This is breath-taking greed, there is no other words to describe this.

When I first saw the story I was going to say something like "the politicising of judges", but then I realised that they are political anyway. "The criminal justice system" doesn't mean "the justice system for criminals", it means just what it says "the criminal-justice system". It really is a system of government employees (i.e. statists in their purest form, people totally beholden to government, reliant on government for their income and very basic needs) "judging" the people. When government owns all the judges, how can we actually expect them to be on anyone else's side?

Millions On Travel And Spousal Travel For Judges | Stuff.co.nz

Judges have clocked up more than $18 million on travel and accommodation over the past three years, including five overseas trips where Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias took along husband and business tycoon Hugh Fletcher at taxpayers' expense.
snip

Note the difficulty in obtaining this information:

A Dominion Post request last July for details of judges' travel and accommodation costs, as well as spousal expenses and costs of attending conferences, was initially declined by the Justice Ministry because it was "judicial information rather than official information" and was therefore not covered by the Official Information Act. But some information has now been provided by the ministry after consultation with Dame Sian.

The acting deputy secretary of courts, Robert Pigou, said the initial refusal in part reflected the need for judicial independence.

"Judicial independence"

"The courts must be, and be seen to be, separate from and independent of the executive." Ssuurree ... "independent of the executive" (said really sarcastically)

Just more greedy, unaccountable government "sheltered workshop" parasites dipping greedily into the bottomless public trough, I guess. After all it is not like it is a company that might run out of money, government can just recalibrate the speed cameras or something if it wants more money.

There's a lot more to this article, but I just can't be bothered with it at this time of night.