Utopia, you are standing in it!

Whether or not it is ultimately found to be unlawful, the Prime Minister’s decision to advise the Queen to prorogue Parliament  has shed a spotlight on what Robert Blackburn has described in his illuminating article on the monarch’s personal prerogatives as: “a little corner of the constitution that is little understood and is routinely misunderstood”, (‘Monarchy and the personal prerogatives’ (2004] PL, 546) In the absence of any clear consensus amongst UK constitutional scholars on this issue, I would suggest that the postcolonial experience of the Commonwealth Caribbean with regard to the head of state’s personal prerogatives, prorogation, and constitutional review more generally, can offer a helpful comparative constitutional perspective.

Prorogation in the Commonwealth Caribbean

The 12 countries that make up the Commonwealth Caribbean (Antigua, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St Kitts, St Lucia, St Vincent and Trinidad) attained their independence from the UK in a period…

Housing Minister Megan Woods this week eased herself  past the KiwiBuild fiasco to   announce a fresh range of housing policies. She conceded the commitment to specific KiwiBuild targets had been a “mistake”: others have labelled KiwiBuild as a “political humiliation”. Woods exuded confidence the new bundle of policies has what it takes to deliver on the government’s housing goals.

As for Greens co-leader Marama Davidson who appeared alongside Woods as the government’s housing policies were “reset”, she exclaimed that it was one of the best days in her political career. “I want to say to those NZers today who have given up hope on their dream of owning a home we have opened the door to you”.

Pardon?

Twenty-one eminent constitutional lawyers expressed this view in a letter to the Times (3 4 19): ‘Any attempt to advise refusal of Royal Assent to a Bill passed by Parliament would stand constitutional principle on its head. It would presume a governmental power to override Parliament, yet it is in Parliament, not the Executive, that sovereignty resides’.

But it is the eminent-21 who stand constitutional principle on its head.  The true principle is: it is in Parliament (not the Executive, and not the Legislature) that sovereignty resides.

The name Parliament, or parliamentum, came (from the Old French: parlement, parler) into use in England in the 14^th century (the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum, probably 1321), but by the 15^th century it had come to mean a legislature (OED 3^rd edition, 2005); and, indeed, that’s what it was.  The movement from an absolute monarch to a legislative Parliament…

The decision to prorogue Parliament does not only have implications for whether Parliament can prevent a no deal Brexit, it also has important consequences for the making of primary and secondary legislation prior to exit day. We are particularly concerned with statutory instruments (SIs). There is already a strained position vis-à-vis the lack of scrutiny of secondary legislation, to such an extent that Parliament scrutiny is effectively incapacitated. It is clear that prorogation will exacerbate this incapacitation. In this post, we explain why this is the case.

Primary Legislation

When Parliament is prorogued all Bills fall unless expressly carried over to the next session. This means they need to start the legislative process again in a new session, if they are to be revived. At present, there are five Brexit Bills progressing through Parliament. Two of these, the Trade Bill and the Financial Services Bill are ineligible to be carried…

Do we really need another article that telling us that evolution isn’t always “progressive”, going in a straight line towards traits that we consider “advanced”? (These are nearly always traits that humans have, like intelligence, high consciousness, and big brains.)

This form of evolution, often represented by the “straight line” diagram of human evolution shown in the new The Conversation article below, also called “orthogenesis,” is said to misrepresent evolution in several ways. It implies, for instance, that there’s an inherent directionality to evolution, which isn’t true (though in some cases, like arms races, it can approximate truth). It could be taken to imply that the directionality isn’t conferred by natural selection, but by some teleological force, like the “drive to consciousness” broached by computer scientist David Gelernter in a recent, dreadful, and grossly misleading critique of evolution. And it implies a scala naturae—a “scale of nature”—that could…

On   September 3, at 9.30pm 80 years ago, New Zealand declared war on Germany. International tensions had steadily risen from mid-year as Germany became more bellicose. On August 24 the Government declared an Alert State. The Government offered the 30 Vickers Wellington bombers ordered for the new RNZAF to the British Government and this was accepted with alacrity.

This opinion piece appeared in the 2019 Spring issue of Te Awa (the NZ Green Party’s newsletter) at this link. Marama Davidson, a Green Party Co-Leader and Member of Parliament, has since said this article “puts trans rights to exist up for debate” and it’s been removed.

Solutions that are Fair to Everyone

I am writing a personal response to Jan Logie’s words in the last Te Awa, where she says: “We continue to push for progress on LGBTQI+ freedoms, and resist the backlash that’s trying to undermine our trans and gender diverse whanau and roll back their hard-won rights”.

Who is the “we” in this statement? Is it the Rainbow Greens? I am a lesbian, supposedly under their umbrella, but I am part of the backlash. Is it the whole Green Party? I am a long-time Greens member, but I am part of the backlash. If…

While the prorogation of Parliament has generated political controversy, constitutional lawyers are asking whether the government acted legally in advising the Monarch. The legal challenges to the prorogation will face a number of hurdles. Even if the prerogative power is justiciable, there are difficult questions in identifying the specific legal issue. When writing about a potential challenge in June, Lord Pannick stated that one legal objection is that ‘the prime minister would be seeking to prorogue parliament for the purpose of avoiding parliamentary sovereignty on an issue of significant constitutional importance’. This post will explore a related line of argument, which focuses on proroguing Parliament as a means to avoid political accountability (so the argument does not rely on the language of sovereignty). The starting point in the line of argument is that the prorogation will to some degree hinder Parliament in whatever it wants to do in the period…

It may be that there is no such thing as a date of 31 October 2019 for a no-deal UK withdrawal from the EU.  On 9 April 2019, according to Le Monde, Michel Barnier, chief negotiator for the European Council in the withdrawal negotiations with the UK, said: ‘The EU will never take a decision on a ‘no deal’. That will be a choice for the British.’

On 10 April, the European Council adopted a very obscure decision.  ‘In response [to a British request], the European Council agrees to an extension to allow for the ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement.  Such an extension should last only as long as necessary to allow for the ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement and, in any event, no longer than 31 October 2019.  If the Withdrawal Agreement is ratified by both parties before this date, the withdrawal will take place on the first…

Heather Roy

28 July 2019

Registers and health screening programmes have two things in common.  First, they both cost a lot to establish and administer.  Second, they are both effective only when compliance is at or very close to 100 percent. It follows then that excellent compliance should be assured before a gun register is put in place. Are the gangs really going to register their weapons, having already refused to surrender those that have been banned? Of course not. And having aggravated the rural community and law abiding gun owners the government should expect civil disobedience from many. An effective, well-functioning register needs buy-in. The $42 -$52 million cost of a gun register quoted by Police Minister Stuart Nash is taxpayer money down the gurgler.

Monday’s announcement by the Prime Minister about changes to gun licencing (gun owners will likely pay 2-3 times more for half the preseent licence…

It is eighty years today since New Zealand declared war on Germany, joining the United Kingdom in responding to the unprovoked aggression of the German invasion of Poland.  Until just now, glancing at one of the government historical websites, this statistic hadn’t occurred to me

New Zealand was involved for all but three of the 2179 days of the war — a commitment on a par only with Britain and Australia.

It is estimated that 11928 New Zealanders died in the course of that conflict, a death rate (per million population) higher than in any other Commonwealth country.  Dreadful as the war was, it still strikes me as something closer to a just war (for our side) than most other conflicts in modern history –  although, of course, the counterfactual is unknowable.

Back in the very early days of this blog, I wrote a short post on some aspects…

The relationship between rocketing power prices and chaotically intermittent wind and solar is crystal clear. Let’s call it Germany, Denmark and South Australia, where wind and solar obsessions have driven power prices into orbit.

While RE zealots continue to chant the mantra that wind and solar are practically free, and getting cheaper all the time, the reality is that the cost of their collective chaos is born by the generation system as a whole, principally those readily dispatchable sources, coal, gas and nuclear.

As detailed by Tom Stacy and George Taylor in their study of the US experience (summarised below with the full paper linked below that) adding intermittent wind and solar to your grid is a guarantee of spiralling power prices.

The Levelized Cost of Electricity from Existing Generation Resources
Institute for Energy Research
Tom Stacy and George Taylor
June 2019

Introduction

In this report, we analyze publicly available…

Boris Johnson’s prorogation announcement has generated widespread criticism, and will be hotly debated when MPs return today from their summer break. Meg Russell, Alan Renwick and Robert Hazell argue that the decision to suspend parliament for five weeks was an improper use of executive power, sets dangerous precedents, and undermines fundamental principles of our constitution. It should therefore not proceed. MPs may seek to block it, and so may the courts, but the preferable route would be for the government to recognise its mistake and reverse it.

MPs return to Westminster today after the five-week summer recess in deeply unusual and worrying circumstances. Last week Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has faced just one day of parliamentary scrutiny since taking office on 24 July, triggered a prorogation of parliament, set to last another five weeks. Particularly given the Brexit deadline of 31 October, this has caused widespread consternation: among…