The Lords of the Blog
Cactus Kate, a witty and acerbic observer of life, refers to David Farrar in her blogroll as Lord of the blog. Today Adam came across a blog called Lords of the Blog.
Lords of the Blog is an experimental project to encourage direct dialogue between web users across the world and Members of the House of Lords. Commissioned by the House of Lords, the pilot project is conducted by the Hansard Society who are working directly with Members of the Lords to bring their blogs to the wider online audience.
In any event what took Adam’s eye was this post by Lord Norton who recently gave a paper to a meeting of the Hansard Society. Lord Norton wrote:-
I gave a paper that examined some of the problems at the heart of the current law-making process.
Unfortunately the paper does not seem to be available, but Adam was especially struck by the concluding comments to the post which included:-
I argued that if deficient legislation is to be avoided, then there is a need to achieve greater constraint on the part of government, ensuring that legislation is necessary, well prepared and subject to pre-legislative scrutiny. The ideal situation is compliance with all three criteria but the ideal is rarely met. There is much more Parliament can do to subject legislation to more rigorous scrutiny (greater use of the carry-over of bills, fore example, among other things) but the ideal requires a culture shift within government departments. That is the biggest challenge and there is a long way to go.
These remarks it appears to Adam would apply equally well in NZ. Indeed, Adam would argue that NZ with a three year electoral cycle, and a unicameral legislature badly needs to reform the legislative process. Our parliament passes too much ill thought out and badly drafted law. Surely we can do better!
Should anyone from Lords of the Blog read this perhaps they could post a link to Lord Norton’s paper.
Comments are closed.
Your comment and the reply to that comment by Lord Norton in the “Lords of the Blog” article “Improving the law-making process” highlights pertinent intestinal problems that are inherent within the NZ system for creating law which has been put into fewer hands than is democratically desirable – without, one would consider, the proper mechanisms of reliable and adequate checks and balances – thus enabling the passing of ill considered law and at times undesirable law enacted all too frequently with the immoral tick of emergency.
At present, a copy of my paper is not available online, but it is likely that the Hansard Society will be producing a publication drawing together the papers delivered in the ‘Making Better Law’ seminar series. My paper was the first in the series.
If anyone is especially keen to have a copy of the paper, please feel free to contact me (p.norton@hull.ac.uk) and I can e-mail a copy.
Thank God some read the post
Part of the problem is that I suspect many in NZ fail to see the issue!
“I argued that if deficient legislation is to be avoided, then there is a need to achieve greater constraint on the part of government, ensuring that legislation is necessary, well prepared and subject to pre-legislative scrutiny. The ideal situation is compliance with all three criteria but the ideal is rarely met. There is much more Parliament can do to subject legislation to more rigorous scrutiny (greater use of the carry-over of bills, fore example, among other things) but the ideal requires a culture shift within government departments. That is the biggest challenge and there is a long way to go.”
That has the echo of a Yes Minister script during a meeting between Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker with Sir Humphrey in mid flight manipulating Hacker into a corner and the all too familiar proverbial no-win situation.