Dr James Allan: Trump’s Lesson in Remedial Education

I have hesitated to respond article-by-article to Roger Partridge’s continuing attacks on the Trump administration beyond my initial response and rebuttal in these pages to his first anti-Trump piece. That was where I argued that Roger’s comparisons of Trump to Hitler, Mussolini and Hugo Chavez were, shall we say, a tad overdone. My general view is that more than a few people on the political Right side of politics (and near on everyone on the Left side) have been infected with a strong dose of TDS, or ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. All of us can agree or disagree with this or that policy of a US President, including those of President Trump.

Dr James Allan: Dictator Trump? That’s Just Silly

In Saturday’s edition of Quadrant, Roger Partridge lambasted Donald Trump as an enemy of America’s constitutional democracy. On Sunday, James Allan, Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland and the author of Democracy in Decline, took his friend and colleague to task.

Let me start this reply to Roger Partridge’s column (‘Trump’s War on Constitutional Democracy‘) by laying my cards on the table. I know Roger Partridge. He is one of the best lawyers in New Zealand. He, like me, has grave worries about the sort of judicial activism or judicial usurpation of the role of Parliament that he sees over across the Tasman (and which, in enervated form, is on clear display here in Australia too).