In Search of Consensus: New Zealand’s Electoral Act 1956 and its Constitutional Legacy
Elizabeth McLeay
Victoria University Press, $40.00,
ISBN 9781776561841

As I write, the sitting president of the United States of America is reported to be seriously contemplating the use of his powers of pardon to pardon himself. Such proposed conduct illustrates just how much all constitutions, written or unwritten, require large measures of self-restraint on the part of officials and politicians in order to work properly. Constitutional lawyers, political scientists and pundits tend to focus on these and other incidents in which politicians test the limits of their powers. In her new book, In Search of Consensus: New Zealand’s Electoral Act 1956 and its Constitutional Legacy, Elizabeth McLeay does something which is much more original. She makes a study of the voluntary and wholly politically enforced self-restraint by New Zealand politicians in the Electoral Act 1956 and its successor legislation.