Focusing on Mission, Ministry & Leadership, Wellness and NZ Trends. Every day we come across material that's helpful to those ministering in the Church. Some of it is vital, some of it is just plain interesting. This blog will aim to include a wide mix of resource material: links to other blogs and sites, helpful quotes, anecdotal material you can use, the names of books worth reading and more.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
One Person, One Vote
A couple of extracts from Maxim Institute's latest newsletter, which discusses Philip Joseph's call for Maori seats to be abolished:
A new paper has stirred up controversy by calling for the seven Maori seats in Parliament to be abolished. The paper, written by Professor of Law and constitutional expert Professor Philip Joseph, makes the case that the Maori seats have created an "insidious" form of discriminatory privilege. He claims that while they were once necessary for ensuring adequate Maori representation in Parliament the seats now work against fair representation for Maori and other ethnicities. Professor Joseph's concerns about the Maori seats are warranted, as they divide society by ethnicity and make it difficult to foster the common good.
Some argue that the purpose of the seats is now redundant as under MMP Maori members "have a 5 percent higher representation than the relative national population of Maori," however, it is not a question of how many of which ethnicity or sex or age sit in Parliament relative to the proportion in the population. The bigger question is why do we assume that someone must share our ethnicity or sex to be able to represent us well?
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