Fran O'Sullivan: Pushing back a steamroller

COMMENT

The Business Roundtable is taking an activist approach in trying to preserve New Zealanders' rights of appeal to the Privy Council.

The Roundtable's Roger Kerr, Business New Zealand's Simon Carlaw, Federated Farmers' Tony St Clair, Diana Pryde of the Accountants Institute and Paul Morgan from the Federation of Maori Authorities last week combined forces to try to defeat Attorney-General Margaret Wilson's latest constitutional steamroller.

The group launched an appeal to United Future's Peter Dunne, asking him to ensure his party opposes the move to deny New Zealand access to the Privy Council "unless it is endorsed by a public referendum".

A parliamentary select committee has failed to reach a consensus on legislation to establish a Supreme Court as the final court of appeal within New Zealand.

Roundtable analysis of submissions to that committee showed the vast majority of representative organisations affected by the plan were against it.

Neatly putting Dunne on the spot, the five players pointed out United Future had emphasised its pro-growth and pro-business attitudes.

"We fear that the proposed replacement for the Privy Council could easily become stacked with politically appointed judges lacking in commercial expertise," they said.

It was up to Dunne to vote in the interests of growth and stability and oppose the legislation.

The Roundtable-orchestrated campaign is a neat example of how much clout New Zealand's business organisations could muster if they chose to work together more often, rather than play to sectional agendas.

But the difficulty for business and Maori groups is that this is a slow-burner issue.

Abolition of the right to appeal to the Privy Council was not a major issue at last year's election, but Labour did warn it was on its second-term agenda.

Tucked away in Labour's justice policy was this sentence: "Labour will establish a final court of appeal in New Zealand to improve access to the appeal system and ensure that decisions are relevant in the New Zealand context."

So Labour claims legitimacy for this radical shift, despite the fact that it was not elected on a single-issue platform.

It is worth recapping some of Labour's history here.

During the 1990s, Labour's high priestesses (and priests) took the party through a ritual repudiation of its 1980s economic reform agenda.

Helen Clark - installed as Opposition leader after Mike Moore was ousted following the 1993 election failure - gradually transformed her "so dry she's combustible" image (the description belongs to former Labour Prime Minister David Lange) to that of a centre-left leader.

Much of Clark's imagery was a straight steal from New Labour's Tony Blair, who swept the British Conservatives from power and provided New Zealand Labour with a steady stream of electioneering gimmicks to copy.

The famous "credit card" pledge, on which Clark detailed seven categorical policy pledges her Government would implement on achieving power at the 1999 election, was just one visible example.

Supporters who had cried that Labour in the 1980s "went too far" were mollified.

The Clark Labour Government performed a "nip and tuck" operation to modify Sir Roger Douglas' reform policies, particularly in taxation and employment.

But much of this is for domestic consumption.

On the international arena, Labour presents a much more sophisticated face.

Labour's hierarchy now operates a "Government at home" and "Government away" syndrome on economic issues.

Nowhere is this more apparent than at multilateral forums such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Trade Organisation.

In each of these forums, Labour ministers - or their senior public servants - present New Zealand as a model open economy, making a virtue of the Reserve Bank Act, trade liberalisation policies and flexible labour markets which 1980s Labour introduced.

There are few caveats placed on that period other than a ritual nod that "Labour may have gone too far or too fast" or "the reforms had been poorly sequenced".

But if the Labour Government retails for domestic consumption the fundamental belief that its predecessors acted hastily and trampled over citizens' rights in their haste to reform the economy, why are ministers so anxious to go down a similar route with something as fundamental as the right to appeal to the Privy Council?

If the abolition is rammed through - which seems likely - it will not be the first fundamental change with profound constitutional implications which this Government has steamrollered through against opposition from credible parts of the New Zealand community.

The first major change was to fundamentally reconstitute New Zealand's defence policies by converting the armed forces into peacekeepers and reducing the capability of both the Air Force and Navy.

Labour claimed legitimacy for this switch rested on the findings of a parliamentary select committee. But the committee had been heavily lobbied by the Army and its report was not unanimous.

Despite September 11, the policy has not been revisited. Yet arguably defence of the nation and its citizens is a government's first obligation.

That obligation extends to legal protections.

When such a large number of business organisations and Maori groups are saying "no" to the abolition of the Privy Council, the message is crystal clear.

Change course or be condemned for following your predecessors' path.