Category: Democracy
No one pretends that if the mixed-member proportional voting system (MMP) is thrown out by public referendum New Zealand’s constitutional woes will be over.
In his book The Vision of the Anointed, economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Thomas Sowell, describes how the great catastrophes of history have typically resulted not only from ill-advised policies, but from the fact that public feedback cannot get through to decision-makers. He says, “Typically, there has been an additional and crucial ingredient – some method by which feedback from reality has been prevented, so that a dangerous course of action could be blindly continued to a fatal conclusion. Much of the continent of Europe was devastated in World War II because the totalitarian regime of the Nazis did not permit those who foresaw the self-destructive consequences of Hitler’s policies to alter, or even influence, those policies.”
A political system that allows the select few of the ruling elite to dominate the life of the ordinary person has come to be known as …..“Plato’s conceit”.
The arguments about the ‘h’ in Wanganui will clearly be around for some time to come. The citizens of Wanganui, led by their firm no-nonsense mayor Michael Laws, have no intention of giving up without a fight. The Geographic Board has recommended to the Land Information Minister, Mr Maurice Williamson, that an h be inserted, but the city and citizens of Wanganui intend to make an issue of the matter. Some commentators have argued ’Why don’t they just give in? After all, it’s just one tiny letter’. By the same token, one could argue that, if it is so tiny and unimportant an issue, the supporters of the h should give in. But the h’s supporters clearly think that the issue is bigger than one tiny letter, and so the h’s opponents can hardly be blamed for thinking the same way.
The The Prime Minister has announced that the Government is planning to hold the long-awaited referendum on our MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) electoral system before or at the same time as the 2011 general election. This was a National Party election promise based on the widely held view that voters were going to be given a chance to review MMP after a suitable trial period.
Who holds the New Zealand Government to account? The voters? The press? Both might be formidable forces during an election but sadly they seem to lose influence over politicians once they are appointed.
As was expected, in its report on the Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill released on Friday, the special Auckland Governance Legislation Committee did not recommend separate Maori seats for Auckland’s new super city council. While there was undoubtedly vociferous support from advocates for greater Maori representation in Auckland’s governance, the Committee rightly stated that this was a matter for the council and the people of Auckland to determine.
Constant repetition of assertions that Maori have a Treaty of Waitangi right to dedicated seats on the new Auckland Council doesn’t make them correct. It is clear that neither Tuku Morgan nor Len Brown, nor most of the other advocates of separate representation, has read the Treaty, sometimes called our founding document. It is a simple treaty of three clauses. It was written in 1840 when nothing approaching today’s concepts of democracy existed anywhere in the world. There was no parliament, nor any councils in New Zealand. Consequently there was nothing that could be deemed an Article Two “taonga” to be preserved on behalf of Maori. What there was in the Treaty, however, was an Article Three guarantee to Maori that the Crown would give Maori “the same rights and duties of citizenship as the people of England”. In other words, when it came to politics, Maori rights would be the same as everyone else’s.
The public have spoken. 87.6 percent of New Zealanders want the law that has banned smacking changed. They want to go back to the common sense situation that existed before Parliament saw fit to pass Sue Bradford’s repeal of Section 59 of the Crimes Act into law.
In May, Justice Minister Simon Power explained to the United Nations that the new National-led Government intends to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.[1] The problem for New Zealand is that this is being done without a mandate from the public. If people really understood exactly what the declaration proposes, they would reject it outright, as the Labour Government did - to their credit - in 2007.
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