For the past 40 years, what do US Democratic Presidents have in common? They have all been lawyers. Bill Clinton went to Yale Law School. Barack Obama went to Yale Law School. Hillary Clinton, who ran unsuccessfully for President, went to Yale Law School. The current US President who is standing down, Joe Biden, is a lawyer. Who has he endorsed to be the Democratic candidate for this year's Presidential election? Kamala Harris who is a lawyer. Meanwhile, current UK Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a lawyer, and former UK Labour PM, Tony Blair, is a lawyer. On the US Republican side, things are very different. President Reagan was an actor, George Bush and his son, George W. Bush, both businessmen, the former graduating with a BA in economics. Meanwhile Donald Trump is also a businessman and holds a degree in economics from Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. What could be a possible reason for this striking difference between left and right? Maybe its because lawyers like to pass laws that regulate our behavior, whereas business folks and economists are more on the side of letting people make their own decisions.
The NZ public has not embraced lawyers as political leaders like the Americans. However that does not mean the legal profession has not been running the show in this country. It was Geoffrey Palmer, a lawyer, who designed the original Resource Management Act, and it is David Parker, a lawyer, who's currently drawing up plans to implement wealth and capital taxes as part of the Labour Party's platform for the 2026 election. The current Chair of Kiwi Rail is a lawyer. His Deputy Chair is a lawyer. Most of NZ's big firms have boards dominated by lawyers (and accountants) who have no shop-floor experience in the industry in which "their" company is working. How have they got their jobs? From what I have learned, mostly by networking & schmoozing. Is this a world-wide phenomena? No. Who do companies like Tesla have on their boards? To give you a flavor, folks like Mr. Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, and Mr. Straubel, founder of Redwood Materials, a firm working to drive down the costs and environmental footprint of lithium-ion batteries by offering sources of anode & cathode materials from recycled batteries. He holds a B.Sc in Energy Systems Engineering and M.Sc in Engineering, with an emphasis on energy conversion, from Stanford University.
But don't dream about it in New Zealand. In our case, much of the mess we are in can be blamed, in my view, on lawyers (and judges). What has been the objective of those sitting in the Auckland law firms quietly earning incomes of way over $1 million a year? To maximize their fee income, of course. The legal & regulatory structures that have promoted monopoly power in NZ, the frameworks that govern race-relations, and the mountains of red-tape we all must navigate, have been made deliberately divisive, deliberately ineffective, and deliberately onerous by Kiwi lawyers, all to generate more disputes & work for law firms and their partners. The profession that has ground NZ's economy to a halt has been our legal profession - all in the name of its selfish, greedy quest for higher incomes.
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