David Cormack
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Kill referenda with fire
🕑 Added 2020-11-15 00:02:32 +0000 UTCI recently did an interview with The Detail podcast. The main premise was whether Labour was wasting its mandate and why the Prime Minister kept strait-jacketing the Government with her statements on ruling things out.
In the last month or so she's ruled out meaningful cannabis reform, a wealth tax, and then the other day increasing benefits before Christmas. And she's famously ruled out a Capital Gains Tax.
These are all things I'd like.
As Emile and I talked, we got on to the idea of whether a Government should lead the people or reflect its will. In theory the Government should lead the people. Because reflecting the will of the people leads you to a tricky place where you have to define "the will of the people".
The cannabis referendum is a case in point, more than 50% of those who voted did so against the legalisation of cannabis, but for most of those people the cannabis laws wouldn't negatively impact them, so there was not much to be gained for them personally by a change.
If you look at the Māori electorates' cannabis referendum results you'll see that all of them voted in favour. This is because the cannabis laws in this country are racist and disproportionately have a negative impact on Māori. But Māori only make up 16.5% of New Zealand's population so they ran headfirst into the tyranny of the majority.
Most empirical evidence supports cannabis legalisation for a wide array of reasons, but put to a vote of the people and it failed to get over 50% (as an aside, Oregon in the United States recently voted to decriminalise all drugs, yes even meth).
We do not elect Parliaments to then have decisions turned back over to us. there should be no referenda for anything barring constitutional matters, like our form of electing representatives - the MMP referendum - or the length of terms, etc.
For issues like cannabis, euthanasia, abortion, Brexit etc, we elect these goddamn people to do the goddamn work to make the goddamn decisions for us. That's the whole point of a representative democracy.
Most of us do not have the time to research each issue carefully. Politicians have the opportunity to hear from experts far more often than we do, and from those scientists, scholars, whatever, they should make their mind up which way to vote.
The Green Party fucked it up by having a cannabis referendum in its confidence and supply agreement with Labour last term. What that has done is set back meaningful drug reform a decade or so.
Brexit is such a great example of the perils of a referendum. 52-48. That was the percentage of people who voted in favour of Brexit, and now the overwhelming majority of the UK's citizens will be objectively worse off as a result. That was the Government reflecting the will of the majority of the people. It certainly wasn't the Government leading in any meaningful way.
A good example of the Government leading and defying the "will of the people" was John Key's response to the Citizen's Initiated Referendum of smacking your kids. That got 87% of people saying it shouldn't be illegal to smack your kids, Key went "cool story guys, I'll totally look in to that". And then left the last as it was.
People didn't punish him at the ballot box, people came to realise that smacking your kids was a bad thing and so now we just don't tolerate it.
So come on Labour. You are the entire Government. You got over 50% of the country voting for you. For fuck's sake do some leading.
Comments
David Cormack
Umm did you read this paragraph: "The Green Party fucked it up by having a cannabis referendum in its confidence and supply agreement with Labour last term. What that has done is set back meaningful drug reform a decade or so."
Joe Stockman
I greatly enjoy how you mange to blame Labour when it was a Green call to have a referendum. Either you believe that referenda are the way to go or you don't - but don't try to bulldoze the blame off the Greens' doorstep for using the wrong mechanism
Beckie Alexander
Agree 100%. The main reason I didnt vote for Labour was them ruling out so many things like substantial benefit increases, CGT, wealth tax etc. Zero progressiveness alongside conservatism.
