Dummy of the Day

David Harvey, who served as a judge between 1989 and 2021, was submitting on the legislation and expressing general support for it. His written submission said the bill introduced a “proper, rigorous process for considering the enactment of legislation”.

He covered several themes from his written submission, including that the bill was “not constitutional” but instead “procedural” and could be amended or repealed by future governments.

“The only thing is that if it is going to be ignored, those who are responsible for ignoring it are going to have to stand up and say why,” Harvey said.

One of his arguments was that the legislation didn’t reflect a libertarian ideology, as some critics have suggested.

“Every piece of legislation that is enacted involves an erosion or some form of interference with individual or corporate liberty,” Harvey said.

He said the principles which legislation could be compared against in the future involved a “process of legislative balancing”, but he did not believe this was an example of libertarian ideology.

Labour’s [Deborah] Russell asked Harvey “what notion of liberty you’re working with”, as she believed it was “contentious” to suggest every law infringes on liberty.

Harvey responded by asking if she was familiar with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the German Enlightenment philosopher.

“I have a PhD in political theory so I’m familiar with [Thomas] Hobbes”, Russell responded.

As Russell continued, Harvey asked if she was aware of the opening line of Rousseau’s The Social Contract.

She said: “There is no need to patronise me. I am asking you what notion of liberty you’re working with.”

Harvey said: “‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’. The chains in fact are legislation. Everywhere, any time that you enact legislation, you infringe on a person’s liberty, freedom of action or ability to choose.”

Russell said: “You don’t buy into the notion, then, that in actual fact the laws can create our liberties, which is the Harringtonian notion, or the notion that comes to us through the civil republican tradition, as opposed to the liberal or libertarian tradition.”

Harvey said he was “more a person from the Enlightenment”, which Russell said she was too.

“I’m afraid that just stating that as a notion of liberty is actually a deeply contested view of liberty,” Russell said.

Harvey said it might be contested, but “it might be one to which I adhere”.

Following that, the select committee’s chair Ryan Hamilton said there was nothing like a “good academic jousting on a Tuesday morning”.

NZ Herald