ACT Party
The Government will rush through legislation so that citizens cannot petition against Councils establishing Maori wards. Besides the policy itself, the Government’s habit of rushed lawmaking is becoming its own problem.
We don’t live in a dictatorship. Parliamentary democracy gives each adult the right to elect a representative to speak for them. The Government does not make laws. The House of Representatives does. It has a process for making laws with the people’s consent.
That process requires a new law to be debated in Parliament three times. There is a six-month period where the people can submit on the law and a Select Committee can make changes. There is a second Committee stage where MPs can propose changes to the text of the law. A new law is usually debated publicly and in parliament for nearly a year.
This process is designed to make sure all angles are considered, leading to better laws. It is designed to build public confidence in the law. We disagree with many if not most of Parliament’s laws, but it’s easier to accept following laws made democratically. It is designed to unite the community; the principle is that everyone has a chance to be heard.
Sometimes it makes sense to pass a law urgently, and the rules allow for that too. One time it turned out a technicality made it illegal to issue speeding tickets. Parliament fixed it in an afternoon. The alternative was giving hoons open season for a year.
That was the right time to use urgency. There was not much to debate. Having enforceable speed limits has been widely debated and agreed over decades. The problem is this Government rushed though debatable policy changes without debate.
There is no such urgency with the Maori wards. The Government says it wants to stop people petitioning for referenda against their council forming Maori wards in time for the next council elections. The problem is that people keep getting enough signatures to force a referendum and, when the referendum is held, they vote the wrong way.
By using urgency, the Government has said it’s more important to make the change in time for the 2022 council elections than it is to get the policy right and respect our lawmaking traditions.
The real reason for using urgency is because they have a majority to pass it. Put another way, they’re passing a law under urgency because they can. We are not an elected dictatorship where whoever wins can just ignore due process, but this Government is trying to make us one.
The ban on offshore oil and gas exploration was passed through Parliament in only six weeks. It was done because the Government, five months earlier, had taken to the podium and announced it would do so. Since then the Parliamentary Commissioner for the environment has pointed out it may actually increase carbon emissions.
The rushed firearm laws have been a deeper disaster, because they eroded respect for the law. The Government banned 300,000 firearms and collected in 60,000. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Government eroded respect for the law.
It also didn’t solve the right problem. Now, gun violence is an almost daily occurrence in our news. If the Government had taken a more sober approach to lawmaking, it might have realised that it was solving the wrong problem.
One of the most important priorities for New Zealand now is not any particular law, it is better law making in general. The alternative is more and more laws that don’t work, that people are less willing to follow, and that divide instead of unite the community.
This is why ACT will be campaigning for better lawmaking. There are three parts to it.
(1) A Regulatory Responsibility Act to make sure Governments ask the right questions before introducing laws.
(2) Independent select committees so that laws are properly scrutinised.
(3) If and only if the first two take place, a four-year term so that there is time to consider laws properly.
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