What I told the Select Committee on Treaty Principles Bill
Sovereignty of Parliament under challenge
Yesterday, I made oral submissions to the Justice Select Committee. As David Seymour made the first submission, I became the third submitter after Lady Tureiti Moxon who spoke for an urban Maori group.
My introduction, reproduced below, took about 2 minutes of the 10 allocated to me. I was questioned by Committee members in the remaining time. My proposed amendments to the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act are in my supplementary submission dated 12 January 2025 which I shall publish separately.
The sovereignty of Parliament is under challenge in the courts and from elements of the legal profession. One of their weapons is the undefined principles of the Treaty. The Bill if enacted would remove that weapon.
The behaviour of some of our senior judges suggests they think they are entitled to make law, to ignore Parliament’s laws or to twist them into a shape they find more congenial.
The most recent judicial excess occurred on 2nd December. In the Edwards case, the Supreme Court was so eager to try to frustrate the progress of the MACA Amendment Bill that it rushed out what it called a judgment. It wasn’t a judgment. It was a pronouncement the court had no jurisdiction to make. When the Court announces the outcome of the claimants’ claims, only then will there be a decision.
42 KCs warned that the courts might not enforce the legislation. Opposing the Bill, the Law Society claims that the Treaty and the principles limit Parliament’s law-making power.
In our free and democratic society ultimate power rests with the people who exercise their power by electing you to represent them. That’s why Parliament is sovereign.
The lawyers think the Supreme Court has the ultimate power. The Supreme Court has been acting as if it thinks so too.
They see the ordinary people and their representatives as untrustworthy decision-makers who can be second-guessed by persons implicitly claiming superior intellect and wisdom.
Parliament should be jealous of its sovereignty and be clear that unelected decision-makers must act in accordance with the law and accept the sovereignty of Parliament like everyone else.
The Bill stops the principles from outflanking the sovereignty of Parliament. My proposed amendment to the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act would remind lawyers of the duty they owe to New Zealand’s constitution.
The rest of my time is available for questions.
As Niall Fergusson stated in The Great Degeneration and his Reith Lectures, the rule of law is not the rule of lawyers.
Law- nomos- becomes capricious, inhuman (as Krylenko, Che Guevera and The Red Guard demonstrate) and contrary to human anthropology in the absence of physus, (natural law, the law of nature as noted on the US Constitution.)
Materialist collectivism belongs in the catalogue, per Delsol, of the unlearned lessons of the 20thC.
To point any of this out is to be met with the bric bat of academic by the provincial minded.
My wish is that all lawyers and Judges active in New Zealand would follow your lead and have the integrity you have shown Gary