Parliamentary Sovereignty And Its Discontents.

Saving The People From ... The People: The strangest aspect of the mass Israeli protests, from a New Zealand perspective, is that the judicial reforms proposed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government would only confer upon Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, powers which the New Zealand House of Representatives has not only exercised for decades, but which have also been seen, by an overwhelming majority of Kiwi legislators, as critical to the health of New Zealand’s democracy.

BEGINNING IN LATE JANUARY, Israel has been rocked by a series of massive weekly protests against planned judicial reforms. Concentrated in Tel Aviv, Israel’s former capital and easily its most secular city, these protests have become increasingly disruptive. So much so that the far-right coalition government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, appears poised to suppress them by force. Political commentators in Israel have begun to speak of the protests as evidence of a fundamental disagreement over the core nature and purpose of the Israeli state. About the only thing both sides can agree on is that Israel cannot survive such deep-seated divisions.

The strangest aspect of the Israeli protests, from a New Zealand perspective, is that the judicial reforms proposed by Netanyahu’s government would only confer upon Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, powers which the New Zealand House of Representatives has not only exercised for decades, but which have also been seen, by an overwhelming majority of Kiwi legislators, as critical to the health of New Zealand’s democracy.

The problem which the judicial reforms proposed by Netanyahu and his far-right colleagues seek to address is the Israeli judiciary’s current power to restrain, or, in extremis, overrule, the actions of both the Israeli Executive and the Knesset. In other words, these reforms seek to confer upon the Knesset what New Zealand’s House of Representatives already possesses – and jealously guards – parliamentary sovereignty. Netanyahu wants the Knesset to become what our House of Representatives already is: the highest court in the land.

What makes this whole constitutional stoush even more interesting, from a Kiwi perspective, are the similarities between New Zealand and Israel. Neither country has a written constitution, preferring to be guided by a set of basic laws and rights. Israel and New Zealand also lack an upper-chamber empowered to initiate, review and delay legislation. This unicameral system gives the legislators of both countries the sole right to make the laws. Both countries also operate under an electoral system of proportional representation– although, to be fair, Israel has a much purer variant of PR than New Zealand’s MMP. Israeli MPs do not represent electorates, all Knesset seats are allocated from party lists. Israel’s representation “threshold” (the share of the popular vote that must be won before seats are allocated) is 1.5 percent, compared to New Zealand’s 5 percent.

Where the two legislatures diverge, however, is over the status of the law conferring fundamental human rights upon their respective citizens. Legislation and/or Executive Orders which contravene Israel’s “Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty” may be (and have been) struck down by Israel’s Supreme Court. The author of the “New Zealand Bill of Rights Act”, Labour’s Geoffrey Palmer, wanted New Zealand’s highest court to be invested with similar authority, but so deeply entrenched is the principle of parliamentary sovereignty in this country that he was unable to persuade his colleagues to confer such decisive constitutional powers upon New Zealand’s judges.

Apart from the very obvious objection that unelected judges should not be given the power to overrule the elected representatives of the people, New Zealand legislators’ refusal to countenance judicial intervention can be traced back to two deeply ingrained Kiwi prejudices.

The first is class hostility – a phenomenon intimately bound up with New Zealanders long-standing self-identification as egalitarians. Judges are (rightly) perceived by “ordinary” New Zealanders as being drawn overwhelmingly from the upper-echelons of New Zealand society. The objection to these “posh bastards” overruling a Parliament made up of “ordinary people” like themselves dates all the way back to the Liberal Government of 1891-1912 and its presiding populist master, Richard “King Dick” Seddon. The rise of the Labour Party and the growing parliamentary strength of its working-class caucus only dug the anti-posh prejudice deeper into the nation’s collective political psyche.

The second factor is racial hostility. Repeated attempts by dispossessed Māori Iwi to seek redress through the New Zealand courts, though mostly unsuccessful, planted in the minds of Pakeha legislators the necessity of preserving Parliament’s privileged status vis-à-vis the Judiciary. The idea that the achievements (and the depredations) of the “Settler State” might one day be found wanting by the courts, aroused the most atavistic fears among Pakeha politicians of every ideological persuasion. What had been won by the gun, must never be reclaimed by the gavel.

Just how animated this racial rationale for parliamentary sovereignty remains was demonstrated very forcefully by the House of Representatives’ reaction to the Court of Appeal’s 2004 judgement on the foreshore and seabed. Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark, and her Attorney-General, Margaret Wilson, lost little time in reminding Māori, and the Judiciary, exactly who controls New Zealand.

The bloody circumstances of the State of Israel’s birth in 1948, and the mutually hostile ideological and religious groups that assisted it, encouraged Israel’s legislators to deny their parliamentary opponents the opportunity – albeit at some distant point in the future – to transform their narrow vision of Israel into law. The Basic Law relating to human dignity and liberty was, therefore, to be interpreted and enforced by a highly-qualified and non-partisan Judiciary. That way, no party, or collection of parties, commanding a temporary Knesset majority would be able to legislate their way into a position of permanent dominance.

The wise old Socialist-Zionists who founded Israel were only too aware of how quickly extremist minorities can become proscriptive majorities. They understood that the Israeli Supreme Court’s gavel was their best protection against the extreme Zionists’ legislative guns.

Unsurprisingly, young, well-educated, and increasingly secular Israelis are terrified by the plans of Netanyahu (himself under indictment for corruption by Israel’s courts) and his far-right allies to recreate in Israel the soft authoritarianism perfected by Hungary’s Viktor Orban. They are only too aware that moves to limit the authority and independence of the courts are proof positive that the shift to “illiberal democracy” has begun. The moment the defence of human dignity and liberty is placed in the hands of a temporary parliamentary majority of religious and nationalist extremists, there can be little doubt that neither principle has long to live.

Nor is it any longer an axiom that New Zealand parliamentarians are united in their determination to preserve the House of Representatives as New Zealand’s highest court. With so few MPs now drawn from working-class backgrounds, and so many of them in possession of legal qualifications, the possibility of the House being over-run by passionate, marginalised, justice-seeking populists from the wrong side of the tracks has ceased to be the progressive prospect it used to be. What might such a mob, unconstrained by a written constitution, an upper-house, an interventionist Judiciary, or even a progressive ideology, not descend to?

Members of Parliament who looked down with horror upon the fiery violence unleashed in Parliament Grounds by the great unwashed on 2 March 2022, and contemplating the possibility that people only marginally less extreme could one day constitute a majority in the House of Representatives, might be forgiven for shifting their gaze across Molesworth Street to the Supreme Court building, and whispering: “Why not?”

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 13 March 2023.

Ominous Similarities.

Extremism Consumes Itself: The plot of “Act of Oblivion” concerns the relentless pursuit of the “regicides” Edward Whalley and William Goffe – two of the fifty-nine signatories to King Charles I’s death warrant. As with his many other works of historical fiction, Robert Harris’s novel brings to life a period that is at once starkly alien but also curiously familiar to our own.

ROBERT HARRIS’S LATEST NOVEL, “Act of Oblivion” is a welcome reminder of fanaticism’s terrifying aptitude for extinguishing human happiness. By recalling that period in English history when God was taken seriously enough to die and kill for, it also serves as a timely check upon our readiness to condemn the excesses of contemporary religious bigotry.

The plot of “Act of Oblivion” concerns the relentless pursuit of the “regicides” Edward Whalley and William Goffe – two of the fifty-nine signatories to King Charles I’s death warrant. As with his many other works of historical fiction, Harris’s novel brings to life a period that is at once starkly alien but also curiously familiar to our own.

Whalley and Goffe were colonels in Oliver Cromwell’s “New Model Army” – a fearsome body of righteous killers that might best be thought of as the Taliban in breastplates. Both men were what their contemporaries called “Puritans” – standard-bearers for a radical Protestantism that sought to strip away from Christian practice all oppressive hierarchies and unnecessary rituals, until only the purified encounter between God and the sinner remained.

Fanaticism was more-or-less built into Puritanism. So much religious falsity was said to have been interposed between the simple Christian seeker and his Bible, and for such base and nefarious purposes, that clearing the path to glory struck the Puritan-in-arms as an inescapable duty. Not the Church of England, not the Roman Catholic Church (whose doctrines and practices were thought to skulk beneath the Anglican Bishops’ surplices) not even the King of England, after years of civil war, could be permitted to go on corrupting and obstructing the path to salvation. Not if these New Model Puritans had any say in the matter.

And for the eleven years of the English republic – dubbed the “Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland” by Cromwell, its “Lord Protector” – they did have a say. In their zeal, the Puritans shut down the brothels and the theatres, and cut down the “pagan” maypoles standing erect over a multitude of English village greens. Not even Christmas – similarly denounced as an excuse for pagan revelry – escaped the attentions of the Puritan Parliament’s censorious legislators. Under the Commonwealth, celebrating Christmas became a crime.

Today, those evincing such unyielding determination to do good would be described as “Woke”. The comparison is far from original. No less a luminary than the English historian, David Starkey, has noted the rather ominous similarities between the Sixteenth Century’s Protestant Reformation (of which Puritanism was but one radical evolution) and the “Woke Revolution” of the Twenty-First.

Both movements were born out of game-changing technological innovation. The Protestants’ progenitor was the printing-press, the Woke communicate via the Internet. If the Reformation was the inevitable corollary to the emancipatory impulses of the Renaissance, then Wokeism is the heir of the counter-cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 70s.

In both cases, the movements’ intellectual trajectories trace a course from moderation to extremism; liberation to forced conversion. Once accepted as righteous and true by its followers, any system of religious, moral and/or political thought will be refined and intensified to the point where the idea of the rest of humanity continuing to languish in moral and political ignorance becomes intolerable. Those dwelling in darkness must be made to see the light. Those who wilfully reject the enlightenment of the righteous deserve only punishment.

The danger arises when religious and political fanaticism acquires arms. Christianity found the Emperor Constantine and his legions. The Puritans did not so much find as construct their New Model Army. The Bolsheviks enrolled the armed deserters fleeing the Russian Czar’s broken armies.

The Woke have yet to find their army – but they are close.

Like the English Puritans of the 1630s and 40s, the Woke of the 2020s are to be found embedded in the nation’s most powerful political, legal, commercial and intellectual institutions. They are determined and ingenious promoters of their cause, and a significant fraction of the means of communication is under their control. All they need is an antagonist to match the folly of Charles I – someone to deliver them the key to the arsenal.

But, as Robert Harris’s latest novel makes clear, fanaticism burns too brightly to long endure. It also conjures up its own nemesis. For every fanatical action, there is an equal and opposite fanatical reaction.

Extremism consumes itself.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 January 2023.

The Royal Commission Report: Staying Safely Inside “The Norms” Of Our Neoliberal Society.

Keeping It Normal: If we are going define extremism in relation to a society’s “norms”, then we will discover very quickly that we have signed-up for an extremely moveable feast!

THERE’S SOMETHING a bit creepy about the Royal Commission’s report into the Christchurch attacks. That an agenda is at work throughout the document is incontrovertible – and it goes well beyond simply uncovering, describing and learning lessons from the actions that led to the tragedy of Friday,15 March 2019. It’s an agenda dedicated to the monitoring, management and eventual eradication of an entire way of thinking about the world. The “far-right extremist” way of thinking.

Now, I’m quite sure there a plenty of people on the Left who would say: “And what’s wrong with that?” They would point to the mountains of skulls piled up by the Far-Right over the past two centuries and demand to know why the world would not be a better place without these awful ideas and their political executors. But measuring the height of skull mountains is a mug’s game – especially when you’re on the Left. The bone-piles of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong put Adolf Hitler’s to shame!

To which many on the Left would respond by asserting that Stalin and Mao weren’t actually of the Left, they were totalitarians – a very different beast altogether. Possibly. I would argue that the argument, at its heart, is all about how tolerant you are of people whose ideas contradict your own in a fundamental way.

Even the Royal Commissioners got this: stating, in their definition of political extremism, that:

“Extremism is generally understood as a belief system underpinned by rigid and uncompromising beliefs outside the norm of a society. In the case of New Zealand this might be by rejecting democracy, the rule of law and human rights. Extremism can have different ideological underpinnings and manifest in a number of ways. Central to extremist belief systems is a desire to bring about change and overhaul the political, social or religious environment to conform to the person’s or group’s idealised vision of society.”

That unwillingness to compromise is critical. Rigidity, too, is a key aspect of the extremist personality. Certainly, it’s pretty hard to argue that Stalin, Mao and Hitler weren’t rigid and uncompromising political leaders. That said, there are elements of the Commissioners’ definition that are deeply problematic.

The most obvious of these is the phrase “outside the norm of a society”. What, precisely, do they mean by that rather extraordinary statement?

Society’s “norms” have a nasty habit of changing. In 2020, anyone advocating the incarceration of homosexuals, or their detention in a mental health facility, would be branded a homophobic extremist. A century ago, however, they would be guilty of nothing more than reiterating “the norm of a society”.

In 2020, a left-wing activist calling for the “socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange” would be dismissed as an eccentric ideological throwback to a bygone era. Seventy years ago, however, such a person would have been viewed as a potential threat to national security.

If we are going define extremism in relation to a society’s “norms”, then we will discover very quickly that we have signed-up for an extremely moveable feast!

To illustrate the downright sneaky character of the Commission’s definition, let’s apply it to neoliberalism’s conquest of New Zealand in the mid-1980s. The policies introduced by Labour’s “free marketeers” were indisputably outside the norms of New Zealand society. Given the “top-down” manner of its imposition, one could even argue that “Rogernomics” amounted to a rejection of democracy, the rule of law and human-rights. Certainly, the true intentions of its proponents were not communicated to the electorate in the run-up to the 1984 general election. In 1987, Labour dispensed with a manifesto altogether!

It is also indisputable that neoliberalism’s advocates and defenders evinced a rigidity of mind and an unwillingness to compromise that was entirely consistent with the Commission’s definition of extremism. Also present in the neoliberal mindset was a very strong desire to bring about change and to overhaul their country’s economic, social and political environment in comformity with the neoliberal ideology’s “idealised vision of society”.

Thirty-five years on, however, the authors of the Royal Commission’s report would have utterly discredited themselves if they had described neoliberalism as an extremist ideology. If challenged on this point, they would simply argue that neoliberalism is now accepted as “the norm of [our] society”.

And therein lies the problem.

One hundred years ago, what the Commission now describes as “far-right extremism” was the norm of New Zealand society. White supremacy was in evidence across the entire face of the planet: indeed, it underpinned, both morally and politically, the grossly exploitative economic policies of the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese and American empires. New Zealand children educated in the 1920s, 30s and 40s were taught that Maori and Europeans were “brothers under the skin” – members-in-good-standing of the same Aryan race. Many of those children are still alive today. Over the course of a century they have gone from being perfectly “normal” New Zealand schoolchildren, to the hapless victims of far-right extremism.

This is the inconvenient truth the Royal Commission Report is so keen to consign to George Orwell’s “memory hole”. That the consciousness of constant historical change should encourage extreme caution when determining what is, and what is not, “extremism”. The consciousness that resists instinctively the totalitarian impulse to erase all memory of those moments in time when the current “norms” of society weren’t in the least bit normal. The impulse which seeks to eradicate all perspectives but the totalitarian’s own. An outcome that can only be successfully imposed by force and fear.

A wiser Royal Commission, rather than fetishizing the social and ideological milieu which spawned Brenton Tarrant, would have looked more closely at the historical causes of his crime. It would have recalled a New Zealand in which established working-class communities (especially Maori working-class communities) were torn to pieces by the ideology of free market fundamentalism. A country in which the social pathologies of poverty and marginalisation grew steadily worse. It would have counted the casualties.

A wiser Royal Commission would also have questioned the bi-partisan political commitment that took the bi-cultural Aotearoa which was just beginning to emerge in the 1980s, and turned it into a multicultural “Asian nation” (as Jim Bolger memorably characterised New Zealand) without the slightest attempt, on the part of either Labour or National, to secure a popular mandate for such a wrenching demographic transformation.

A wiser Royal Commission might have gone in search of the people who opened the nation’s borders – recklessly setting-up burgeoning communities of new immigrants as targets for populist wrath. The people who provided the “context” for Tarrant’s exterminationist hatred.

Ah, yes, but that sort of Royal Commission would have ended up training its sights on a very different kind of right-wing politics – wouldn’t it? A politics defended by extremists a whole lot better resourced and infinitely more powerful than a handful of bewildered ethno-nationalist malcontents.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 19 December 2020.