Saturday 14 May 2005

Message to Kerry Prendergast:

1 comment:

Peter Cresswell said...

Tuatara, you said: " Even accepting, for one minute, that private property rights are the key to democracy (which I disagree with)..." -- and in any case I've never said that -- ".... my right to use what is partially my land would have been over-ridden by the V8 race."

I can just imagine your reaction, Tuatara, if an Anti-Capitalist March was required to wait two years and pay $750,000 in order to have its resource consent heard so that it could march down Lambton Quay and cause a ruckus. Or for permission from your Anti-Anti-Capitalist co-owners of the road to let you use the roiad to cause an Anti-Capitalist ruckus, because that's what you're asking for. Is that really want you want?

And why is your free speech or free expression more important than someone else's? Why a protest march and not a street race?

But with your question, I believe, you've hit on one of the problems associated with nationalised property and/or the Tragedy of the Commons, problems with which private property rights and common law protection of those property rights pretty much laid to rest.

What's property rights got to do with it, you ask? Wel, if you grant that the property rights that inhere in the road are (rightly or wrongly) not actually held in common but are presently vested in the council, then it should be within their authority to make that road available, as they do for street marches, capping parades and ANZAC Day commemorations and the like -- and as they did in the eighties when the V8 street race was held in Wellington to the enjoyment of most of us who were then living there.

The only possible objectors to such an event under common law are those that have standing, ie., not just every idiot from Island Bay and Waikanae and Karori who wants to rain on someone else's parade in Lambton Quay or around the harbour edge, but those who have specific property rights that will be damaged, harmed or trespassed upon by such an event, and for specific measures may be agreed upon and taken in good time to alleviate those specific problems.

Shop-owners might for example be quite reasonably concerned that Anti-Capitalist protest marchers might urinate in their doorways, break their windows and put up pictures of Sue Bradford up on lamp-posts about the place; protest organisers might be able to alleviate these concerns by for example promising to put up air-brushed pictures of Heln Clark instead, and to just one window for the TV cameras, (and promising to replace that and buy dinner for the shop owner and his or her family.)

AS for your protest march, so with the street race. Or at least, so should it be.