Oaths Modernisation Bill

The Green Party will be supporting the Oaths Modernisation Bill at its first reading, so that it can be referred to a select committee. We are all in favour of having some of the archaic language in the various oaths modernised, as they have been in the proposed texts. It is good that the oaths now have a Maori version.

However, we should not exaggerate the importance of oaths. In most cases, uttering an oath does not change people's actual behaviour all that much, and that fact has been recognised in one respect in the proposal to drop the teachers oath, which was no longer necessary. Oaths have a use in marking the beginning of a person's new responsibility and marking that person's dedication to it, such as when becoming a new citizen, a citizen of New Zealand, a lawyer, or even a member of Parliament.

For an oath to have a real effect, the person uttering it should feel as comfortable with it as possible so that it really means something. For years everyone uttered a religious oath, even when many of the people uttering such an oath were atheists or agnostics. Now we at least have in the system affirmations for the non-religious, and those people can now feel truer to their pledge.

Unfortunately, the same principle has not been applied to the question of whether a pledge to the Queen should be included in the oath. In the introduction to the hill it is stated that there was clear support among those who submitted in favour of retaining loyalty to the Queen in the oath.

Of course, that support was not universal in the submissions. For a start, the submission of the republican movement opposed its retention. However, it is not how many of the limited number of submissions were for or against the retention of loyalty to the Queen in the oath that should count. If we apply the same principle that we have been applying to religion and religious belief - that of not wanting people to swear to something they do not believe in; like not swearing to a god if they are atheists - then we should not make republicans swear their loyalty to the Queen. It only demeans the oath.

It devalues the oaths when we all know that 35 percent or more of the population are republicans and another big chunk of New Zealanders do not really support the monarchy as an institution but cannot really see that this is the right time to make a big constitutional change in that respect. So all these people who are not really for the monarchy will be reluctantly swearing an oath to Queen Elizabeth, a woman whose office they do not really believe in.

To take loyalty to the Queen out of the oath is not to deny that New Zealand is a constitutional monarchy, and we just need to look at countries of a similar constitutional situation, like Australia - particularly Australia - which is also a constitutional monarchy. That country has a new citizenship oath that does not mention the Queen. It reads as follows: "From this time forward I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey." There is no mention of the Queen.

In other countries new citizens pledge their loyalty to the State, or the nation, or its laws, or its constitution, or its people, or some combination of those things. The United States, for example, is big on citizens pledging loyalty to its "constitution and laws". In Ireland a new citizen declares himself or herself to have "fidelity to the Irish nation and loyalty to the State". In Jamaica, they pledge to "the constitution and the people of Jamaica". The Canadian Parliament has before it a bill that represents a compromise in terms of changing the oath away from an oath to the Monarch. It is proposed to remove the reference in the oath to the Queen's "heirs and successors".

Unfortunately, that term is still in our oath. I think that the reference to "her heirs and successors" helps to get to the heart of the problem we have in keeping the monarchy as part of the oath, because it reminds us that the Queen is not our head of State as Queen of New Zealand because of any democratic procedure but because of an accident of birth - she was born into the right family. We as New Zealanders, under this constitutional arrangement, are stuck with her "heirs and successors" because heredity rules in that respect. From a republican perspective, and even other perspectives, this leads to an inbuilt contradiction in the new oaths proposed in this bill for the people of New Zealand, be it the new citizenship oath, or the parliamentary oath that we as members of Parliament have to swear.

Under the new and, I believe, improved oath, I am supposed to swear that I as an MP will "be loyal to New Zealand and respect its democratic values and the rights and freedoms of its people", which I am happy to do, but as far as I am concerned this makes the oath internally contradictory.

How can I possibly pledge loyalty to democratic values and at the same time declare loyalty to the Queen as a head of State whose selection process is a complete denial of democratic values? There is simply no democratic selection process for our head of State. Queen Elizabeth is there only because she is the daughter of a particular human being - George Windsor.

Democracy should also involve public accountability, and there is no democratic public accountability system for the Queen, or any proper democratic means of dismissing her. She is there for life, as are her heirs and successors, without any means of removal.

Of course, the existence of this contradiction in the oath does not mean that all Greens would object to swearing allegiance to the Queen. Not all Greens are republicans and we do not have a party policy on republicanism or the monarchy. But we could easily have an oath like Australia's in order to get out of the problem of making people swear to something they do not believe in and devaluing the oath accordingly.

As members may know, I have a member's bill, the Head of State Referenda Bill, in the ballot. If that bill is selected and we have the appropriate referenda and the monarchy is dispensed with, then that would remove the contradiction in the oath, as clearly that would have to be removed from the oath.

The essence of oaths should primarily be a loyalty to the people, the nation, and the law of the country. That is why I quite like the Australian and Jamaican oaths. In this respect I am a little concerned about the proposed police and armed forces oaths before us in the bill.

The police oath should be focused on the police upholding the law, whereas the emphasis is on serving Her Majesty and the reference to the law is a little too indirect - that is, to "perform all the duties of the office of constable according to law ."

The armed forces oath emphasises loyally obeying "all orders of Her (or His) Majesty, her (or his) heirs and successors, and of the officers set over me ...". This is all about obeying orders, with no reference to loyalty to the people, nation, or laws of New Zealand, let alone any reference to the "democratic values of New Zealand and the rights and freedoms of its people.", which is rightly in the citizenship oath and the parliamentary oath before us.

I think the select committee has a fair bit of work to do to remove the contradictions and the weaknesses in the oaths before us. We have made a step forward in the proposals, in getting away from some of the archaic language of the old English tradition, but I think we should have a simpler citizenship oath, along the lines of the Australian oath.