A referendum on Te Tiriti o Waitangi would be corrosive and unfair, writes Dame Anne Salmond, but there is room for a new government to initiate a mana-enhancing inquiry into recent interpretations of the treaty
It doesn’t have to be about the public being dumb, just that the public doesn’t have the time/inclination to engage fully with complex political issues that don’t really affect their life. People might also be happy to vote for something to reduce minor inconvenience or cost to themselves, that has massively detrimental affects on others.
As a thought experiment: should we allow a referendum on whether a majority ethnic group should be allowed to enslave a minority ethnic group? If most people voted purely on their own interests, that referendum could be won by the majority, even though it would infringe on human rights. Obviously, that’s an extreme example, but the point is not everything should go to referendum.
Not everything, but when you propose giving a huge amount of control and influence to an unelected group of people, based on some very tenuous reasoning, I think the public deserves a say.
The most common reasons given for co-governance are, first, that water is Taonga and as a result Maori should have some control over it. This holds true for our natural waterways, a number of which do have a co governance aspect to their governance, but applying this logic to man made infrastructure is simply nonsense
The second is that a lot of land was stolen from Maori. While a decent amount of it was, the vast majority of land in NZ was legitimately acquired. Despite this fact, some people seem to think this means we should have a co governance arrangement over our water infrastructure, which just makes absolutely no sense to me.
A large chunk of NZ aren’t happy about this, and would like to express their feelings in a democratic way, and I think they deserve to.
It doesn’t have to be about the public being dumb, just that the public doesn’t have the time/inclination to engage fully with complex political issues that don’t really affect their life. People might also be happy to vote for something to reduce minor inconvenience or cost to themselves, that has massively detrimental affects on others.
As a thought experiment: should we allow a referendum on whether a majority ethnic group should be allowed to enslave a minority ethnic group? If most people voted purely on their own interests, that referendum could be won by the majority, even though it would infringe on human rights. Obviously, that’s an extreme example, but the point is not everything should go to referendum.
Not everything, but when you propose giving a huge amount of control and influence to an unelected group of people, based on some very tenuous reasoning, I think the public deserves a say.
The most common reasons given for co-governance are, first, that water is Taonga and as a result Maori should have some control over it. This holds true for our natural waterways, a number of which do have a co governance aspect to their governance, but applying this logic to man made infrastructure is simply nonsense
The second is that a lot of land was stolen from Maori. While a decent amount of it was, the vast majority of land in NZ was legitimately acquired. Despite this fact, some people seem to think this means we should have a co governance arrangement over our water infrastructure, which just makes absolutely no sense to me.
A large chunk of NZ aren’t happy about this, and would like to express their feelings in a democratic way, and I think they deserve to.