Tim Barnett: No need for public whim to dictate fate of MMP

Tim Barnett

It sounds as seductive as it is profoundly misleading. Who in all conscience could object to the idea of voters making the decision, through referendums, on all the important issues of the day? Well, I for one.

Don Brash's call for referendums to become an essential tool of decision-making is naive, cynical, and a hostage to fortune which he and his National Party will come to regret.

In 1992 and 1993, New Zealanders voted, thoughtfully, for a new style of democracy. The old two-party domination, in which the inevitability of eventual electoral defeat generated more arrogance than humility, was replaced by the MMP system.

As it was promoted, so it has come to be - power shared between a range of political parties, mandated by their manifestos, and law-making slowed to increase public input.

So, in the past 30 months, five political parties supported in 2002 by 66 per cent of voters have contributed to a greater or lesser extent to the task of governing through parliamentary majorities. Submissions to select committees have increased in number and quality and many more are now heard - a system regarded internationally as a model.

The Government has been a busy one. Some decisions of a constitutional nature have been made - the Human Rights Amendment and the Supreme Court Act, for example. They were foreshadowed in both the Labour and Green Parties' election manifestos before the parliamentary votes on them. To put such measures to a referendum would go beyond what any other OECD country has considered necessary.

And, yes, Parliament has taken some decisions on moral issues, in all cases with the outcome being in line with public opinion polls at the time and with some Labour MPs voting for and some against, according to their consciences.

But, without exception, Parliament and New Zealand as a whole have moved on from these quasi-constitutional and moral debates without the world entering trauma. Act, for example, has made good use of the new Supreme Court. Human rights law has been applied to actions of the Government just as its author, National's Doug Graham, intended it should.

Prostitution has been decriminalised, and those who claimed that 95 per cent of the public opposed that law could not gather 10 per cent to get a referendum on it.

The smokefree law has more than 80 per cent public support.

Many people would call these initiatives progressive and farsighted.

I called Dr Brash's position naive. He may be a fresher in Parliament but he is no stranger to policy-making. He knows that few debates or decisions are straightforward and that most positions on every matter can be presented in persuasive ways by skilful advocates.

He also knows that officials, ministers, and then MPs on select committees go through a complex process of researching, consulting and listening while developing proposals, because their credibility and professionalism rely on that.

Thus, the justice and electoral committee, which I chair, did not spend more than 80 hours hearing public submissions on the Supreme Court Bill, or more than 50 hours on the Civil Union Bill, for no reason. Through that, the integrity of the opposing arguments could be judged and specific changes proposed.

To reduce such complicated matters to one question in a referendum, and then take the public response as an absolute, is an insult to public intelligence. And those groups that identify as minorities have every right to be very afraid at the thought of those rights being subject to repeated majority veto or removal.

Tariana Turia may well have wanted a referendum on the Civil Union Bill (which would have made this nation the only one of many reforming the law in this area to have made that a precondition), but most of us accept the need for a nation born in diversity to guard the laws which ensure that diversity with something a little more rigorous than public whim.

I called Dr Brash's position cynical. With the exception of a well-orchestrated, if unimaginative, email campaign to MPs calling for binding citizen-initiated referendums - which to judge by Dr Brash's evangelical zeal for the idea may well be the only new policy proposal presented to National in the past two years - I sense no public demand for the overturning of our parliamentary democracy in favour of an electronic-age version of the Greek city state.

That may well be for National a small price to pay for the chance of regaining power. But have they thought beyond that? Have they created, in their desperation, a hostage to fortune?

The 1990s were filled by National Governments. As well as progressively legislating morality on human rights, and lowering the drinking age, both without referendums, National demolished employment law and the ACC, slashed superannuation and benefits, passed 20 state asset-selling laws, and deeply indebted a generation of students.

Few doubt they would seek to do the same again, if ever given the chance. Maybe that bill to introduce binding referendums on issues of great public importance would be delayed a while to allow ideology to have free rein - or has Dr Brash really succeeded in snapping on that political chastity belt only to lose the key?

* Labour MP Tim Barnett was a key organiser of the push for the prostitution and civil union laws. Dr Brash, in his Perspectives article, said the Government had no mandate for much of its legislation on social issues, and that there should be greater use of referendums, starting with one on MMP.