ABSTRACT
On 11 December 2004, the New Zealand House of Representatives commissioned a parliamentary committee to review existing constitutional arrangements.1 The Committee was also to make recommendations to the government concerning appropriate processes for constitutional change. This inquiry was concerned to review, among other issues, ‘the place of the Treaty [of Waitangi], its principles and the broader issue of historic claims, the idea of a written constitution and Maori representation in Parliament’.2
Published in August 2005, the Committee’s report located the sources of the constitution and set out a ‘timeline’ of its development, with 1840 – the year the Treaty was signed – being marked a significant originary point. In the report’s ‘Overview’, Aotearoa New Zealand is positioned, with the United Kingdom, in the group of countries with an ‘unwritten’ constitution, in which constitutional rules ‘are contained in a mixture of statutes, court decisions and practices’.3 As a consequence of ‘the absence of a written and entrenched constitution’, there is ‘room for much debate whether key values or policy settings are so embedded that they have become “constitutional” ’ [sic].4 Furthermore, the constitution is defined as having developed over a period of just over 150 years by a process of ‘pragmatic evolution’.5
