Chapter Two

Justice

"A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth ... and say, this is not just.” Martin Luther King.

The primary goal of the Values Party is not to create an enclosed utopia for New Zealanders. We seek to establish the largest possible measure of equality of environment, circumstances, and opportunity, not just for ourselves and our own descendants, but for every world citizen.

We do not regard the injustices in human society as exceptions or accidents within a basically sound society. We consider society itself is ailing and reject solutions whereby the affluent do good works yet continue an exploitive lifestyle at the expense of the majority of mankind. We think the extremes of both riches and poverty are degrading and anti-social.

Since we no longer believe that the present political, economic, and social system is basically sound and just, we are not prepared to try yet again the piecemeal approach of the reformer. It is not enough to attack the symptoms of injustice; the cause lies in the false values of those who run society. We believe that social institutions, laws, and economic organisation should be planned as far as possible to emphasise and strengthen the common humanity which unites people, not to emphasise the differences that divide them, such as nationality, sex, race, age, religion, income and class handicaps.

People may differ profoundly as individuals in capacity and character but their human and civil rights are equal. Society must try to enable all of its members to make the best of any powers they possess. Because people's requirements are different, they can be met satisfactorily only by varying forms of provision. Society must not treat different needs and different groups in the same way, but must devote equal care to ensuring that they are met in the ways most appropriate to them.

With regard to civil liberties, we are concerned at the way repressive legislatioh and inflexible bureaucratic procedures intrude more and more into the area of individual privacy and morality. Our policies on law reform and discriminatory practices are based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We endorse the belief of J. S. Mill [1871] that:

“There is a circle around every individual human being which no government, be it that of a few or that of the many, ought to be permitted to overstep ... it ought to include all that part which concerns only the life, whether inward or outward of the individual, and does not affect the interests of others, or affects them only through the moral influence of example. It is allowable in all to assert or promulgate, with all the force they are capable of, their opinion of what is good or bad, admirable or contemptible, but not to compel others to that opinion.”