Last night, Parliament saw the first reading of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill. The primary purpose of the bill is to restore the feudal title of "Queen's Counsel" to the New Zealand legal community (New Zealand lawyers apparently feeling inadequate with merely being labelled "senior", like the Australians).
The Greens supported it.
This is an appalling move. The Greens have always strongly supported moves away from feudalism and towards greater independence. Which is why they supported the original change. Nandor Tanczos was pretty clear in his first reading speech:
We believe that the title of Queen’s Counsel is a colonial vestige, and that it is high time it went.And he was even clearer at the committee stage, when he proposed an amendment removing the title of "senior counsel" from the realm of the royal prerogative altogether and instead having it bestowed by someone qualified to judge whether a lawyer was actually highly experienced: the Law Society. This was a feudal title, and both it and the patronage by which it was bestowed had no place in modern Aotearoa.
So, what's changed? Why do the Greens suddenly support feudal titles and corrupt royal patronage? Do they have a reason? or is it simply that Nandor, Jeanette, and Sue have gone, and taken those core beliefs with them?
