You have committed a serious crime. Bad enough that you have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment of two years. For the duration of your sentence, you won’t be able to wear what you want or eat what you want to eat. By and large, you will not be entitled to control the timing and manner of your interactions with other people.
In this and a hundred smaller and bigger ways, you will cease to be a free person in any meaningful way.
Oh, and as a consequence of your imprisonment, you will not be entitled to participate in a mass vote in a general election where the effects of your participation as an individual will be so minute as to make no discernible difference.
If you, as an imprisoned person, could choose to have just one of those rights to be restored to you, which would it be? Would you honestly choose the right to vote under section 14 of the Bill of Rights over the right to freedom of peaceable assembly (s 16), association (s 17) or, say, of movement (s 18)?
In 2010, Parliament determined that those who have been found to disregard our laws to the extent they are imprisoned should also forfeit the right help make the rules during the term of their punishment. Now, the government has announced it intends to reverse that stance, so some prisoners (but not others) will be re-enfranchised during the term of their punishment.
Personally, I have no serious objection to prisoners being able to vote if they so choose. It will probably result in a tiny little bump in the vote totals for Labour and NZ First but that’s neither here nor there, really. Of all the ways that imprisonment would be Hell on earth, the loss of a prerogative that a lot of people don't bother to exercise anyway ranks very low on the scale.
For the life of me, however, I struggle to understand why it has, in particular, become such a cause celebre for liberals in this country. The basic premise of the social contract is that people exchange total freedom of action for the protection the rules the legitimate government. If you are found unwilling to adhere to those rules, being stripped of your right to influence them for the period of your ostracisation.
After all, what is prison but a period of suspended freedom? When the prisoner is restored to the community, he or she is then, of course, permitted to participate in the act of governing once more. The reutrn full democratic and civil rights is mark of the former prisoner's restoration to society.
I'm not sure I really go in for all this personally. However, the logic is intuitive enough that the theory underpinning the ban probably makes sense to most people. And while a blanket ban on prisoner voting will produce some anomalous situations, this is the case of most laws.
In any event, there was nothing particularly new or novel about Parliament banning prisoners from voting. Nor was there anything exclusively "right-wing" or necessarily "reactionary" about the stance.
During the English civil war, for example, the movement known as the Levellers threatened the powers that be with notions of popular sovereignty – but did not extend demands for suffrage to convicted criminals. In the mid-19th century, the working-class Chartists fought strongly for the expansion of the vote, but not for those undergoing punishment for a crime at the time of an election. In neither case did the democratic instinct of the reformers countenance prisoner voting and nor did the question arise during the great advances of women's suffrage.
None of this is to say that there is a requirement we ban prisoners from voting. Rather it is a policy that is available to be considered by a democratic but ordered society. Especially given the fact, as set out above, that we already impose worse indignities on prisoners. Much worse.
Now it is certainly true that the courts do not agree with this. In multiple decisions now, judges have determined that, in their view, the ban on prisoner voting is not justifiable. But those are inescapably political judgements, and it is not part of our consitutional order that the political judgments of our judicial branch are superior those of our legislative branch.
And that is why, very wisely, Parliament did not make the courts into New Zealand's version of a Guardian Council when it passed the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990.
If you think prisoners ought to vote, by all means make the case for why this is so. But as for the claims of National Party tyranny? Spare me.