Australia beware, rent-seeking is a term you may have to look up if your life path has yet to cross the discipline of political economics. It’s when a group, the rent-seekers, manipulate society’s systems to give themselves an unfair advantage with society’s assets, at little cost to themselves.

Why is New Zealand progressively introducing national legislation which promotes and condones rent-seeking based on genetic origin, aka heredity? Water services legislation with a controversial genetic bias in its governance is currently transiting the Kiwi Parliament, while legislation segregating healthcare provision based on genetic origin was passed last year.

The question is of the utmost seriousness when you think about examples of rent-seekers globally.

Russian oligarchs are a topical example, backed, of course, by the Kremlin and its puppet Parliament, the Duma. In reality, the licensed ability to manipulate a law-making Parliament is the ultimate asset for top rent-seekers, such as Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party. New Zealand was moving in that direction last year, when a legislative proposal to weight local electoral voting by genetic origin was headed for the statute books under Labour’s majority. The legislative bill was only stopped when it was declared to be in breach of human rights law by the Labour appointed Attorney General.

Examples from history of nation-forming rent-seekers include the feudal barons installed in England by King William I after the Norman conquest. It’s taken over 900 years to emasculate the power of the baronial rent-seekers in the English, now UK, Parliament in Westminster. In 1999 the UK House of Lords Act reduced the population of hereditary rent-seekers from 1,330 to 92. A major leap for democracy by the ‘Mother’ of all Parliaments, and one made well within the living memory her offspring institutions.

People today in the parliamentary democracy of Australia can rightly scoff at the British for only recently demolishing their clan of genetically licensed rent-seekers in Westminster’s Upper House.

However, scoffing Kiwis would still be throwing stones in the proverbial glass house.

New Zealand created its own genetically licensed group of parliamentarians 106 years ago, when it introduced the Māori electorates in 1917. These genetically biased electorates cover the whole country and currently source seven MPs to Parliament. The sourcing is based purely on the genetic origin of both the incumbent MPs and their electoral voters. Thus, as well as prescribing for MPs by genetic origin, the electoral voting method denies the universal suffrage which underpins democracy. Put simply, you can’t vote if you have the wrong genetic origin. The slippery slope for the institutional equivalent of eugenics persists in New Zealand.

The British people and their institutions have been working long to free their parliamentary
legislature from the whiff of genetic bias and discrimination in both its membership and suffrage.

That is a testament to a pervasive democratic spirit, evident today in the diversity of recent prime-ministerial selections by the presiding Tory government. New Zealand’s people and government should perhaps follow suit with their own parliamentary whiffs before they cascade towards an Orwellian stink. The present situation is especially precarious as the Kiwi upper house was abolished back in 1951. This removed a potential buffer against rent-seeking legislation which now only requires a simple majority in a single house.

Those thinking of introducing genetic bias into other Parliaments should think twice too.