Wednesday, November 19, 2008



It's official

John Key is now Prime Minister.

And while it was forced by circumstance - Government House is currently being renovated - I like the symbolism of the Governor-General going to Parliament to swear in the new Ministry, rather than them going to him. It gets things the right way round: Parliament is in charge, and the monarch's representative is merely a functionary who does the paperwork; it is the people, rather than the monarch, who make a government. Hopefully, when Government House is fixed, we'll continue doing things this way, rather than returning to the seventeenth-century charade which pretends that the monarch is still absolute, and that the opinion of her unelected representative matters any more than anyone else’s.