Over the course of what is becoming, I am glad to say, a fairly long life, I have tried my hand at a range of different things. I have been a diplomat, a politician, an Oxford don, a television journalist, an economist, an author, a columnist and Waikato University Vice-Chancellor.

But if I were asked to identify the central element in my career, I would answer that I have been a lawyer – and I choose that characterisation for a variety of reasons.

It is partly that the law was my area of study when I first went to university – first, at Victoria University and then at Auckland – and the learnings I acquired then have stayed with me through the rest of my life. I have carried with me the intellectual training and mental habits inculcated by the study of the law – “once a lawyer, always a lawyer” one might say.

It is not just that legal studies equip one for a variety of different careers, as indeed they do. It is rather that the law is such a constant and beneficial part of our national life, and one whose importance is so often overlooked, that it is a duty and a privilege to claim adherence to it.

The law is by far the most significant and successful attempt we have made to regulate our social behaviour in the general interest. It is, as a consequence, the glue that holds us together as a society and that enables us to act together effectively.

The experience of many people with the law may have been, as they saw it, of falling foul of irritating rules, seemingly made to be broken, or of paying apparently exorbitant bills to have the sale and purchase of property validated. But these perceptions understate and mistake the true value and purpose of the law.

The law operates on the social level to outlaw disruptive and therefore unacceptable behaviour, so as to restrain violence, dishonesty, untrustworthiness and deception. And, it provides some ground rules so that we can conduct certain kinds of relations on a secure basis of honesty, trust and reliability. These purposes combine to provide valuable building blocks for a properly functioning society.

But its value goes beyond those elements. The most important function of the law is, in many ways, to place limits on the exercise of what would otherwise be unbridled power – what is usually called the application of “the rule of law” – the principle that no man or body, however powerful, is above the law. It is that principle that was used to defeat the claim in England centuries ago that kings had a “divine right” to govern and were therefore above the law. And it is that principle that is currently being challenged in the US by Donald Trump.

The law exists essentially to protect the rights and liberties of ordinary citizens. It is the bedrock on which our democracy is built.

My own special interest as a law student and teacher was in a body of law called administrative or public law or the law of judicial review – the law that restrains the actions and powers of public bodies and government agencies and provides remedies to the ordinary citizen if the limits to that power are exceeded. It is a body of law to whose development I can claim to have made a small but significant contribution, through proposing a comprehensive and coherent definition of the concept of jurisdiction and replacing the complexities of the ancient remedies of certiorari and mandamus with an all-purpose modern remedy called a declaratory judgment.

The law, as a scholarly and professional focus, has played an important role, not only for me but for my family as well. My brother was a judge in Hong Kong, my daughter is a respected defence lawyer in Tauranga, and my grand-daughter has recently completed law degrees in both New Zealand and France.

We can, as a family, claim to be “upholders of the law”. But the value of the law extends well beyond me or my family; it is there to benefit us all.

As I wrote this, I had news that my old Oxford tutor, Don Harris – also a Kiwi – had died. This column is in part a tribute to him.

Bryan Gould
19 August 2020

What to do to improve the public perception of the newly elected National party leader, when her performance so far has no doubt disappointed the expectations of her supporters?

The answer is to get a National-supporting newspaper (the Herald) to organise a poll that could be guaranteed to provide an acceptable answer.

The poll was not – in other words – just any old poll. It asked a very specific question to which there was only one answer. The poll – of only 500 people – didn’t ask, as such polls usually do, whether Judith Collins was doing a good job, or was the preferred Prime Minister, or whether people warmed to her.

It asked instead whether they thought that National’s prospects had improved with her as leader.

Those polled were asked, in other words, to compare National’s prospects today with how they had been during the disastrous period of changing leaders repeatedly and of the resignations occasioned by irresponsible leaks of private data and the sending of pornographic messages.

Not surprisingly, those polled thought that anything was better than those dark days for National. Poor old Todd Muller was apparently required to deliver one last service to his party – to act as the fall guy, the benchmark against which Judith Collins was to be measured.

We must conclude that it is a measure of National’s desperate need to boost their fortunes that so much care and planning was put into such an artificial operation as this Herald poll.

It also prompts the question as to what National’s own private polling is showing. It suggests that it shows that the public’s perception of Judith Collins is some way off favourable, and that desperate measures are needed to turn things round.

Polls must always be taken with a pinch of salt – but, beware, this one is particularly shonky.

Bryan Gould
11 August 2020

Yes, an election is in the offing – and we all know that elections can be polarising, as parties of the left and right square off against each other.

But we should not allow our party and political allegiances to obscure the fact that, in a properly functioning democracy like New Zealand, what unites us is more important than what divides us.

And party allegiances are not set in concrete. Even for the individual, they can change over time; and my own experience offers a case in point.

The conventional view is that people are more radical in their views when younger and that they grow more conservative as they grow older. My progress was in the opposite direction.

I grew up in a family that took it for granted that “people like us” voted National. I was brought up to believe in the right-wing values – that individual effort should be properly rewarded because it was what held society together and allowed us all to progress, that everyone had their “proper place” in society, that property rights were sacrosanct, and that respect for authority (not to say hierarchy) was the necessary basis on which an orderly society operated.

It was only as I grew up and my life experience extended that I began to see further and to understand more. I began to see that a society that was happy with itself, because everyone had a stake and an equal chance in it, was not only morally required and appropriate, but also delivered a great practical benefit to all of us, both collectively and individually. I saw that serving the interests of the “have nots” as well as the “haves” was the proper business of government.

Even today, when my current views are conveniently but not always accurately described as left-wing, I think I understand that most of those on my right are – while misguided – not necessarily ill-intentioned but seek in broad terms the same outcomes as I do. I am satisfied that, if the levers of power were to pass into their hands, no irremediable damage would be done to the fundamentals of a free and democratic society – not least because there would soon be another opportunity to persuade my fellow-citizens that there is a better way.

There is no need, in other words, to demonise one’s political opponents. From the left, the right might well be attacked for being uncaring and selfish; from the right, the left could be accused of relying on others to fund their ambitions. But in neither case need we be too despairing if we lose the argument for the time being – the emphases and directions may differ but the fundamentals will remain the same.

We are in the happy position in New Zealand, unlike those in many other countries, of being assured that most of those seeking the powers of government have no intention of seizing that power and keeping it in perpetuity. We are all – or almost all – democrats, and we engage in an entirely proper and productive competition for popular support. It is, after all, that need to please the voters that keeps our governments in check and doing the right thing.

We might even learn that the terms “left-wing” or “right-wing” are, or should be, descriptive, rather than terms of abuse, and that their application to this or that opinion does not invalidate it or deny its legitimacy, and tells us as much about their user as about those to whom they are applied.

So, let us welcome the firing of the starting pistol. It signifies that we are once again invited to engage in a decision that billions of people worldwide would give their right arms (and even their left arms too!) to have the chance to enjoy. And, when we express our personal preferences for one person, party or policy rather than another, we are exercising our democratic rights, rather than seeking to deny them to others. We are all entitled to warm to one politician, rather than another, and to think there could be a better way.

So, let the battle begin – and let us be ready to salute the victors, and to live to fight another day if we lose.

Bryan Gould
5 August 2020

As polling day in the American presidential election draws closer, things are looking bad for Donald Trump. The polls show that he is tracking well behind his Democrat rival. Most people assume that the President will be striving might and main to avoid what looks increasingly likely to be a humiliating defeat.

I have a hunch, however, that this may be to misinterpret what is really happening. Consider the evidence.

The President is spending most of his time playing golf on his own golf courses, attracting a good deal of unfavourable comment as a result and dismaying his supporters who would expect him to be working doubly hard to overcome the Covid 19 pandemic. This is hardly the behaviour of someone who wants to keep the job.

He manifestly spends little time concerning himself with dealing with the virus and its deadly progress. He can’t seem to focus on what he should be doing; his press briefings on the subject are perfunctory and do not include his senior adviser on the subject, Dr Fauci. He seems to have lost interest in the subject altogether.

He offers no strategy for dealing with the pandemic, other than assuring people that, contrary to all the evidence, it will “go away”. The economy is in an unprecedented nosedive as case numbers and deaths multiply.

His one positive reaction to the crisis is that he has suggested that the election should be delayed and has warned that the high numbers of postal votes, necessitated by the virus, will mean that the election result will be the least reliable in history and will be vitiated by fraud. He has refused to give any assurance that he would accept the result if he loses.

What conclusion does all this suggest? My thesis is that he is is not only resigned to losing the election but would actually welcome that outcome. Here, I believe, is someone who knows that he is out of his depth, on the issue of the virus and on everything else – who is not enjoying the job, and has a sense that it is all beyond him, who would be glad to have the immediate burden of dealing with the pandemic removed from him and for others to have to shoulder it.

If, as I suspect, this is the case, what then is his priority? It is not to win the election, since that would mean that all the burdens and responsibilities would come crashing and crushing back down on him for another four years.

No, his main objective would be to escape the burden of a further term but to do so without having to accept that he had been rejected by the voters, which would be a serious blow to his ego and to his place in history. He has always been a President whose ego is much greater than his ability. His inaction and ineffectiveness in dealing with the virus have simply illustrated and exemplified a much wider truth, which is his overall unfitness for the job – it is a truth of which he cannot, however self-deluded, be unaware and that will weigh increasingly heavily on him.

So, if he is resigned to, or would welcome, losing, his focus would be on salvaging what he can of his reputation, which requires him to be able to say, as he hands over the reins to his successful rival, that it was not a fair contest and that he lost only because his opponents cheated.

This interpretation may be regarded as fanciful but it at least makes sense of the two apparently contradictory elements in his behaviour – contradictory, that is, if he is really trying to win.

There is, first, his manifest lack of interest in being seen to deal effectively with the pandemic, something he must know is the pre-condition of getting himself re-elected.

And secondly, there is his deliberate attempt to undermine the electoral process and his unwillingness to accept its outcome, an attitude that opens him up to the criticism that to re-elect him would be to empower someone prepared to threaten democracy – a perception that cannot help his chances of appealing to voters. Watch this space.

Bryan Gould
5 August 2020

It hasn’t taken long for the advent of Judith Collins as National party leader to change the tone of the political debate.

After several days of headlines and airwaves dominated by reports of a National MP sending pornographic images to young women, the National leader had had enough of that story, and found a way to turn the tables. She devised a way to release into the public domain reports that a Labour minister had had an affair that had ended some months earlier.

No matter that the affair had been known about in political circles for some time; the focus of attention was now on Labour. The Prime Minister had no option but to sack her minister; a failure to do so would have allowed Judith Collins to pursue the second leg of her stratagem, by daily hounding Jacinda Ardern with questions as to when she would “show leadership and do something about it”.

The contagion seems to have spread rapidly. We have now had Winston Peters attributing to the Prime Minister a readiness to lie and, when she does, to lie “big” – a practice usually attributed to Nazi leaders like Hitler and Goebbels; even for NZ First, this is surely “over the top”.

But before we get too depressed about this descent into gutter politics, we should pause to count our blessings. As we look around the globe, we see daily evidence of a world that, as the WHO constantly points out, has totally failed to grasp the severity of and threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic.

In Europe, there is worrying evidence of a second wave of cases and deaths. The virus is raging, almost unchecked, in countries like India and South Africa. Even in counties that have so far done quite well, like Australia, Israel, Japan and Hong Kong, there is a threatening resurgence. And as for the US and Brazil, a total failure of leadership in those countries is exacting a tragic toll of rising daily numbers of cases and deaths in the tens of thousands.

It is beginning to dawn on people that, until there is a vaccine (and I salute my old university, Oxford, for the promising work they have done in that regard), the virus will continue to seek out new victims until there are no more.

And – what about us, here in New Zealand? We have brought the pandemic under control, by ending community transmission, and we have now resumed normal life. We, alone in the world, can go about our business more or less as usual, and we alone can attend in large numbers to watch thrilling rugby matches and other sporting events. And, we can cheer when we see Ashley Bloomfield, “The Eliminator”, score a try!

None of this would have been possible if we had listened to the siren voices from various parts of the political spectrum, urging us to abandon the lockdowns prematurely, to open our borders, and to open up “bubbles” with other countries. It is noteworthy that none of the owners of those voices has ever “fessed up” that they got it wrong.

And one thing is even more certain; none of it would have been possible without the most effective, clear and courageous leadership from our Prime Minister and from Ashley Bloomfield, and without a truly uplifting community effort and resolve from all of us – ordinary Kiwis.

We can afford to ignore the efforts of politicians to re-focus on the grubbier aspects of life. We can afford to sympathise with those millions overseas whose governments have let them down.

Best of all, we can afford to congratulate ourselves and our leaders on a job well done.

Bryan Gould
29 July 2020