Abstract
The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (NZBORA) was intended to create a form of 'political rights review of legislation' whereby elected representatives would carefully scrutinise, and often reject, legislative proposals that impose apparently unjustified limits on individual rights. Rather than judges being able to strike rights infringing legislation down ex post facto, elected members of parliament would apply ex ante controls to ensure that legislation did not impose unjustifiable restrictions on rights and freedoms. In practice, this has not occurred. Instead, New Zealand governments routinely have proposed legislation they are told includes unjustifiable rights limits, which members of parliament in the House of Representatives have then almost invariably voted to enact into law. This article explains why New Zealand's combination of Westminster style government and tight internal party discipline mean that the NZBORA has not delivered on the early hopes invested in it. It also considers New Zealand's experience in the context of other jurisdictions that followed its constitutional lead, concluding that the idea of political rights review of legislation appears to suffer from a fundamental flaw at its very core.