Only Switzerland has held referendum on abortion

Press, 22 December 1978, Page 14

Only Switzerland has held referendum on abortion

Washington

If New Zealand ever holds a referendum on abortion it will be in an unusual position internationally. A new study published in Washington reveals that outside Switzerland no country in the world has held ’ a Nation-wide referendum on abortion. In its manifesto for the General Election last month, the Labour Party promised referendum on the controverial Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Bill, if it were elected. David Butler and Austin Ranney, editors of “Referendums: A Comparative Study of Practice and Theory, say that everywhere the great moral issues seem, by general consent, to have been avoided. Internationally the subject of referendums had been over whelmingly constitutional, with territorial issues next.

“Referendums” is published by the Washington 3 based American Enterprise Institute, a non-profit, non-partisan group specialising in public policy research. Mr Butler, a noted British political scientist, is a fellow of Nuttfield ColOxford University, and the 8.8.C.'s leading elections analyst. Mr Ranney, a resident scholar of the A.E.I. is codirector of the institute’s programme on political and social processes.

Their study, which contains contributed chapters on various countries (but not New Zealand), says that most referendums in most democratic countries

are held because governments wish to avoid or make legitimate difficult decisions.

“Governments have been reluctant to settle issues on which they are themselves divided.” Messrs Butler and Ranney say. “They have wanted to avoid responsibility for decisions which would be unpopular with a significant section of the public. referendums have offered a way of passing the buck.” The editors argue that the E.E.C. referendums in Norway and Britain, the Leopold 111 referendum in Belgium, the divorce vote in Italy and various prohibition referendums in Scandinavia and Australia and New Zealand ex 3 emplifed this. They add that so, in a different way, did the military conscription referendums (Australia, 1916 and 1917, Canada, 1942 and New Zealand, 1949). The study notes that referendums have a history almost as old as democracy itself but says they have been used sporadically (never in the Netherlands or nationally in the United States).

National referendums up to September 1, 1978, totalled slightly more than 500. But 297 have been in Switzerland and 39 in Australia, two countries with a federal system that has given a special impetus to the use of the referendum. In the rest of the World, France with 20 referendums tops the list, while Denmark, with 13,

is the only other country to have reached a double figure.

But many countries have experimented with referendums at the national level at least once — a majority of states in Europe and more than a third of all United Nations members. The authors have excluded questions on liquor control in more than 20 New Zealand elections and say New Zealand has had five ordinary referendums — two on drinking hours, one on off-track betting, one on conscription, and the other on the term of Parliament.

But Messrs Butler and Ranney says .referendums are increasing in number and importance in the United States and abroad and that the trend is almost certain to continue. Even when referendums have not been held, the possibility has been discussed more extensively in the 19705, especially in the main English-speaking democracies, than at any time since the early 1960 s they write.

On the question of posing moral issues in referendums, the study says it is arguable that such issues are matters on which the public is likely to have strong views and perhaps an obligation to accept responsibility for official policy on matters which evoke strong passions.

“Yet it is also arguable that the problems involved are so difficult and delicate that it is better to leave them to elected policiticans, with their delay-

ing, moderating, ompromising and obfuscating ways, than to the all-or-nothing confrontations that referendums so readily become.” Messrs Butler and Ranney add that referendums disturb politicans “and us,” because they tend to force voters to choose between only two alternatives.

“There is no opportunity for continuing discussion of other alternatives, no way to search for the compromise . , .

Referendums by their very nature set up confrontations rather than encourage compromise. They divide the * populace into victors and vanquished. They force decisions often before the discussion process has had a chance to work itself out fully. Surely this is a great deficiency.” Yet the editors admit that there are times and circumstances when some decision is better than none, when further delay is disruptive of consensus and good temper, when chances of a compromise are slim. “In such a situation the referendum has at least one great virtue — not only will it produce a decision but the decision is more likely to be regarded as legitimate and therefore acceptable than is a decision produced indirectly by elected officials.

“The people are always likely to think better of themselves than of their leaders, and thus any decision they make directly is likely to strike them as more legitimate than a decision made for them by others. Surely this is a great advantage,” says the editors.