Have your say: Not democratic

Prime Minister John Key

We are familiar with the saying, "If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear."

That sounds okay until the Government decides to change the law ... and backdates it.

And, it does this under urgency and, you, the people, have had no real say in the matter.

We now have two Acts of Parliament that were passed in this way in the past 18 months.

One was the amended GCSB which was passed to legalise the Government's illegal acts against Mr Dotcom and the armed raid on the Tuhoe of Urewera.

The other was the "Speed Validation Bill and Other Matters" (not publicised).

This latter bill was created, had three readings and was passed under urgency in less than a day. It also legalised things that were not legal and ... backdated the effect of the bill.

Once, urgency was used only for urgent matters such as putting into law changes announced in the Budget.

These were necessary for the continuing running of the country.

We now have most laws being passed under urgency.

This stops the people having a say in their laws. We have a procedure for passing laws. It should take at least a year to go through all the stages.

We do not have an Upper House to check and hold back any doubtful legislation.

Failure to follow the democratic process is to fail democracy.

Arbitrary legislation is called ... dictatorship.

This Government has not brought in the necessary changes to MMP which were needed to make our elections fair. This is no longer a democratic government.

M McDonald
Whangarei

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