Rule makers as priests (no 2) under the RMA

June 6th, 2012

Last week I posted on a NZ Law Society submission to the effect that the law should no longer humbly set minimum standards of behaviour, leaving room for adult freedom of contract, even among commercial parties. It would not preserve a sphere for the operating flexibility of morality and social sanctions without aid of the coercive power of the state. Instead it should require of all a selfless standard of behaviour, the ideal.

Orthodox jurisprudence explains why such an approach to law is inimical to liberty. It justifies intervention by courts, lawyers and policing authorities into any and all behaviour. They gain the power to make virtually any conduct punishable in hindsight, because what is the highest standard of conduct will always be debateable. That standard will not find an equilibrium. Perfection is not attainable because it is self-referential. As soon as a particular standard has become widespread or 'normal' then a new level must be set to distinguish the standards of the anointed from those of the lesser mortals whose conduct is the norm.

I doubt that the Law Society rep thought that was what she meant. But even if she did she was in respectable company. The resource management industry has been working to replace the rule of law. They regard as quaint the notion of rule by law so that one can predict in advance from rules what you can do on your land, and what you cannot. They implement instead rule by rulers who can impose their personal aesthetic and other prejudices in the guise of enforcing gnomic rules.

The following ecclesiastical power masquerading as a rule was sent to me as being from the draft Hamilton District Plan.

“All development shall be contextually relevant, positively responding and integrating with the surrounding civic and natural heritage environment, ecology, land uses, public realm and networks.”

So now of course you know exactly what you can and can't do, all you property owners who stupidly thought that property rights (and Article 2 of the Treaty) allowed you the peaceful use and enjoyment of your land as you saw fit, if it did not interfere with your neighbours.

If you can't work out what that rule means, ask a planner.

Filed under Environment, Red tape and risk aversion

Comments

I figured this out in 2000, when I had to get a resource consent to paint my house anything but cow poo green.

As Flaubert said, “There is no truth…only perception.”

This view of the law is entirely consistent with the ‘power struggle through ideas’ advocated by Gramsci, and more specifically the course advocated by German Marxist Dutschke known as “the long march through the institutions.”

If natural justice and common law are abandoned in favour of a “selfless ideal”, those who determine the (ever variable) standard of the selfless ideal can never be in the wrong and never be displaced from power.

Your recent blog on the Urewera trials demonstrates how the New Zealand media has already become completely captured by Gramsci’s cultural relativism. The judicial activism of our highest courts in recent decades shows they are well on the way to the same goal.

It is interesting to conjecture whether people like the Law Society rep are aware of what they are doing, or whether they are so utterly brainwashed by the Gramsci-ites in our universities, that they can no longer think for themselves.