Citizens-initiated referenda (CIR) sound like a cool idea: any citizens can get any question they like turned into a national referendum if they get a certain number of signatures.
It has turned out to be a problematic process, however. The questions that have made it to referendum have been phrased in unusual ways. They have also had no impact whatsoever on the actions of government, despite overwhelmingly clear results each time.
Wikipedia has four CIR listed:
- 1995 – “Should the number of professional fire-fighters employed full-time in the New Zealand Fire Service be reduced below the number employed in 1 January 1995?” (27% of voters responded, 88% of those saying No)
- 1999 – “Should the size of the House of Representatives be reduced from 120 members to 99 members?” (85% of voters responded, 82% of those saying Yes)
- 1999 – “Should there be a reform of our Justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offences?” (85% of voters responded, 92% of those saying Yes)
- 2009 – “Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?” (56% of voters responded, 87% of those saying No).
What can we observe from this? First of all, that CIR results are so massively one-sided that they must be foregone conclusions. When 82% support is the lowest result out of four you’re dealing with some very clear outcomes. Furthermore, these are always tilted in the direction of those who initiated the CIR. The people who start it find themselves massively validated by the results.
And that right away should tip us off as to the limitations of the system. These CIR are not about deciding a question that divides the NZ public, clearly. In fact there are two prominent reasons why the results might tilt this way.
First, it might be because CIR are initiated to send a message to the govt. that they have the wrong end of the stick about some issue. This is certainly the narrative adopted by those who initiate a CIR – they believe they represent the majority of Kiwi battlers whose views are being ignored by the power elite. The % outcome, on the face of it, validates this view, at least to their own satisfaction.
However, there’s a second reason: it might be because CIR questions are drafted in a self-serving way by their authors.
This is unquestionably the case. The 2009 referendum question is the most egregious example; the question itself presupposes that the act in question is good. If you tick “yes” you seem to be saying that something good should be criminalised. Of course, there is much more to the issue than this, but other factors are excluded entirely from the question. Similarly, other referendum questions by what they choose to include and not include, and by their framing to promote “yes” or “no” outcomes, presuppose their answers.
In fact, I think that these referendum questions do not exist to be analysed. They are primarily symbolic in nature, and participating in a referendum based on questions like this is not an act of analysis and opinion expression, but rather a ritualistic act. The meaning of a “Yes” or a “No” vote doesn’t necessarily reflect the content of the question; in fact, for “Yes” voters, it would be almost impossible for it do so. And this is why CIR have never led to any political response.
The real problem here is that two worlds are colliding: the world of general public discourse; and the world of bureaucratic political action.
The first world is shallow and heavily-spun, framed through political messages in the media. It favours sound-bite complexity, and the application of simple and stereotypical models of reality and causality to create narratives which are then judged on a reflexive moral basis. It is immediately accessible to everyone in society and its turnaround is swift.
The second world is deep and burdened by a wealth of data and process. It is closed off and protective of itself. It is a realm of compromise and long-term effort for long-term solutions. It is the domain of technocrats who have mastered its complexities and evaluate everything in terms of its ability to sustain in the face of complex obstacles and political sacrifice. The second world is not easy to access, but higher education and working in government departments, for different reasons, give entry.
For all its many faults and blindnesses, the advantage of the second world is that it is deeply informed by practice. It is all too aware of the complex matrix of cause and effect in which all political action is embedded. It knows the reasons why things are done the way they are done, or at least it has the ability to explore them and is aware that things may not be as they seem.
The first world does not have access to or awareness of this kind of information. It is responsive and driven by emotion not information. It is a completely different model of reality.
CIR emerge as direct expressions of first-world logic; however, they are fundamentally incompatible with the second world. The second world can only ever talk to itself on its own terms using its own forms of logic and expression. The first world cannot produce anything that is comprehensible to the second world. This a clash of realities, and it is inevitable.
Moreover, those in the second world cannot help but perceive a first-world question as being nonsensical, leading, and uninformed. They understand the drive behind the question as a challenge to systems that exist for a number of complex reasons and that must be protected. Second world inhabitants cannot make sense of the question on its own terms, and tend to be opposed to the question’s hidden content because that hidden content is an attack on the entire second world.
The massive disparities in CIR responses are, perhaps, better understood as population counts: the people in the first world who support the CIR; the people in the second world who resist. There is no real moral content to a CIR; rather it is a war for control between the second world that has captured all policy power and the first world that must experience the exertion of that power without being given access to a rationale.
So what sense to make of this? That we should not be surprised by these outcomes; that the CIR act is useless to policy-making and law although it has revealed itself as a powerful symbolic tool; that the divide between those who make policy and those who do not is great and closing that gap might be a worthy long-term goal.
In this specific instance, with massive support for a statement that, in the most generous parsing possible, doesn’t actually describe anything real, the only possible response is for politicians to say “your views are noted; the police will be advised” and never to mention it again. It looks like this is what our Prime Ministerial John Key is about to do.
[I’m trying very hard not to be derogatory towards what I’ve called the ‘first world’ here. That would probably be impossible. I do, however, believe better policy comes from an understanding of complexity; and that complexity serves as a barrier to understanding in practice if not in principle (i.e. I certainly don’t think people in the ‘first world’ are ‘too stupid to understand’; far from it). Also, I certainly don’t think understanding complexity leads always to good policy!]
[typed all in a rush. Hope it makes some kinda sense.]