Campbell: System stacked against Baldock petition
System stacked against Baldock
petition
Kiwi Party
leader Larry Baldock made a good point on RNZ this morning
about the unfair hurdles facing anyone who wants to bring a
Citizens Initiated Referendum in this country. Yesterday,
the organisers of the petition for a referendum against the
child discipline law were adjudged to be at least 15,000
short of the required threshold of 285,027 signatures.
Among the list of Baldock’s complaints was that
this threshold is set too high. He’s right. As Dr John
Parkinson of Britain’s York University explains in his comparative study of ‘Direct
Democracy’ measures, the New Zealand hurdle is very high
by world standards – the valid signatures of some 10 per
cent of registered voters need to be gathered within a
calendar year, with two month extensions. Since 285,027 is
the Clerk of Parliament’s threshold, this means
Baldock’s petition needed to gather 781 signatures a day,
every day, for a year. “Even well funded initiatives such
as the NZ Flag campaign,” Parkinson observes, “managed
barely a third of that in 2004/05.”
Compare the New
Zealand situation with Switzerland, which gives campaigners
18 months to gather 100,000 signatures - or just 1.75% of
registered voters, at a rate of only 182 a day. On the other
hand, Baldock may care to rethink his enthusiasm for
California’s citizens measures. The threshold for statute
initiatives may be only 5% of voters registered for the
previous gubernatorial elections, but these must be gathered
in just 150 days, at a rate of 2,492 a day – and while
the result is binding, such statutes can be ( and regularly
are) struck down subsequently by the courts on
constitutional grounds.
Even if Baldock gets an extra
15,000 valid signatures over the next two months, there is a
further way the petitioners could possibly be frustrated. As
Parkinson says, the vote on a CIR in New Zealand has to be
held within a year of a successful petition being presented
to Parliament - unless 75 % of MPs vote to defer it. In May
last year, the Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment
Bill passed by a vote of 113 to 7, a 93 percent margin in a
House of 121 MPs. In other words, the petition measure could
easily be deferred if Parliament had a mind to do so –
say, at least until the review promised by the original
legislation is carried out in 2009.
One reason the
MPs could cite for deferring the petition would be cost. A
valid petition has to be put to a public vote within a year
– which leaves the option of it being run in conjunction
with this year’s general election, or separately. The 1994
firefighters petition was not held in conjunction with
another referendum on crime election, had an extremely low
turnout and cost $10 million to run( source : Jenny Shipley
quote, in the Dominion, 18 December 1998). IF Parliament
wants to guarantee a low turnout (on this non-binding
measure) and thus an added reason to ignore the result, it
could choose to run the referendum outside the election
process.
However, if it wants to get things over with
and save money, it could run the poll at election time this
year. In 1999, two separate CIRs were held in conjunction
with the general election, at a combined cost of $355,000.
(source : Dominion 26 November, 1999).
It seems
unlikely that Parliament would want to risk the undemocratic
appearance of voting to defer – no matter that it would
plainly be reasonable to wait until the promised review has
taken place. Ironically - given the origins of the
legislation Baldock opposes – he might now require a
friendly MP to sponsor a private members bill to lower the
unfair threshold for CIRs. Because when you put the current
requirement alongside the equally unfair 5 % party vote
threshold for representation under MMP, the system is
patently skewed. It goes to show that politicians should
not be entrusted with setting the rules for how the checks
– or the cheques – are written on how democracy should
operate.
ENDS