Public Address. A community of blogs
The 2023 General Election has a preliminary result. The preliminary result is mostly meaningless from a legal standpoint, but we don’t want to wait two weeks to hear some number, so we get a rough and ready count of the ordinary votes: those cast by people whose name appears on the printed electoral roll who voted at a voting place designated for their electorate (including during advance…
I have a basically finished 800-word article on the entrenchment issue that is now unneeded. Dean Knight’s tweets, my tweets, and the open letter of the group of legal academics published by the New Zealand Herald say almost all that needs to be said on the manner in which the House – hopefully briefly – attempted to entrench parts of the Water Services Entities Bill: in short,…
I have prepared the following (draft) submission on the Electoral (Māori Electoral Option) Legislation Bill, which you all have until Saturday to submit on. Happy to consider comments, or to fix typos: have I used the word whakapapa incorrectly, etc? Please let me know :-) ====== The Justice Committee Electoral (Māori Electoral Option) Legislation Bill Submission of Graeme Edgeler 1. Thank you for…
Tomorrow, I will be 60 years old. It’s the impossibly distant age at which people used to retire with a pension and a mortgage-free house. It's okay. I've been thinking of myself as basically there for a while now – and the same thing appears to be happening to some of my dearest friends. Technically, you could make a case for us as both boomers and Gen Xers, but we're not quite…
You might recall that on April 19 and 20 this year, RNZ published and broadcast a series of reports – beginning with this one – that claimed the government had not followed Ministry of Health advice to end the MIQ system in November 2021. The coverage was based on a misleading interpretation of an internal memo, which assuredly did not call for MIQ to be ended in November, and it…
This Disability Pride Month I am reflecting on the complicated identity of disability for those of us with physical disabilities. I am often “reminded” by those inside and outside the disability community that having a disability is only made difficult by the people around us, by ableism, by discrimination, by lack of accessibility. This can be a useful sentiment that highlights how…
There are four types of bills that Parliament considers: most bills are government bills, but there are also members bills, private bills and local bills. Members bills are relatively well know (some important ones have passed over the last few years), but these latter three types are often grouped together. On the days that the House considers members bills (every second Wednesday that it meets),…
The New Zealand Drug Harm Index 2020 just made it into 2021: it was quietly posted on the Ministry of Health website before Christmas. And it contains some startling claims. Not the least of them, that cannabis is New Zealand's most harmful drug – accounting for $626 million in "community harm" every year. Would you be surprised if I told you more than a third of that was lost GST? Well, it…
Just sent the following submission in on the law repealing the three strikes sentencing regime. You have until midnight tonight if you want your say. == The Justice Committee Three Strikes Legislation Repeal Bill Submission of Graeme Edgeler Introduction This submission is made by Graeme Edgeler. I am a barrister with an interest in criminal law issues. I support the Three Strikes Legislation…
The year we are about to depart has been a frustrating one for the New Zealand medicinal cannabis community. A cluster of companies established to produce and distrubute legal cannabis products ran up against a regulatory scheme that sometimes seemed unworkable and informal growers and green fairies struggled to see a place for themselves after the narrow failure of last year's cannabis…