Editorial: Hidden danger of rule by poll

The thousands who joined the "march for democracy" in central Auckland yesterday were advancing two causes. The organisers of the so-called smacking referendum are outraged that the overwhelming support for their proposition has not resulted in immediate law change - the Prime Minister has said the law is "working well". But that anger has boiled over into a larger discontent. The agenda now is that the results of citizen-initiated referendums should be made binding - and the marchers yesterday want a referendum on that question.

Binding referendums are part of a process known as "direct democracy" - a phrase that sounds much better than it is. The very word democracy, after all, means "government by the people". What could be exceptionable about that? Well, plenty, actually. The idea that governance might be driven - as opposed to informed - by public vote remains problematic on several levels.

The constitutional problem was well expressed by former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer, who chairs the Legislation Advisory Committee. He has suggested a Government veto of the proposed vote - the referendum about referendums - for the reason that it contradicts the fundamental purpose of the 1993 Citizens Initiated Referenda Act. His remarks highlighted the ludicrousness of a non-binding referendum producing a result that required referendums to be binding and the even sillier idea that a referendum question could replace carefully drafted law.

Kiwi Party leader Larry Baldock, who is promoting the vote, accused the committee of "trying to shut down democracy" - a tellingly injudicious response, since Sir Geoffrey was simply pointing out the legal reality. If Baldock wants to pursue his agenda at all costs, including disregard for the rule of law, he may come to regret it.

In practical terms, the proposal for binding referendums is doubly flawed. Like the non-binding kind, they result in questions, worded by lobby groups, that are so heavily loaded as to render their answers meaningless. The most recent referendum question demonstrated this starkly: it was so misleading as to be deceptive, yet its wording had to be accepted since it satisfied the legal requirement of allowing a simple yes/no answer.

Binding referendums would simply magnify the potential for damage to good governance. Administrations trying to develop coherent public policy could easily have their hands tied by pre-emptive plebiscites. That's what's happened in California, where three decades of tax revolt, starting with the infamous Proposition 13 in 1978, have brought the state to the brink of bankruptcy. As the Economist has noted, it has "launched an entire industry of signature-gatherers and marketing strategists [who] circumscribe what representatives can do by deciding many policies directly".

But by far the most fundamental objection to the idea of binding referendums is philosophical. Baldock and his supporters may bristle at the use of the term "mob rule" but referendums are essentially anti-democratic since by their nature they reduce complicated questions to highly-charged binaries. At best, they are a way of letting off steam: a referendum that asked, for example, "Should the Government do more to protect children?" would be unlikely to attract a single "no" vote, but on the day after the votes were counted our kids would not be one jot safer. And where does it stop? Should we decide our own tax rates? The distribution of health or police spending? The cost of the sausage rolls at Bellamy's?

Among the luminaries trotted out at yesterday's march was Russian-born classical-pop singer Yulia, who referred to her poverty-stricken upbringing and invoked "the families who sacrificed their loved ones for our freedoms" as she implored the Government "to value the vote of its people". It was typical of the flamboyant but empty rhetoric that has characterised public debate on this matter. In fact plebiscites were favoured instruments of both Hitler and Mussolini, both skilled populists who used them to legitimise oppressive laws.

If our democracy has a problem, it is that governments value the vote of their people too much, making and spinning policy to maximise opinion-poll success and electoral advantage. The electorate gets the chance every three years to tell politicians what to do. Democracy more direct than that is a form of tyranny exerted by the vocal and it is not in the interests of good government.