My name is Graeme Edgeler. I am a Wellington barrister with a strong interest in parliamentary procedure. I thank the committee for the opportunity to make a submission on the Review of the Standing ...

The 2023 General Election has a preliminary result. The preliminary result is mostly meaningless from a legal standpoint, but we don’t want to wait two weeks to hear some number, so we get a rough and ...

1. Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the Electoral (Māori Electoral Option) Legislation Bill. 2. I recognise that the policy questions raised by the bill can be fraught, and that there are ...

There are four types of bills that Parliament considers: most bills are government bills, but there are also members bills, private bills and local bills. Members bills are relatively well know (some ...

The New Zealand Drug Harm Index 2020 just made it into 2021: it was quietly posted on the Ministry of Health website before Christmas. And it contains some startling claims. Not the least of them, ...

I have made a submission on the COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill (No 2). In preparing it, I looked at the Hansard for the first reading debate, and got name-dropped as someone likely to ...

In the decades leading up to the 18th Amendment, the case for the prohibition of alcohol was made repeatedly. The harms of alcohol were substantial, and the US experience was worse than most. The ...

I was alerted late last week to the fact that John Campbell had used one of my earlier pieces in questioning the Prime Minister about the Government’s hate speech proposals, in particular focussing ...

In what will hopefully be the first of the number of posts on the government’s hate speech proposals, I have a look at what they actually cover. You may have guessed from the title of this piece that ...

After a quiet spell in the news on account of, well, other stories, cannabis and what to do about it staged a modest headline revival this week. First there was this Stuff report on a journal article ...

Last night, One News ran a follow-up story to its Colmar Brunton poll results on the cannabis referendum, headed here as Government accuses big American anti-cannabis group of interfering in NZ ...