Until very recently, kritocracy was not a word the ordinary New Zealand citizen needed to understand. It is one of those words, like democracy, that is made by butting two separate words together to produce a new one. In democracy’s case, the two Ancient Greek words butted together are demos, meaning ‘the people’, and kratos, meaning ‘rule’. So, democracy denotes a political system in which the people rule. The term kritocracy emerged in similar fashion. The first part of the word derives from krites, the Ancient Greek word for ‘judge’; kratos we’ve already met. The product of this word-merge is kritocracy: a political system in which judges rule.
But, what has government-by-judges got to do with us? Our country’s political system is the first to truly merit the description “democratic”, since, in 1893, no other was prepared to acknowledge women as belonging to the demos – the people – by legally enfranchising them. New Zealand was the first state to include women, alongside men, in the exhilarating business of ruling themselves. We were also the first British colony to guarantee political representation to its indigenous people. Clearly, New Zealand’s definition of the demos has always been extraordinarily broad and accommodating.
