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New Zealand Police Act Wiki Lets You Write the Law
PhoenixOr writes "New Zealand is now on the top of my list for cool governments. They've opened a wiki allowing the populace to craft a new version of their Police Act, the legislative basis for policing in New Zealand."
This was a science fiction story in which anyone could create a law. The visitor from Earth created a law saying that only qualified people could create new laws, arguing that otherwise someone might create a stupid one. The native said "Someone just did, in fact". The revert happened almost immediately, and the visitor was advised not to start a revert war: the reverter was described as "very good with the ritual sword".
I think having the community develop laws together is a rather superb way of handling society. The more people, (generally) the better (IMO). The more people that have their hand in this, the less likely something will be left out. Also, since everyone in that society will have to live with those laws, I think it's best that the majority has the opportunity to shape those laws (granted, not everyone will likely use this wiki, but I think the concept is good).
Doing it this way, the way I see it, has the potential to mend gaps between people groups in a society by allowing them to discuss their ideas and explain and collaborate their ideas carefully.
I wish more governments could be run this way -- moreso by the people.
And having this online provides an excellent communication medium.
While on the one hand getting feedback in this manner is good, satirizing them is also important. So its one step back one step forward for the New Zealand government.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
"People are calling it 'extreme democracy' and perhaps it is." Actually, we've had a word for it for a long time: Communism.
Communism and democracy is apples and oranges. Get your fact straight.
Communism corresponds to centralised economic model, versus free market. Democracy corresponds to the model of law regulation and separation of powers in the country. Versus, say totalitarian regime.
Communism is a great many things, it is a social and an economic model first and foremost, but communism, as opposed to social democracy, is the idea that the sum [or a random selection, similar to a jury] of the population set government policy.
No, please, I asked you to get your facts straight.
There's difference between the way most communistic countries developed in practice, the way it's described by ideologists, and the way it's described to the citizens in the the propaganda communist governments spread out.
It's perfectly possible to have both democracy and communism at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive.
You could ask: then why virtually any known communist government I know uses the totalitarian model, well this is because this is the model that develops when you overthrow the previous government with force. After revolution, it's always totalitarian regime.
Many modern democratic countries have implemented and running ideas from communism in SOME sectors of their economy, but they just don't call it that way (historical burden on the term itself).
As I've said many times before, we'll see ideas we thought mutually exclusive before (like libertarian ideas and communism) play together in an increasingly complex landscape of our national and international economies. It's just the result of increased complexity and the need to handle plenty of "special cases" in the interest of society (and various other interests...).
I agree, I live in wellington. There is yet, nothing cool about using a wiki for our overdue update to the police act.
This is just an extra piece of fluff to go with the announcement of the new cyber-crime lab.
I wonder, did they also use green matrices and smoke effects to herald this new initiative?
However, if this is the start to allow citizens to write their opinions on forthcoming and existing laws, I'm in favor.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Umm, no. We don't have a president. That would require a mature attitude to politics :-)
We are a realm of the commonwealth, basically the Governor-General looks after us on behalf of the Queen.
We only get to elect Parliament, local government and health boards.
However, I would agree that the masses (Auckland) and the Rest Of New Zealand (RONZ) know better than politicians.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Yes, but what if what someone wants is to steal your property?
Given the track record of open Wikis to trend towards vandalism, I'm interested in what policies they are going to put into place to stop stupidity.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.