by Keith Locke
It was good to see Labour leader Phil Goff come out in the Herald on Sunday for starting the move to a republic. According to Phil the “succession of the monarchy is the time to have a head of state who is a New Zealander”.
This echoed the view of former deputy PM Michael Cullen at the Reconstituting the Constitution conference I attended in Wellington last week.
Both Goff and Cullen are worried that unless we change the law before the Queen dies or abdicates then Prince Charles will automatically become our next Head of State.
That means we have to choose what sort of republic we want. Nobody at the Reconstituting the Constitution conference wanted a head of state with executive powers like a US president. This was in line with the proposal in my Head of State Referenda Bill (defeated in Parliament earlier this year) that a new head of state should have no more powers than the Queen and Governor General currently have.
Michael Cullen proposed two legs of legislation: firstly, that Governor General be selected by a 75% vote in Parliament, rather than just a government choice; and secondly the Governor General would replace the monarch as head of state when the Queen dies or resigns.
One fly in the ointment is that Kiwis might not like MPs having all the power to choose the new head of state. The Australian people turned down such a proposal in their 1999 referendum. My Bill allowed New Zealand a three way referendum choice between the status quo, a head of state selected by a parliamentary ‘supermajority’ and one directly elected by the people. Michael Cullen didn’t favour an elected president with non-executive powers, but former PM Jim Bolger, who chaired the conference session, chipped in that it works ok in Ireland.
With a Governor General Bill currently before Parliament, we do have an opportunity to introduce more democracy into the selection of the nominee for Governor General to be forwarded to the Queen. The Greens will be proposing an amendment to the Governor General Bill, currently before Parliament, so that the nomination comes from 75% of Parliament.
Published in Environment & Resource Management | Featured | Justice & Democracy by Keith Locke on Mon, September 6th, 2010
Tags: republic
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on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
from republican.co.nz
A republic by evolution? The call for an elected Governor-General
The Republican Movement of Aotearoa New Zealand (RMANZ) has proposed that the Governor-General of New Zealand should henceforth be elected by a three quarters majority of parliament.
At present the Governor General, the British monarch’s personal representative in New Zealand, is appointed by the Queen on the recommendation of the Prime Minister. The office was established in the early colonial era to allow the British Crown to control the New Zealand government through an official who was answerable to neither natives nor colonists.
Circumstances have changed. The British Crown no longer seeks to govern New Zealand. So the Governor-General is practically redundant. The office is retained to carry out the ceremonial duties of a head of state while serving as a permanent reminder of New Zealand’s continuing association with the British crown, and, just as importantly, to act as the final arbiter in the event of a major political impasse.
The RMANZ proposal implies that the office of Governor-General could, by stages, transform into the office of President of an independent republic. First, have an elected Governor General. Then decree that the Governor-General shall represent the nation, rather than the British monarch. Finally, change the title of “Governor-General” to “President” or “Tumuaki”. It is a gradualist approach to the establishment of a republic, which would easily fit into the conventional New Zealand way of doing things. No drama, no barricades and no blood in the streets. New Zealanders would just wake up one day to find that they were living in a fully fledged independent republic.
An unstated, and perhaps unintended, consequence would be to restore the status and political influence of the office of Governor-General, which has steadily waned over the past century. For the first time in New Zealand history the Governor-General would have democratic credentials.
There would then be three officers of state elected by Parliament, namely the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Prime Minister, and the Governor-General. At present, the speaker can be elected by a simple majority, while the Prime Minister is appointed by the monarch on the basis of his assurance that he has the support of parliament, which means that he would secure election by parliament if an election was to take place.
If the Governor-General was elected on the vote of three quarters of the House of Representatives, parliamentarians would face a dilemma. Should they elect a popular candidate, or an unpopular one? The question is not as silly as it sounds. Clearly, the successful candidate would need to be acceptable to both major political parties. However if a popular Governor-General, elected by three quarters of parliament, fell out with a Prime Minister who only had the implied support of a bare majority, or even a minority, of parliamentarians, the democratic principle would then seem to favour the broadly elected Governor-General over the more narrowly “appointed” Prime Minister. In such circumstances there might be a call to go all the way to a fully-fledged democratic republic, by abolishing the office of Prime Minister, and putting the executive in the hands of a presidential head of state elected by the population at large.
A popular, democratically elected Governor-General, beholden to no political party, would therefore present a latent threat to the parliamentary parties which are at the heart of the present system. For this reason parliament might choose to elect a Governor-General not unlike the present incumbent of the office – a person with no popular standing, no charisma, and, apparently, few strongly held convictions. An uninspiring individual who would not challenge the status quo and who would do nothing positive to set the future course of the nation, and who would do nothing, consciously or otherwise, to advance the republican cause.
Such a person is commonly denoted as “a safe pair of hands”. Yet that may be a delusion. Popularity may encourage vain ambition, but it is just as likely to temper and restrain political behaviour. A person who occupies a crucial constitutional position, such as head of state, without any real popular mandate or serious responsibilities is at risk from the class of behavioural disorders associated with members of the royal family a step or more removed from the throne and shadow ministers of the crown. People in such positions often suffer from a compulsive desire to impress their arcane views or unusual personalities upon society as a way of compensating for, and overcoming, the disjunction between the apparent importance and the practical inconsequence of their formal roles. An elected yet unpopular Governor-General would be in a similar situation. Rather than a “safe pair of hands” he could be the proverbial loose cannon, and at risk of misusing the extraordinary powers of his office in extraordinary circumstances.
Apart from these practical political difficulties, there is another peculiarity of the New Zealand political system which would make parliament reluctant to entertain the idea of an elected Governor-General – even one elected by itself. In contrast to those autocratic regimes which cloak themselves in the trappings of democracy, the realm of New Zealand is a democracy which feels obliged to assume the garb of autocracy, as seen in the method of appointment of the Prime Minister, the requirement that all members of parliament pledge allegiance to the monarch, and so on. The common element is a profound reluctance to give free rein to democracy.
That reluctance, characteristic of most British colonies, is not unreasonable in the circumstances. The New Zealand state maintains a delicate balance between competing ethnic groups, while the socio-economic order is marked by deepening class divisions. These ethnic and social divisions go back to the very beginning of the New Zealand state, which had its genesis in ideas of British racial supremacy propounded by the British state, and the New Zealand Company’s explicit plans for the development of a class-based socio-economic order in the south seas. New Zealand’s founding principles of class and race distinction were challenged in the mid-twentieth century by the populist movements towards racial assimilation and social egalitarianism. However from 1984 onwards the privatisation of public wealth and the concurrent “Treaty of Waitangi settlement process” has breathed new life into the older colonial ideals and once again New Zealand has become a nation deeply divided by race and class. In this situation the regime can reasonably argue that unfettered democracy could be dangerously destabilizing.
The regime has averted one of the most obvious dangers by incorporating a stratum of Maori into the privatisation process. This has not been done out of altruism – there is nothing altruistic about creating an economically privileged caste within Maoridom – but for purely pragmatic reasons. If the state had excluded all Maori from the great grab for the national resources that went under the name of economic restructuring, then Maori would almost certainly have provided the heart of the resistance to “New Zealand Inc”.
But even with Maori resistance effectively neutralised by the settlement process, a purely democratic state would still pose a particular threat to the stability of New Zealand society. Autocracy serves to temper the democratic principle of self-interest, and so tends to keep the dispossessed classes relatively pacified. That is sufficient reason for the heirs and successors of the New Zealand Company to shy away from any significant, or even formal, moves away from monarchism. At present parliamentarians like Hone Harawira and Sue Bradford must pay lip service to the sovereign authority of the British Crown, and not to the people of New Zealand whom they affect to represent.
Under a purely democratic political system Harawira and Bradford, to take just two by way of example, would be subject to no such constraints, and in the absence of a constitution which defines the extent of and the limits to the rights of citizens, there would be even fewer reasons for either the ruling elite or the dispossessed classes to be moderate in their dealings with each other. The monarchy, then, can fairly claim to be an instrument of social stability in the present political circumstances.
Thus there are a number of reasons, ranging from short-term self-interest to longer term concern for the stability of the regime, why Parliament will resist the RMANZ call to democratize the office of Governor-General. It remains to be seen whether RMANZ can succeed in bringing about an independent republic of Aotearoa through a series of incremental changes to the office, and it remains to be debated whether a republic that is not based on thorough-going constitutional reform would be truly viable.
In my own opinion, an independent republic of Aotearoa will have to confront, and overcome the legacy of the New Zealand Company, and of British colonial rule in order to create a stable and harmonious social order. Distinctions of race and class, established as the very foundations of the monarchist regime, must be totally abolished by the republican regime.
End
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One fly in the ointment is that Kiwis might not like MPs having all the power to choose the new head of state.
While they might not like the idea, I suggest that hardly any Kiwis know what the current HOS and Governor General do, let alone who either of those two people are…
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Do it properly.
Rod Donald supported moving toward a republic, but he wouldn’t have supported it by such a sneaky method precluding the public from having any say on the matter.
At the very least, propose the SOP now and seek through the business committee to have it referred to the Select Committee along with the rest of the bill.
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President Keith!
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There is a popular opinion that economic and environmental issues are an important concern for New Zealand while constitutional issues are not. The conventional wisdom is that New Zealand’s constitution is basically sound, that the economy and the environment is a bit of a worry, and that the politicians are, or should be, capable of providing the leadership necessary to fix New Zealand’s economic and environmental woes.
All three presumptions are wrong. New Zealand does have economic and environmental problems, but the ultimate source of those problems is constitutional. To be specific New Zealand colonialism has continually frustrated any moves to establish an economy in depth, or to entrench the notion that the natural environment of New Zealand is worthy of protection. Capital is expatriated at phenomenal rates, with environmental values and skilled labour going along as baggage. These outflows of capital, skilled labour, and environmental values are enabled and encouraged by the historical connections between Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, a situation which will not alter until New Zealand’s sense of being a nation begins to transcends its sense of being a minor player among the “English speaking nations” of the former British empire.
A lot of New Zealanders will reject this analysis because they are pragmatic, materialist, and economically fundamentalist. They don’t accept that economic behaviour is decisively influenced by broader issues of social identification. They don’t recognise that their own economic behaviour (the “fetish of property”) is dysfunctional, and a result of their failure to identify as a nation and a people. Consequently they remain confused about why New Zealand never seems to get out of the mire, and why all the kauri, the gold, the refrigerated lamb trade, kiwifruit and kiwi ingenuity have never been sufficient to build the platform for a sustainable national economy. They live in hope that “National” or “Labour” or some other political party will change everything about the economy while changing nothing in the constitution of the nation. Or, perversely, they imagine that tweaking the constitution in very small ways might have very significant beneficial effects.
I suspect that most Greens share this delusion. Those who keep assuring us that questions of national identity “don’t matter” or are “trivial” or “irrelevant” are the deluded victims of a regime which believes that “pragmatism” is the key to, and only condition of, national salvation.
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I find it hard to believe in 2010 that this issue is still unresolved.. even the British monachy recognise that the ‘days of empire’ are long gone.. time to grow up & let go of the apron-strings.. we ditched “god save the queen”.. its time we took the next step & became : The Republic of Aotearoa ! I for one, think the Governor/President should be publically elected. Kia-ora Koutou
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Excellent summation.
Let me add another group of pewople to the equation.
Trade union officials and the trade union movement. In New Zealand they are mired in the 1920′s cloth cap mind set.
What is required is a hard hat union movement that takes 21st century endeavours into society.
I think the union movement is still clinging to the hope that compulsory unionism will return (didn’t happen under a Labour government for nine years) and lead them somewhere into the future where the strengths of the past (which were in fact weaknesses) are somehow magically restored.
Will never happen and the union movement needs to look towards progressive thinking along the lines of the union mopvement in the USA.
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“Will never happen and the union movement needs to look towards progressive thinking along the lines of the union movement in the USA.”
You mean like the teamsters?
Or the remainder of non-union US workers who have been completely shafted ?
They still have the right to strike and free association and speech in the US. The right wing here would be keen to give Unions the same rights in NZ. Yeah!
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I probably share some of the delusions that Geoff diagnoses.
I think we have already gone too far toward a republic, because our legal profession is too incestuous to host its own top court without corruption. I know that the civil/economic one is being investigated now. The ones I’m really worried about are instances of criminal law where judges have ratified each other’s decisions and then been reversed in the Privy Council.
I also agree that national identity matters, but I’m not sure that changing the law will significantly change that. It’s about the stuff discussed in “The quest for security in New Zealand” and “No Right Turn”: what’s the relative significance of the people who want to export wealth and the people who expect to stay?
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Of course the establishment of a republic would not automatically redress that situation. But neither will retaining the monarchy do anything to turn the tide of corruption.
The New Zealand Immigration Service is notoriously corrupt. So are many politicians, police officers, state servants and local body officials. A former Auditor-General, the very man who is meant to keep the apparatus of state honest, has been jailed for fraud.
However I personally don’t see a major problem within the judiciary at this stage. In my perception, the judiciary is one of the few social institutions which is restraining the spread of corruption within the regime. On the other hand you will find quite a few contributors to frogblog arguing that one does not have to be strictly honest in politics. That is the thin end of the wedge. That is where the fight against corruption should start.
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Can anyone tell me in a nutshell exactly what the constitution (not the treaty of Waitangi) of New Zealand is?
Then ask any child in the US what their constitution is; they will be able to recite it line for line.
I know that their constitution is not perfect (we don’t have to emulate it’s imperfections like the 2nd amendment), but to have all the populous know their declaration of rights is most empowering.
As it is NZ is developing into a dystopian state, where by our own ignorance of the laws foisted upon us, we are therefore forced to become lawbreakers, subject to blackmail!!!
There are four thousand tax laws in this country!!!!
I say give us a president elected by the people who will oversee the drafting of a constitution that will be taught in all schools.
A constitution that protects the environment and peoples rights ‘in perpetuity’ that no politician can subvert.
Bring on the Republic of Aotearoa!!!!!!!
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Geoff; former Auditor General jailed for fraud? Thats interesting I never heard that on the news. Are you permitted to name names?
A few years ago when our community wanted to investigate the Selwyn District Ccouncil, the Audits Office idea of doing an audit is giving them a ring and asking how their books are. I have a letter that attests to this.
A bit like the drug squad asking a P manufacturer for an appointment to do a raid.
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Kery Thomas,
You lost me on that statement.
Nobody gives unions powers or takes away any.
It is what unions do for their members that provides a vehicle for the members wellbeing and the basis of any powerbase.
Problem for the unions is the same problem for Maori sovereignty.
Changing population demographics.
New Zealands’ population is getting khaki coloured and the english influence is being replaced by an asian/oceania outlook.
Just like the Treaty of Waitangi is becoming irrelevant to New Zealands’ changing society, so is 1930′s style cloth cap trade unionism.
And no, it is not a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, just a slowly changing demographic culture shift.
Something neither Maori sovereignty proclaimers or the ye old english trade union movement is able to stop or, I suspect, even come to terms with.
We will be a republic in the future and it will be interesting to see the make up of that constitutional entity.
I personally dont see the Treaty of Waitangi as the basis of a constitution, being that it does not represent New Zealand society today or in the future.
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Any constitution must NOT be in perpetuity. How dare we of this generation impose our values for all time. I’d advocate a sunset clause of 100 years at which point a new constitution must be forged, also with a sunset clause.
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Geoff; former Auditor General jailed for fraud? Thats interesting I never heard that on the news. Are you permitted to name names?
Jeff Chapman. 1997, I think. Six months prison, increased to 18 months after a Crown sentence appeal.
Was certainly news at the time.
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Seems to me that the Framers of the US Bill of Rights were insightful beyond their time, and handed down a set of rights that are as relevant today as they were all those years ago. More than that, you’ll find very few of the citizens of the US would would like to scrap their constitution and start again.
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The effect has been to remove power from any workers accept those like teachers, doctors and Lawyers who are still allowed to have industry wide associations.
Employers banding together to screw down wages in an industry however is still legal.
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Hardly – there’s a couple of unions with an old-fashioned (but not necessarily wrong) outlook. But most unions replaced their ‘cloth cap’ officials with middle-class university educated social democrats in decades following the 1970s and have inevitaly sunk into irrelevance as their staff has little interest or understanding of the problems facing workers. Most of the unions have a “be nice to the bosses and they’ll be nice to us” mentality, which suits the worldview of most social democrats, and can’t figure out why they keep getting shafted and keep losing support.
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…oh, and I couldn’t care less whether we are a republic or a constitutional moronarchy, either.
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Kerry Thomas
So why do so few people belong to unions?
Is it because they dont see a need for strike action?
If strike action is the be all and end all, surely unions would be inundated with applicants to join!
Maybe more and more people (the changing demographics) are happy with their employment relationship and see no need for a union?
Do you think that when a New Zealand constitution is drafted compulsorary unionism will be on the card? Will people vote for it?
Same with Maori sovereignty, will it get voted into a constitution?
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“So why do so few people belong to unions?”
Because most are hopelessly inneffective and spend a lot of time dissuading workers from taking action. Every union I’ve been in has been less willing to take action than my fellow workers.
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Less people are in Unions because they are ignorant of the history and benefits of unions.
NZ history is neglected in schools and if the history of labour and things like the Waihi miners strike were taught the right would scream.
Not to mention seamens wages being frozen during WW2 while shipping company owners made a fortune. The reason why Unions like the cooks and stewards were so bloody minded.
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Every union I’ve been in has been less willing to take action than my fellow workers.
Unsurprisingly i don’t know that much about unions, but isn’t there a measure of democratic voting and/or participation? i.e. can’t more militant leaders be elected?
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Kerry Thomas
So where are the unions in promoting history?
Nowhere and that is my point. They are as useless as a cloth cap in todays society.
Sam Buchanan,
Is the reason that the options being promoted by the union officials are not in the best interest of the worker?
Back to the constitution and republicanism
Would you have compulsorary unionism in a constitution?
Would you have Maori sovereingty in a constitution?
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“Is the reason that the options being promoted by the union officials are not in the best interest of the worker?”
That’s what I said.
“They are as useless as a cloth cap in todays society.”
My cloth cap is very useful for keeping my head warm. Part of the problem for unions is the legislative environment, which prevents them doing much. But their lack of vigour and analysis is also problematic. At the moment, the more militant unions, such as Unite, seem to be growing, while the others continue to languish.
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Gerrit. The CTU put together a information program for schools some time ago on what unions did. Also on rights and responsibilities of an employee and stuff on finance, debt, banking, getting work etc. Not political just factual. The sort of thing you would think most employers would want employees to know.It was canned amid screams about socialist unions taking over education.
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“Not political just factual.”
Therein lies the problem. An understanding of the political nature of society – how power is exercised and who holds it, is necessary to see the point of unions.
If a union is simply explaining your rights and obligations as they currently stand, they become little more than a Citizen’s Advice Bureau (which aren’t bad things, but don’t exactly attract widespread support and commitment).
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Personally I would have democracy in a constitution.
http://direct-democracy.geschichte-schweiz.ch/
Most of the objections to this are from people who say you cannot trust the majority. Which is rather an arrogant point of view. Why should the ideas of a small minority of self appointed power seeking politicians be any better.
The Greens are right in that a consensus is the best form of decision making, but you have to have a fall back position when consensus cannot be obtained.
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In New Zealand, on the other hand, any efforts to write a constitution will be fraught with difficulty because there will be people from both the left and the right trying to place elements of their own agenda in that consitution – we don’t have the consensus that exists at independence or after a revolution.
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Sam B you don’t care for either monarchies or monarchies, fair enough but I would like to point out that I have read a lot of history about the monarchies and the more I read the less impressed I am.
The monarchial system in Europe was badly flawed in many ways; (1) their assumption that kings were Gods representatives on earth (2)That the eldest male held claim to the throne often regardless of their abilities.
(3)The marriage of first cousins (Prince regent [son of George III] to princess Caroline of Brunswick)to hold together two countries Germany and England. Do I need to spell out the results?
Monarchies were often divided within their own house a classical egsample of that is the British house of Lancaster and the house of York that resulted in the War of the Roses that divided England from 1400 when Henry IV usurped the throne from Richard II through to Edward of Lancaster 1472. This even puts a big question mark over the legitamacy of the throne today.
Do we want to go back to those dark ages?
The US system is not perfect but it’s the best there is, had it been drafted after the industrial revolution it could have addressed the excesses of capitalism in point of fact America had strong legislation to curb monopolies but alas they were watered down.
Jon ston suspects that it’s too late for NZ to get a proper constution. well what is the alternative? I think that there are core values that both the left and right can agree on and that will have to be worked on in the future. Or should parliament be the same old factory mass producing bulk Claytons laws to be scrapped three years later.
There has to be more permanent.
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1) The employer proposes unsatisfactory pay rises or cuts to conditions.
2) The staff are mighty unhappy and want to take industrial action.
3) The union officials say that taking industrial action is too risky. The usual scare tactic is something like: “if you lose this fight you’ll be shafted by the bosses for ever after; the current offer from the bosses is the best you’re likely to get”.
4) The staff accept the union official’s advice; after all they are meant to be the expert on these things.
What has happened (in my opinion) is that paid union officials now view the job as leading to bigger and better career options in the future … for example as a candidate for the Labour party. The emphasis has moved from serving the union members to serving their own career interests.
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If in the process of going to a Republic the country manages to get actually written down in a formal Constitution, the responsibilities, limits to power, rights and the rest of the package that are required, and manages to bring supersede Te Tiriti with an equally acceptable TO IWI arrangement of power sharing, then I can see spending some time making it happen.
If it becomes another Kiwi exercise in imitating windmills with arms waving and vague promises that put off actual decisions so that nobody actually knows what the law is… that’s just a waste of time.
I am not THAT keen on going to direct democracy systems if the standard of education is not a bit higher or there is a significant restriction on the advertising that is permitted in the process. I want to hear other people’s ideas, not advertisements. Got enough of this nonsense in the political campaigns to last me through several incarnations even if I come back as a rock.
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“If in the process of going to a Republic the country manages to get actually written down in a formal Constitution, the responsibilities, limits to power, rights and the rest of the package that are required, and manages to bring supersede Te Tiriti with an equally acceptable TO IWI arrangement of power sharing, then I can see spending some time making it happen. ”
….
and what will Iwi want? customary ownership of the foreshore and seabed for a start and that won’t be acceptable to a majority. Perhaps we should have just have had a war (since time and intermarriage isn’t sufficient)?
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Samiuela
Your example is the very reason workers are in the position they are in. They are sheep.
Not even the gumption to change their membership from one union to another to help them achieve their ambitions.
Geez, The workers are the union, they have the power to elect, the power to belong, the power to change things.
Instead we have excuses and platitudes on why workers are shafted.
Take the power instead of giving it away. Join or create a union that meets the demands of its members.
No wonder we have a tribal system of government, workers (the majority of voters) cant even organise themselves into anything worthwhile, not even their own union.
BJ
Totally agree.
Thank goodness in 50 years time the changed population demographics will be such that this wallowing in Pakeha guilt and Maori self flagellation will be gone.
Cant see it in my lifetime and not till we have a more positive attitude towards the future.
As an English friend said to me when she settled here. New Zealanders carry this large chip on both shoulders. Nobody seems to know what it is nor how to get rid of it.
Hopefully the new immigrants and the next generation of young people will throw away those chips.
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That seems like a very perceptive comment.
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Gerrit,
I think you’re 100% correct. I don’t personally have the skills or inclination to form a new union, but when it comes to voting on things like industrial action, I vote the way I think is best, not necessarily what what the union officials say is best. I wish more people did this.
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Two possibilities. Iwi become the “House of Lords” with some serious environmental responsibilities (among others). I don’t like how they’ve discharged them to date, but the treaty seems to put them in this position… Second might be a dual government (works for us Greens at least). Superseding the treaty means that that the “ownership” issue is gone, replaced by actual government power that is vested in Iwi entities and answerable to Maori only. Since it is to be shared, government has to be such that Maori and Pakeha must agree on a law for it to pass. One law for all, to each their own government or portion thereof.
I don’t know the answer to this one, but I do know that the guidance of the treaty is vague enough to keep a thousand lawyers employed for a thousand more years. Maybe that’s a good thing… keeping them out of other mischief.. but I regard it as a waste. The dual government recognizes them differently from the way the treaty does, but cedes them similar powers in a formal and defined way, while keeping NZ as a single nation.
My point is that given the fog of indecision and confusion that surrounds our government on its best days, the issue of Republic, Monarchy or Herd-of-Jellyfish is completely moot.
BJ
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A couple of points.
While it is interesting to debate the relative merits of republic or monarchy in general, and with reference to European history, it also necessary to focus on the specific characteristics of the New Zealand monarchy if we are to proceed beyond the purely academic.
In principle, monarchical systems have a number of advantages. In practice, in New Zealand, the monarchy is a serious impediment to the nation’s longterm progress, peace and security.
The argument that a workable constitution must be supported by a national consensus is correct. However no constitution will have 100% support, and historical experience is that consensus is only arrived at after bitter divisions have been worked through. “Loyalists” fought “patriots” in the US war of independence before the constitution was established, followed by the civil war between north and south before the constitution was fully (and arguably blindly) accepted by the vast majority of Americans.
A republican constitution will not emerge from academic or legal debate. It will emerge from the people themselves as they struggle to resolve the social, political and economic problems which the monarchist regime has has only exacerbated.
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The only possible reason to give Maori more power than that based on their numbers (as in one man one vote) is that they are decedents of the first inhabitants (and colonising peoples). That isn’t a good reason to give them extra powers unless you can identify the principle of natural justice which says it is?
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It is a collection of documents some of which are singly entrenched and some doubly and the documents are set out in the Constitution Act 1986 (from memory) it includes things like the BORA, TOW, Cabinet Manual etc…
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“The only possible reason to give Maori more power than that based on their numbers (as in one man one vote) is that they are decedents of the first inhabitants (and colonising peoples). That isn’t a good reason to give them extra powers unless you can identify the principle of natural justice which says it is?”
The principle of natural justice is that you can’t go to another country and impose a new set of laws, customs, language and forms of government without the consent of the inhabitants.
“I would like to point out that I have read a lot of history about the monarchies and the more I read the less impressed I am.”
I’m not at all impressed by monarchies – I just think our present very limited form of manarchy won’t markedly differ from a republic.
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It is fair enough for JH and Sam Buchanan to discuss what would constitute natural justice for Maori in a historical context. However, there is a second condition, namely that any solution to these race problems must work to the general good. The “general good” means good for everyone, including Maori. This is not a concept that gets much of an airing in New Zealand political discourse. It should do, because only solutions based on the “general good” can be viable in the longterm. The so-called “solutions” to the race problem coming from within the present regime (both from the right and the left) are based on the unequal distribution of political power and wealth, and as such are establishing the conditions for a political earthquake at some future time.
On the trade union question, the problem is that unionism (like feminism, Tino rangatiratanga and so on) is based on the promotion of sectional interest which easily devolves into self-interest, so we get careerist union officials, self-seeking feminist corporate executives, and exploiters of the “treaty of waitangi industry”. Because the whole socio-economic system is based on sectional-interest and self-interest, it is difficult to tell workers, women, and Maori that they should play by a more altruistic set of rules. But we should at least acknowledge that unionism, feminism, and the maori rights movement will constantly tend to revert to forms of individualism and naked self-interest.
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To Edge and Jeremy Harris, thank you for your answers.
Geoff “In principle, Monarchial systems have a number of advantages”.
You may be right but I havn’t found them and I think the disadvantages I have mentioned above out-weigh the advantages.
As for unions I say there should be a system where the hardened ‘cloth caps’ direct the academics.
A union should have absolutely no place for career academics who in practice undermine the very reason of a union, to improve the lot of their worker membership.
If the union is directed by one of the shop-floor reps who have come up from the ranks then that person is better positioned to take a leadership role rather than an academic who comes in knowing nothing about the workplace or the people there, but would be in a good position to give legal advice only.
What is happening today is that the older unions are relying too much on the legal opinions of academics who have to work within a very worker antagonistic system.
In other words if you want to make ommlets you need to break eggs!
A union that has lost it’s courage is apostate and will become weak, new unions will take it’s place, that is what we se happening now with the formation of UNITE!!!!!!!!
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In answer to Drakula, even though I am a republican, and even though I have a personal aversion to any autocratic system of government, from an academic point of view I have to acknowledge that in certain historical and social contexts hereditary monarchy has constituted an effective form of government. Monarchies would never have become as widespread as they are unless they had something to recommend them. Having said that, I am no political pragmatist, and I would always be opposed to such monarchical institutions, regardless of social context.
I am using academic in a different sense to yourself. More perhaps in its original sense of being of a philosophic disposition. If we consider academics as that group who have been shaped by university schools of law, business, economics, sociology and political science, then I tend to agree, as a generalisation, that there are dangers if such are allowed to dominate in either trade unions or the political process – as they are wont to do.
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Looks like I’m going to be the odd one out here. I would like to see Charles as King of New Zealand. In fact I’d be tempted to bring back some real royal power! It seems to me just a bit perverse of the Greens to go out of their way to avoid having a Head of State who’s environmental credentials are a league above most other public figures. If we’d taken some notice of him in the past we wouldn’t now have the dog’s vomitus of architecture in Wellington, less capitulation to the motor car, better agricultural practices, organic farms, no toxins or pollution in our rivers, no genetic engineering, fairer trade with overseas farmers, a cleaner atmosphere, stimulation of environmental friendly industry and our albatrosses might be rather more secure and our ocean’s less depleted, and that’s only to write here some of the environmental matters that come from the top of my head. He’s also been active in many other socially aware areas, such as building bridges with the Moslem world and improving opportunities for youth. I can’t think of anyone around more fitted to lead this and any other nation that cares to have him for our 21st Century future.
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