MPs pass the buck to public
There is a question you can expect to hear a lot next year. Should the plural of referendum be referenda or referendums? The former option is the correct one but the latter is catching on, especially in the media. That may be the least consequential question to arise in 2020, the year of referendums. A public vote on whether euthanasia should be legal is likely to be put to the public at the next general election, rather than resolved by Parliament’s 120 MPs, following a 63 to 57 vote on Wednesday. It joins a referendum on the legalisation of cannabis. The no-less-contentious issue of abortion law reform threatened to become yet another referendum question but is now likely to be a conscience vote for MPs.
This is a crowded menu of hotly disputed moral and social issues. The danger for the Government is that its attempts to explain a first term that has so far failed to dazzle the wider voting public will be drowned out by conservative lobbyists and singleissue interest groups, as well as a National opposition embracing a populist mode and an NZ First that will be desperate to amplify differences between itself and Labour.
Will the more boring but important stuff even get a look in? And will the nuances of cannabis law reform be lost in the heat of the discussion?
NZ First insisted on a binding referendum for David Seymour’s End of Life Choice Bill, arguing ‘‘the public is well capable of deciding what the important moral issues are’’, as party leader Winston Peters told RNZ. Peters doesn’t believe ‘‘120 temporarily empowered MPs are betterinformed than the public’’.
No-one could accuse Peters of being temporarily empowered but there is a serious underside to his statement. Referendums may appeal in a shallow way to a sector of the public that believes democracy shuts them out or that politicians are out-of-touch elitists, but more persuasive arguments tell us putting big moral questions before the public rather than well-informed MPs is an abdication of the latter’s role. In short, they are paid – and empowered – to make such decisions on our behalf rather than pass the big questions back to us.
‘‘Public opinion can be volatile and easily manipulated,’’ as Jonathan Boston, professor of public policy in the School of Government at Victoria University, has written in relation to the use of referendums. The debate about cannabis law reform has already featured a degree of misinformation, which will surely ramp up in 2020. Overseas, the Brexit story is the highest-profile recent example of what can happen to a long-promised public vote when misinformation takes over. MPs are, or should be, more adept than the general public at sifting through misinformation and exaggeration.
Boston has explained that the constitutional case is more compelling than the democratic case when it comes to using referendums. This means referendums are a good way to make decisions about constitutional matters that affect MPs – the 1993 MMP referendum was a good example. But policy issues are ‘‘complex and multifaceted’’ and ‘‘cannot be reduced to a simple binary question or even a series of binary questions’’.
Yet two important moral questions will be resolved in such a way in New Zealand in 2020. The only thing we can be certain about is that it will not be a normal year in politics.
The danger for the Government is that its attempts to explain a first term that has so far failed to dazzle ... will be drowned out by conservative lobbyists and single-issue interest groups ...