Friday, November 12, 2004



Cultural cringe

SageNZ on the Supreme Court:

The very recent evidence of the Labour party in constitutional change is appalling. Margaret Wilson and cronies abandoned our highest court and 800 years of judicial interpretation in favour of stacking the judges in the pipeline to the NZ supreme court with her politically correct appointees.

I challenge anyone to explain how it is better for New Zealand to have lost the link to the European courts of Justice through the English privy council. whilst my opinions of their pronouncements on indivdual matters may reflect a contempt for their sometimes nauseating bias, it is a larger body of law that a country of four million people shguld have thought longer and harder about abandoning. The laws governing 400 million people require a level of judicial expertise and specialisation that it is just not possible for our country to access. Dropping the appeal to the privy council was a matter of petty nationalist self aggrandisement.

Behind the reverence for traditional authority (which is quite strange coming from someone who thinks that government should be starved of revenue, preventing it from actually doing anything) there is something else: an enormous cultural cringe. New Zealanders, it seems, are simply too stupid and ignorant to be able to interpret our own laws properly; instead, we must go offshore. It's an embarassingly colonial attitude, and one that I am hoping the Supreme Court will eradicate.

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