No Right Turn points out in What’s in the urgency motion? exactly how much of shambles the NACT government is. At present they are busy ramming through legislation that has no titles, that hasn’t been drafted or presented to politicians to read, and they don’t even have an order paper. What exactly have this pack of clowns been doing in the last 4 weeks? Or is it a deliberate attempt to bypass the normal democratic institutions?
In The blitzkrieg then and now he points out that this kind of parliamentary behavior was last done by Douglas and Richardson. A lot of the legislation then was to put it mildly – crap. From the look of this shambles it appears that NACT hasn’t learnt.
NRT thinks that this a deliberate attempt to put through legislation while the main stream media and public are cooking under summer. IrishBill thinks in F**k democracy that they are doing the same.
I’m inclined to the view that this isn’t deliberate. To me, this looks like simple incompetence by politicians whose egos exceed their abilities. I’ve observed this in the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s with National and (with Douglas) Labour-led governments. They were useless at the process of running governments with the appropriate checks and balances. Trying to bypass the processes of government that are designed to give legislation a good look through to find flaws is fundementally a issue of ego from politicians trying to avoid criticism.
In either case it makes a mockery of the people who supported them because they perceived that the Labour-led government was undemocratic. Labour bills were on the order papers, were actually drafted with titles before being presented to parliament, and with a few exceptions passed through the normal processes of select committee.
It will be interesting over the coming days on the blogs to see which of the devout supporters of democracy from 2007 and 2008 stand by their principles. Otherwise we’d have to conclude that they are simple hypocrites, just like the NACT MP’s doing performances over the EFA, ETS, and other bills have now shown themselves to be.
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