THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, DECEMBER 6, 1947. TOWARDS A CONSTITUTION?

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26637, 6 December 1947, Page 6

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, DECEMBER 6, 1947. TOWARDS A CONSTITUTION?

The passage through (he British Parliament of the New Zealand Constitution (Amendment) Act is the closing paragraph in the story of New Zealand’s rise to nationhood. Yet the measure may seem mainly of academic interest, for the freedom granted—the freedom of the Government of New Zealand, as Lord Addison put it, to amend the New Zealand Constitution according to its own wishes—was already in effect enjoyed. A more vital question, perhaps, is what this Constitution is. Broadly speaking, it is the quintessence of the laws by which this country is governed—of the laws of the Mother of Parliaments and of the Parliament of New Zealand. To interpret these laws as a whole is beyond jurisprudence or statesmanship. Their interpretation in a particular instance could baffle any jurist, and certainly his ruling,, if given* need not unduly perturb a Government bent upon an “ unconstitutional ” course of action. Here is a problem nWie the less real because in its most acute form—a challenge by Government of the democratic way of life—it has not manifested itself in a positive form since the Dominion was created. The possibility that an occasion should arise in which a Government would be prepared to take measures inimical to the good of the State, and against the wishes of the people, exists. In these uncertain times, when ideologies that are the antithesis of democracy inflame great sectors of the world, and Governments bent upon socialisation move by sweeping laws to tamper with individual liberties and infringe the laws of property, it can be ignored only at peril.

Between such a Government in New Zealand and its aims stands only the diminished figure of the Governor-General, the King’s personal representative. Ideally, his charge is to assure that the “ daily conduct of the Government ” is in harmony with the feelings and judgment of the people. Lacking a testing case, it is impossible to determine whether this function could be discharged in certain circumstances. If it could not; then the Government would make itself absolute, and between such absolutism and a dictatorship the line is so finely drawn that it might well become invisible. The truth to-day appears to be that New Zealand lacks an effective Constitution, that is, a body of fundamental, unalterable. law against which even the Government cannot transgress. And it must be realised by any who have studied the matter that New Zealand, like the other self-governing nations' of the Commonwealth, lacks the historical consciousness of those rights and liberties that the people of Great Britain, having won them over the centuries, treasure so jealously. An imported tradition of constitutional freedom is a weaker and poorer thing than a tradition that has grown into the very marrow and bones of a people. New Zealand now clearly has the right to frame her own Constitution; it is a question whether successive Governments should be left with the licence to build and amend and, possibly, to corrupt an unwritten Constitution at their pleasure. The difficulties in the way of framing a written Constitution—a basic code which would make inviolate the rights, liberties and privileges of the individual —would admittedly be immense, yet this is a question that should be considered both by the Legislature and the people. New Zealanders should, as an approach to the matter, remind themselves that they possess no rights to-day that could ‘not be filched from them by a bare majority in Parliament.