This is not democracy

When National introduced its bullshit "Treaty Principles Bill", the public reacted with outrage. Over 300,000 of us - more than 5% of the entire population of Aotearoa - submitted on the bill, crashing parliamentary servers. But now, National's stooge committee has decided to dump two-thirds of those submissions in the trash unread:

Labour's Justice spokesperson Duncan Webb says thousands of submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill are set to be excluded from the Parliamentary record.

He said it was not a matter of submissions arriving after deadline, but that the committee staff do not have enough time to process the unprecedented number of written submissions - including more than 200,000 online and 12,000 hand-written.

"The committee's working but they've made it very clear that there's no way that they can process all of the submissions by the time the committee is due to report back, and if they're not processed ... they kind of fall off the end and don't become part of the record," he told RNZ.

National has consistently used short submission periods in an effort to stifle public opposition to its bills, but simply throwing out submissions unread is a new low. Previously we've seen it on security legislation, steamrolled through under quasi-urgency to meet "urgent" deadlines set by spy agencies. Here its being used on a normal bill, one which was promised a full parliamentary process. Except oh no, that's too much work, so National has decided to dispense with it.

To echo my words from a previous abuse: this process is a sham and a fraud. It is not democracy. It shames our parliament and brings it into disrepute. And as someone who spends a lot of time encouraging people to submit on parliamentary processes (and who submitted themselves and whose submission is apparently among those dumped), I feel once again that my good faith has been abused and that I have been made a party to National's democratic fraud. Rather than encouraging people to participate peacefully within the system, maybe I should have been encouraging them to burn the whole rotten shitpile and the clique of arrogant-self-serving arseholes in it to the ground.

...because that's the clear message this sends. If a government makes peaceful change impossible, it makes violent change inevitable. Maybe our politicians should think about that, before telling people so loudly that peaceful, democratic participation is a waste of time.