Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 4, Number 4, 1 ʻApelila 1987 — Initiative Favored [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Initiative Favored

By Clarence F.T. Ching Trustee, O'ahu

lnitiative is a process j that is often maligned by I some legislators who see it as | an attack on their business = as lawmakers and by special interest groups who would rather not have the general public get in the way of their lobbying efforts. Many legislators also seem to be taken up by their mistaken belief • that they know everything,

that they know what is best for the people, that they always do a good job and that they are always responsive to the people's concerns. On the other hand, legislators also dodge or put off the hard issues. The socalled representative democracy that we Americans believe we have is not all that is cracked up to be. Despite all of its democratic trappings, it isn't that mueh different from the government systems that the American revolution was against. Initiative is something we hear about from time to time but is elusive because it is not well understood. Initiative is the power of the people to make laws by putting proposa!s on the bal!ot by petition arid then enacting them by popular vote. David Schmidt, executive director of the Initiative Resource Center in Washington, D.C. puts it in a nutshell: "The principles of democracy are decentralization of power and power-to-the-people, but the reality is centralization, a large bureaucracy, and people with money controlling all three branches of government. The initiative process translates our ideals into reality. It

truly puts the people in control of government." Occassional public statements have been made that initiative is a haloe-kind of thing and that it is not Hawaiian and will not solve Hawaiian problems. I disagree. If we are to become the self-determining and self-govern-ing people that we Hawaiians espouse to be, then initiative must be one of the arrows in our quiver. It is unfortunate that we have not had it earlier, when we existed in a larger percentage of the voting public. However, we and our non-Hawaiian sympathizers are still a major voting bloc if we eome together. Because of the influx of in-migrants, our relative political power is decreasing. But we still must be reckoned with. The voters in 23 states, including every western state except Hawaii, have the power to propose laws or state constitutional admendments through a statewide initiative process. However, our counties have given us the power and we have been exercising our initiative rights in those arenas. Some of those initiatives have been Date-Laau, Nukolii, Ft. DeRussy and Hawaii's Nuclear Free Zone. That we haven't been able to establish a state initiative may be indicative of the colonialistic and racist attitudes of the power structure. Why give power to the people when a relative small group (the legislature) influenced by big-moneyed special interests have the situation well in hand? Howard Jarvis, one of the co-sponsors of California's Proposition 13 asked: "Does the government control the pēople, or do the people control government?" It might be informative to take a brief look at some of the more significant kinds of progressive laws that were born out of the initiative process: In 1972, voters in California overwhelmingly approved a strong initiative measure to protect the coastal zone of that state. This led to considerable action in

other jurisdictions. 2. In 1972, voters in Washington aproved the first in a series of reform initiatives following Watergate. In 1974, honesty in government initiatives were passed in Alaska, Idaho, California and Missouri. 3. In 1912, when only seven states had granted women suffrage, Aizona and Oregon gave women the right to vote by intitiative. 4. One week before the 1976 public vote on the nuclear safeguard bill in California, Gov. Brown signed three bills into law. 5. Between 1920 and 1914, employee rights' bills that covered workmen's compensation were passed in Oregon and Arizona. 6. The poll tax was abolished in several states by successful initiative campaigns early in this century. 7. Family farming in North Dakota was preserved by a 1932 initiative prohibiting corporate farm takeovers. 8. Bottle bills were passed by initiative in Maine and Michigan in 1976. 9. In 1968, voters in Washington passed an initiative that limited consumer interest rates to 12 percent. 10. Voters in Oregon (1904) and Maine (1911) gave themselves the right to choose their party nominees by ballot. In 1910 the presidential primary eame into being in Oregon by initiative. It is refreshing that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of the nation of Hawaii convening in See lnitiative Pg. 4

• lnitiative from Pg. 2 Keaukaha over the last few months have overwhelmingIy supported initiative. They have also supported referendum and recall, a eouple of other procedures that complete the process of governance by the people. That a representative group of Hawaiians from all of the islands support initiative may substantially add to the existing nucleus of citizens that are pro-initiative and help take the movement one more step closer to realization.