Democracy...?

Some clown is now organising a Citizens Initiated Referendum which would attempt to require the government to enact anything decided in a Citizens Initiated Referendum. These people are hugely frustrated because they think if a “majority” has spoken in a CIR (eg, recently, to satisfy the apparent need of some parents to hit children) the government then ought to have no option but to implement it. This is what these odd people call democracy, and they are frothing at the mouth because the government seems normally to ignore the results of CIRs. I never cease to give thanks that they do.

Heaven help us all when naive idealists ever get their way. New Zealand has a representative democracy. We have only to look to Fiji to see what happens if this ever gets set to one side. Representative democracy means that we regularly and in an orderly manner elect people to decide important matters on our behalf. If we don’t like the people elected, we seek to change our representatives at the right time. If we want them to decide things our way, we lobby them and try to persuade them. This system has very real weaknesses, and it is generally inadvisable to listen in on parliament and their behaviour – but some good work still gets done, it seems to me.

I would be inclined to cancel the right to CIRs, as the waste of time and money they inevitably are, and urge the government to pay more careful attention to serious petitions. If outfits such as Family First want the government to do something, they should persuade by the force of their argument and data. It seems to me so utterly typical of right-wing pharisees that they instead seek to legislate and coerce.

Winston Churchill once said something very clever but wise about how no one in their right mind would support representative democracy, until they have surveyed the alternatives. (My own faith in representative democracy is regularly shaken when it generates someone like Rodney Hide – whereas Hone Harawira seems to me a national treasure.)