Dialogue: Steven Price

If our government's not legal, what a time we could have!


By STEVEN PRICE

According to "investigative journalist" Ian Wishart, New Zealand's Government does not lawfully exist.

The good news, for some: Peter Ellis was unlawfully convicted after all, photo drivers licences are invalid, the Waitangi Tribunal is a legal fiction, the Inland Revenue can't tax us, and the number of MPs must indeed be reduced (to zero).

On the downside: watch out for those intoxicated 12-year-olds driving on the wrong side of the road (traffic laws are invalid, too). It's not as if they have to be in school any more. In fact, there are no public schools. Still, if they bug you, at least you can shoot them. The Crimes Act is void as well.

On that note, though, keep an eye out for Malcolm Rewa and all the other prisoners who now have to be released. Don't expect any help from the police, though - they have no lawful powers, and the Government has no authority to pay them anyway.

You could hire your own bodyguards, but they wouldn't have to honour their contracts. I'm not even sure what you'd pay them with. "Legal tender" doesn't have any legality.

You get the picture. Suffice it to say that we ought to be slow to accept the argument that our entire constitutional system is illegal. So why does Ian Wishart think it is?

In his new magazine Investigate, Wishart says New Zealand became a sovereign nation in 1920, when we joined the League of Nations. At that point, he says, sovereignty passed into the hands of the people of New Zealand.

Yet we, the people, never passed a referendum or drew up a constitution giving any powers to the government or the courts. And the statutes that lawyers point to as the foundation of those powers were passed by the British Parliament. How can those laws affect us now?

They can't, he says. So all our laws and public institutions are bogus. We need a referendum at once to set up a new, righteous constitution.

I think Wishart is flat-out wrong, and so do the half-dozen constitutional lawyers I talked to about this. They include the two professors quoted by Wishart as lending his idea some support. Both told me they thought it was "bizarre."

The fatal flaw in Wishart's argument is in a dismissive little sentence in the middle of his article: "There are still lawyers who argue that international law has no domestic force."

Actually, there's barely a lawyer anywhere who will argue otherwise. It is a basic principle of international law that treaties do not become part of domestic law unless they are specifically incorporated into it. That is why the Treaty of Waitangi is not the supreme law of New Zealand.

International law is broken every day of the week by every country on Earth. Our ACC regulations, for example, breach international labour standards. Our censorship laws violate international free speech rules. That does not mean those laws have no force.

That is why the League of Nations covenant had no effect on our underlying legal arrangements. In 1920, no one doubted that our government's legal authority still derived from Britain, although we were happily and rightfully signing treaties on our own behalf.

We didn't arrive at nationhood through any revolution or grand declaration of independence. The courts have recognised that there was simply a gradual transfer of power from Britain.

In 1852, the British Parliament set up a colonial parliament here. In 1931, it gave us the option of becoming legally independent. In 1947, we took it. That meant we could amend any of the powers originally given to us by the Westminster Parliament. We were on our own.

It's a stretch to say that sovereignty isn't in the hands of the people. After all, we've had half a century of elections, any one of which could have been used by the people to change any part of our law or constitution. And we've done it - look at MMP, for example.

Whatever the constitutional potholes on the road to sovereignty, we have arrived, and virtually the whole country - and the whole world - recognises the government's legitimacy.

I can't see any reason in logic or law why our way of achieving sovereignty is any less legitimate than a bloody revolution or a bunch of rich slave-owners drawing up a declaration of independence.

Then again, maybe I'm part of the cover-up.

Comments: sxprice@hotmail.com