Leighton Baker
Leader New Conservative
The below article is in response to The BFD article earlier this week, New Conservatives Should Prove They Are New By Dumping Their Key Platform by BFD Editor Juana Atkins.
There’s much to like about The BFD. Thanks for providing a platform for open, reasoned debate.
Having just read Juana’s piece on binding referenda, I think she has not only missed the target but shot outside the firing range.
On her island, the leader can determine you must all eat pork. No questions.
With binding referenda the citizens could ask themselves, “Is this the diet we want?” and if a majority disagreed with the leader then the pork diet would be overturned. Currently, with non-binding referenda, even if 90% of her island’s inhabitants did not want to eat pork, they would have no choice. The word for that is dictatorship.
Juana does not seem to realise how difficult it is to force a referendum. Even when the Green Party sought a referendum on the sale of state assets (which, by the way, 67% of respondents disagreed with) they had to ask for extra time to collect the required signatures.
The system itself weeds out frivolous or unwarranted referenda and only really applies when there is a strong national sentiment against what the government is doing. The big question is: should the people of New Zealand have a say on the way the country is headed between elections?
New Conservative’s stance is that politicians are voted in to represent the citizens and, if they fail to do that, then there should be some mechanism to hold them to account. We mere mortals who toil for a living are fully accountable to our employers or clients, and our politicians should be too, and not just every three years.
Juana is right in that we could indeed introduce a system that allows for the very things we disagree with: legalising THC (only because many of us are or have worked with young people negatively affected); full-term abortions (when does life start and who else should lose their human rights); euthanasia (legalising suicide when it is already a pandemic just doesn’t make sense); hate speech laws (far too subjective to be good law).
Yes, the good people of New Zealand could vote for these in a binding referendum; but that’s democracy, and that is what we in New Conservative are defending.
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