... I asked the airline for its submissions on the question of costs. The general tenor of the submissions is that the establishment of this Royal Commission was directed by the New Zealand Government and that the airline should not be ordered to meet any part of the public expenditure so incurred. As a statement of general principle, this is correct. But there is specific statutory power to order that a party to the inquiry either pay or contribute towards the cost of the inquiry, and that the power should be exercised, in my opinion, whenever the conduct of that party at the hearing has materially and unnecessarily extended the duration of the hearing. This clearly occurred at the hearings which took place before me. In an inquiry of this kind, an airline can either place all its cards on the table at the outset, or it can adopt an adversary stance. In the present case, the latter course was decided upon. The management of the airline instructed its counsel to deny every allegation of fault, and to counter-attack by ascribing total culpability to the air crew, against whom there were alleged no less than 13 separate varieties of pilot error. All those allegations, in my opinion, were without foundation. Apart from that, there were material elements of information in the possession of the airline which were originally not disclosed, omissions for which counsel for the airline were in no way responsible, and which successively came to light at different stages of the Inquiry when the hearings had been going on for weeks, in some cases for months. I am not going to burden this recital with detailed particulars, but I should have been told at the outset that the flight path from Hallett to McMurdo was not binding on pilots, that Captain Wilson briefed pilots to maintain whatever altitudes were authorised by McMurdo Air Traffic Control, that documents were ordered by the chief executive to be destroyed, that an investigation committee had been set up by the airline in respect of which a file was held, and that one million copies of the Brizindine article had been printed, a fact never revealed by the airline at all. So it was not a question of the airline putting all its cards on the table. The cards were produced reluctantly, and at long intervals, and I have little doubt that there are one or two which still lie hidden in the pack. In such circumstances the airline must make a contribution towards the public cost of the Inquiry. ...