Dr Michael Bassett: Wellington - What's wrong with it?

On Monday 28 July there was a strange story in the New Zealand Herald about advice that had been given to the Attorney-General, Judith Collins, by her officers. They had told their minister that the Justice minister’s intended changes to the electoral legislation banning enrolment during the 13 days before an election when early voting gets underway, breaches the Bill of Rights Act. Weird! Most particularly because it tells us that whoever gave that advice to the Minister clearly had little or no knowledge of the history of the rules that cover enrolment and voting in New Zealand.

For a century or more, every adult citizen has by law been required to get on the electoral roll. There is a fine if one fails to do so within a defined number of weeks after reaching adulthood. But so eager were the Attorney General’s officials to grizzle that they overlooked that fact. Yet, they are meant to monitor what is going on, and should have alerted their boss to the fact that a considerable sum of fine money was not being collected from the people who put off getting enrolled until election day.

Moreover, there was no sign in the advice that officials sent the Attorney General that they understood the ways in which the electoral laws had worked in recent times. Enrolment for elections always used to cease before early voting began. Not until 1993 could enrolment occur right up until the day before election day. It is only in the last five years that allowing people both to enrol and vote at the same time, with all the confusion this causes, has been possible. Were all the elections in earlier times that gave us our wartime leaders and the welfare state we enjoy in breach of peoples’ human rights? True, the Bill of Rights Act only dates back to 1990, but the notion that it was fundamental to the fair conduct of elections is fanciful. The Attorney General’s advisors need to demonstrate considerably more knowledge and common sense than they displayed in the advice they gave her.

Citizens who become eligible to vote during the 13 days before the election (ie they turned 18, or their citizenship of residential requirement at their current address has become valid) has always existed, and will still operate under the proposed legislation. Wheeling up assertions that Maori, Asian and Pasifika communities are likely to be worst affected by the Justice Minister’s move to require enrolment 13 days before the election is insulting. Laziness isn’t the property of ethnicity. And whatever causes people to overlook their legal duty to enrol, it isn’t enough to turn election day polling places into the chaotic state they have become because poll clerks are engaged in two sets of complex activity. Talk to anyone who has acted as a poll clerk on recent election days and they will confirm stories of bedlam. Surely minister Paul Goldsmith is right when he says that people should be on the roll well before election day, and that “citizenship brings both rights and responsibilities”?

This set me wondering again about Wellington and the standards of today’s bureaucrats. Collectively, Wellingtonians have been behaving strangely for some time. They elected a Green Mayor in 2022 with an alcohol problem who has often been in the news for the wrong reasons. Then her fellow councillor who thought he’d like to replace her turned out to have even worse judgement when he circulated a sleazy note about her. Then, in the general election of 2023 when the rest of the country swung towards the current Coalition, Wellington elected two Green electorate MPs of a singularly undistinguished variety. What is going on in the capital city? Are the inadequate briefings by senior officials of their ministers a reflection of the state of knowledge in that city? Should we be surprised, given the city’s performance at the ballot box?

I spent many years in Wellington, served by thoroughly competent civil servants, especially when I was a minister. The names of Roderick Deane at the Reserve Bank and the State Services Commission, Roger Kerr, Bryce Wilkinson and Graham Scott at Treasury, and George Salmond at Health, seem eternally memorable compared with today’s lesser lights. I keep encountering low grade bureaucratic conduct these days that would once have been the cause of disciplinary action. I had to make a formal complaint a few months ago against the heads of two sections within the Department of Internal Affairs because of their failures to perform routine tasks. And the more I watch and listen to the news, the more I hear some confused bits of advice being tended to ministers and the public by departmental spokespeople. I’m beginning to think there is a city-wide problem that ought to concern us all.

What’s worse is that too many radio, TV and print journalists, some of them quite senior, seem to have spent so long in the capital that they too have lost their historical knowledge. Slowly but surely, common sense in our capital city appears to be subsiding. Why is this happening? I’ve seen stories that too much time is being spent by public servants at hui singing waiata, one of the “blessings” inflicted on them by the governments of Ardern and Hipkins. Is this reality striking the press gallery as well? Too much time-wasting, and not enough on reading and acquiring the knowledge that is fundamental to being a well-paid public servant or a reporter? Or is the problem with Wellington water that we hear about from time to time more serious than we have been led to believe?

To the rest of New Zealand, what goes on in the capital matters. That’s where our laws are made. We have a right to expect that officials provide quality input to them.

Historian Dr Michael Bassett, a Minister in the Fourth Labour Government. This article was first published HERE