Category: Politics
Christmas and New Year! It is a time for relaxation and celebration; a time, too, to reflect on the past year, and wonder about and plan for the days to come. So let us gaze, if not into a crystal ball, at least into the clouds of the future. Perhaps through the clouds we may glimpse the land below occasionally, and sense, however haphazardly, the terrain that awaits us. When I last wrote I imagined the easy steps by which, if we did not rapidly acquire some gumption, we could have a written Treatyist constitution imposed on us without our consent. Let us go further today. Once we had been saddled with such a burden, what would that mean for New Zealand?
In New Zealand, although we have a long and stable democratic tradition, astonishingly, the Government has not ruled out completely bypassing the public over what could become the most radical constitutional change in our history. Instead of guaranteeing that any major constitutional change would only be approved as a result of a binding referendum of voters, it look likely that the majority will be locked out from having a say.
In this article I want to turn to the question of process, and how a country might legitimately change its constitutional arrangements. Let me lay my cards on the table straight up and say this: For a country in today’s democratic era to change its constitution without in any real way asking its own citizens would be a disgrace, the sort of thing one might expect after a military coup in Pakistan or as a consequence of a passing whim of Mr. Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
In 1999, the National government sold the state owned electricity generator Contact Energy, which owned hydro, geothermal and gas-fired power stations in the North and South Island, including the Clyde Dam, in a public share offering. At that time, there were no calls for the tribal ownership of water, no claims to the Waitangi Tribunal, no special deals for iwi. Over 220,000 investors bought shares and life went on.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Maori water rights issue that is fouling the National minority government’s mixed ownership model (MOM) partial selloff of state-owned hydroelectric power generators worse than didymo, think again. More serious problems are quietly emerging, despite the apparent truce that has descended since the hooey hui the government jacked up to pretend it was consulting Maori over MOM-related sweetheart deals.
Housing affordability is shaping up as a defining political issue - probably an election issue in 2014. The problem is that housing costs in Auckland in particular are rising so rapidly that many low income families are being locked out of home ownership. While the reasons are complex, a major burden of the responsibility must lie with central government.
Home affordability has been in the news in recent weeks. The “problem” is a perennial political football, but things got a little more serious recently when the National Party released broad-brush details of their plan to deal with the issue. The Minister of Finance, Bill English, has correctly recognised that housing is becoming less affordable to low income earners and has proposed a range of initiatives to deal with it:
In his victory speech, newly re-elected US President Barack Obama expressed his hope for the future, saying that what made America great was love, duty, sharing and patriotism. “Tonight, more than 200 years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward. It moves forward because of you. It moves forward because you reaffirmed the spirit that has triumphed over war and depression, the spirit that has lifted this country from the depths of despair to the great heights of hope, the belief that while each of us will pursue our own individual dreams, we are an American family, and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people.”
Any way you add up the sums, the message is that present and future commitments under just the one Vote, Treaty Negotiations, will comes to something like 5-6 billion dollars in total present value, probably even more. It’s hard to find Votes with a similarly spectacular explosion.
After a year of operation, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of spending of public money, most New Zealanders still have no idea that a government review of our constitution is underway. Two recently held Focus Groups confirmed that fact. A professional facilitator guided discussion around a series of questions about the state of race relations in New Zealand and the government’s constitutional review. On the issue of race relations, the groups were very well informed. They were emphatic that the Treaty of Waitangi was no longer an historic symbol of unification but had become a political weapon of division. The Waitangi Tribunal was also seen as divisive and backwards looking.
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