Constitutional dialogue: the New Zealand bill of rights act and the noble dream

In its recent decision affirming the courts’ power to issue “declarations of inconsistency” between legislation and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, the Court of Appeal embraces the notion of a “constitutional dialogue” between the judiciary and Parliament regarding issues of rights. It suggests that, since both branches of government are engaged in a collaborative process of giving effect to the Bill of Rights Act’s provisions, Parliament can be expected to take the courts’ views on such matters into serious consideration. This article questions the suitability of the notion of constitutional dialogue to New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements. The idea of dialogue, largely developed as a means to alleviate concerns about the “counter-majoritarian difficulty” that arises in jurisdictions with strong-form judicial review of legislation, cannot be usefully adopted to a system of very weak judicial review, such as the one put in place by the Bill of Rights Act. Dialogue may seem to be an attractive way of addressing what might be termed the “majoritarian malaise” caused by a sovereign Parliament’s sometimes cavalier approach to the rights of individuals and minorities. Yet meaningful dialogue cannot take place if one of the parties is entitled to ignore the other, which has no resources to impress its views upon an unwilling potential interlocutor. As others have argued in the context of constitutional systems with strong-form judicial review, there is no need to attribute the positive connotations of the dialogue metaphor to a set of institutional interactions that is, in truth, very far from being a conversation, because the participants may neither understand nor be interested in understanding each other. Indeed, there is a danger that the embrace of the notion of dialogue will serve to obscure the reality that, the Bill of Rights Act notwithstanding, New Zealand’s constitutional framework remains one of essentially untrammelled parliamentary sovereignty, which can be, and sometimes is, abused