Mr Muldoon defines executive role Comment from the Capital

Press, 25 February 1980, Page 16

Mr Muldoon defines executive role Comment from the Capital

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In a little-publicised address, the Prime Minister (Mr Muldoon) met a general public disquiet about “Government by the executive.” He acknowledged — and sought to refute — the charges of growing dictatorship and erosion of democratic freedoms which have been made against his Administration. That he was moved to do so was significant. In the past Mr Muldoon has chosen to ignore or treat with contempt similar murmurs, and has made no secret of his opinion that such claims have resulted from either politically inspired headline-grab-bing or the reaction of extreme elements. From the tenor of his address this week it would appear that he now believes it necessary to counter such allegations. The talk has spread enough to warrant his intervention, and he is taking a serious approach. As a result, his address read like an attempt to disabuse his audience of what he sees as misconceptions it and the electorate might-'have about his role and that of the Cabinet.

If the subject was significant, the occasion of the address was, perhaps, a little curious: an invitation to speak to St Paul’s Collegiate' School at Hamilton. Mr Muldoon was passing through Hamilton on Wednesday and took the opportunity to expound his view of democracy and the safeguards in New Zealand’s system.

Starting from the premise that his audience “may have heard people say that New Zealand is heading for a dictatorship,” Mr Muldoon compared New Zealand with the United States, Australia, and Britain, coming to the conclusion that a greater degree of sanction controlled governments in New Zealand than in those other countries.

On the way to this conclusion, however, : Mr Muldoon canie out firmly in favour of a government having the

PHILIP WORTHINGTON

power to pass legislation rapidly. He reduced the process to a single sentence in his address: “In times of emergency the New Zealand Cabinet can meet, resolve that a change in the law is necessary, have it drafted immediately—and usually it is a fairly simple matter — get the approval of the Government members meeting in caucus, take it into the House, and force it through in a single sitting.” Lest this sounded a bit much like an advertisement of the “in the time it takes to tell you this . . .” category, Mr Muldoon was quick to point out that such a pudding was not necessarily unpalatable. The procedure has been used in times of severe industrial unrest, occasionally with the agreement of both sides of the House. (An instance of the latter occurred during the term of the Kirk Labour Government at the time of the harbour, pilots’ strike.) For comparison, Mr Muldoon declared that the American processes of govi ernment have become “somewhat inadequate” to cope with the modern world. The checks and balances built into the American system, while suitable 200 years ago when the fastest means of transport on land was the horse, and at sea, the sailing ship, were not so ideal for today’s instant communication and almost instant transport, he said. “The Administration, for example, cannot change the value of the American dollar without going through the whole process of the Congressional system of checks and balances. A few years ago the Administration wished to increase taxes for a perfectly good economic reason. It took so long to get the bill through Congress that nearly two years later the taxes finally went on—about the time economic reasoning suggested they should have come off,” said Mr Muldoon.

In this can be seen shades

of the reasoning the Prime Minister tried to apply when he suggested the ill-starred “fiscal regulator,” even though that mechanism was to have been used only for reducing taxes, not increasing them. Nevertheless, the arguments he used in its favour were substantially a reflection of the criticism of inflexibility and inadequacy that Mr Muldoon has levelled at the American system. And it is no accident that his address this week concentrated on the debate which proved the stumbling block of the fiscal regulator—undue aggregation of power in the hands of the executive. “I believe that the power to pass emergency legislation rapidly is a valuable one in today’s world, although it follows that it is not a power that should be used frequently for other than on the most serious and urgent occasions,” he said. Mr Muldoon’s defence of this power rests on two arguments, one concrete and the other more nebulous. These arguments, the protection of executive power, are 'the length of the Parliamentary term and the public memory., “Many people say that having such a power takes away the freedom of the people. But there is one very important aspect of the New Zealand constitutional situation that they overlook, and that is that in this country we have a three-year Parliament,” Mr Muldoon said.

In Britain the .Government can stay in office for five years, although normally the government will call an election in less than five years at a time that it judges best for its own political purposes.

“Many people say that three years is not long enough for

a government, to put its economic policies into operation. But I believe that multiples of three years give ample opportunity for any Government to put its economic policies into effect, and that at the end of one three-year period the public can get an idea of what the government has in mind and, hopefully, give it a second, and later, a third term,” he said. It is the combination of the shorter Parliamentary term and the even shorter-lived public memory which provides the necessary check to executive power, according to Mr Muldoon. He states, with certainty, that the public memory is short. He challenged his audience to try to think of what were the political issues of this time last year. “If you try to think back four years to what the government of the day was doing, I think that you would find, as most people do, that it is quite impossible,” he said.

“Given the longer period in Government than three years, then a New Zealand government could use the emergency power that it has in the almost certain knowledge that, by the time the election came around, all the public indignation would have died away and be just a distant memory., “My answer to the critics who say that the speed with which law can be made in New Zealand is bad is that there are times when it is necessary, but so long as we have a three-year term for our Parliament, any government that uses such powers executively will be thrown out at the end of three years and that it is a far more important sanction than the frustrating checks and balances of either the

American system, or the federal system as it operates in Australia, or even indeed the two-chamber system of other countries,” he said. All of that sounds very fine, except that Mr Muldoon had already suggested to his audience that the public memory grows dim after a period as short as 12 months and, of course, any definition of excessive use of the power to pass new legislation in a hurry is a necessarily subjective one. Further, and perhaps most important, the arguments outlined by the Prime Minister take no account whatever of the quality of the legislation. It might be, as he said, “usually a fairly simple matter.” Sometimes it is not. Nor is simplicity in itself a guarantee of fairness. During the same address, Mr Muldoon impinged a little on the matters now before the Electoral Law Select Committee to restate again his opposition to both a twohouse system , and to proportional represeptation. The constitutional crisis in Australia which led to the defeat of the Whitlam Government stemmed directly from the two-house system in which an Opposition majority in the Upper House was able to frustrate the law-making of the Lower House, he said. Such a system could imperil the present advantage New Zealand has over Australia in being able to deal with emergency legislation rapidly. Mr Muldoon acknowledged that the New Zealand first-past-the-post system of electing members of Parliament has meant that in many seats the elected member has less than half the total votes cast and that, in the majority of seats, the elected member at present has less

than half of the votes of the total number of people on the roll. This situation had resulted in renewed calls for proportional representation, but two major objections remained. The first objection was that on the .figures of recent elections, the country inevitably would have had coalition governments. The fault in this, according to Mr Muldoon, is that the minority party in the coalition has the power to bring down the government and therefore the power to demand favours in excess of the true weight of its electoral support. “The other objection to proportional representation is that there is no guarantee that under that system people would vote in the same proportion as they do under the system. “Many people in New Zealand vote for the third party knowing that it will not become the government, but merely to show that they are opposed to some action of the party that they would normally supports It is a fact that in electorates where there is clearly going to ba a qlose fight between the two major parties,’ the thirdparty vote normally diminishes quite rapidly,** ha said. These are matters for decision by the select committee, of course,' but Mr Muldoon used them to round out dn address in which he chose to make clear features of his political philosophy. Such declarations might more often be associated with relatively unknown politicians at times of election. The Prime Minister has deemed it opportune, or necessary, to restate his position now. He has done so quite unequivocally and, if the question of executive power is to become a more vexing one for his Administration, no-one can say that he has not made his stand perfectly clear.