REFORM OF N.Z. LEGISLATURE

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28259, 23 April 1957, Page 14

REFORM OF N.Z. LEGISLATURE

Comment By “The

Times”

(Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.) LONDON, April 21.

The formation of a Legislature Reform League in New Zealand shows that after seven years of single-chamber government there is still anxiety about the danger of hasty legislation, says “The Times” in a leading article. The declared object of the league is to put pressure on the Government to redeem its election pledges of 1949 providing constitutional safeguards during the absence of a second chamber, it says.

“Mr Holland’s Administration will no doubt reply they already have done a great deal in the way of safeguards with the passing at the end of last year of the Electoral Act, which is designed to check any totalitarian-minded party from making hay of the Constitution as soon as it got a majority,” says “The Times.” “So long as its provisions remain entrenched (to adopt a term from the Union of South Africa) a would-be dictator in New Zealand would find it almost impossible to treat Parliament as Hitler treated the Reichstag. “The question, however, that immediately presents itself is: How effective is the entrenchment?” It has indeed been asked in New Zealand, and the AttorneyGeneral acknowledged in debates on the Bill, that the Act could be repealed at any time by the same simple majority that passed it. Until 1947, New Zealand was content to leave certain powers of constitutional amendment to the Parliament at Westminster to be exercised only as her only Parliament might request; but this system was abolished in 1947. Consequently a New Zealand Parliament is now under the disability that is innate in every sovereign legislature: it cannot bind its successors.

“One of the most intractable of all problems of jurisprudence is how, under Parliamentary sovereignty, to give greater security to 'constitutional’ than to other laws,” adds “The Times.” “In New Zealand the Government cannot disguise the fact that the Electoral Act can exert chiefly a moral restraint. Real restraints lie elsewhere. They are the vigilance of the electorate.”