural property on Knights Road near Whangarei which contained a quarry. He intended to extract further aggregate for farm use and also sell aggregate to local farmers and other contractors. Not so fast, Council said. There was no resource consent for operation of a quarry, it claimed. An abatement notice was issued and legal action taken to block further quarrying.
The High Court was told research by his then lawyers subsequently discovered that there was a 1988 resource consent allowing quarrying at Knights Road; it had been misfiled in Council records. Council then said the 1988 consent was no longer valid. Despite this, Council subsequently decided that the resource consent was still alive, allowing a new quarry owner to later commence operations. By then, Mr Daisley had sold up getting a lower price than if quarrying were permitted.
It was 2022 before Mr Daisley got his day in court. Justice Toogood ruled Whangarei District negligent in its filing of resource consent records and similarly negligent in failing to find the 1988 consent over a five year period when Mr Daisley was seeking information. Council’s behaviour was so outrageous that Justice Toogood held Council liable for misfeasance in public office; recklessly misinforming Mr Daisley about existence of the consent and failing to make amends after the consent was found. There was evidence Council misled a Hearings Commissioner about the resource consent’s existence when Mr Daisley applied for a new resource consent at a 2006 hearing.
Justice Toogood was particularly critical of Council’s defence in court that Mr Daisley was in some way negligent for relying on false information provided by Council and for failing to establish the correct position regarding entitlement to quarry. It does not appear to have occurred to Council, he said, that the court would never accept as a defence Council criticism of Mr Daisley for not proving the existence of a consent, the record of which it held and the existence of which it denied.
Daisley v. Whangarei District Council – (14.07.22)
22.124