What is The Crown?

Hear a kōrero from the He Tohu exhibition about Te Tiriti with Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Rt Hon Dame Sian Elias. "The Crown wears many hats, its not just the crown on the head of the Queen, it is in a sense the government and how do you distinguish the crown from the government."

One of the complexities of New Zealand relates to the expression, the Crown, well the Crown is a very complicated entitiy, the Crown wears many hats, its not just the crown on the head of the Queen, it is in a sense the government and how do you distinguish the crown from the government. Where does one start and the other end. Well the Crown is the successor of the British Crown and the Queen Victoria, was of course a party to the treaty. So the Crown, the executive in New Zealand if you like is the is is the inheritor of the obligations that the Queen took on in 1840. The Crown is also the the principle part of the justice system, the judges are Her Majesty's judges, the Queen is the fountainhead of justice. Ah, the public service operates in the name of The Crown and so The Crown is the head of state as well. When I use the Crown, I'm really talking about the executive government but, that, that's perhaps a technical use and maybe people use the Crown to mean the state, because that's also possible. In which case it would embrace all branches of government, legislative, executive and judicial. So you see, these ideas merge together, they become quite complicated and people don’t understand them. It's, it's not surprising.