KEY POINTS:
It is more than a little rich for United Future leader Peter Dunne to rail against the existence of the Maori seats in Parliament which, as he sees it, have the effect of "distorting MMP and potentially perverting the will of the voters".
His argument rests on the anomaly in the electoral arithmetic created by the fact that the Maori Party's representation in the House is disproportionate to its nationwide support. In the last election, the Maori Party had 2.1 per cent support, which should have entitled it to only two seats. But Maori candidates prevailed in four electorates, which delivered them four MPs. Polls strongly suggest that the party could take six, or even all seven, Maori electorates this time, without significantly increasing its party vote. So if it is anomalous now, it will likely be more so on November 9.
Just how desirable this state of affairs is a debatable, if complex, matter and Dunne is as entitled as anyone else to his opinion about it. But since he owes his political existence to the anomaly, it ill befits him to be broaching with such vehemence the question of whether the Maori seats are having a perverse or perverting effect.
In fact, United Future has been one of the more anomalous features of the political landscape since the introduction of MMP. In 1996 and 1999, Dunne carried his electorate, Ohariu-Belmont, but his party's shares of the vote (0.9 and 0.5 per cent respectively) would not have seen it in Parliament otherwise; in 2002, United Future got eight MPs, partly by feasting on the remains after National's massacre and partly because an electronic worm in a leaders' debate responded positively to Dunne's repeated intoning of the phrase common sense.
As a result, he took into Parliament with him a green but happy band of mostly fundamentalist Christian MPs who, in his own words, imagined that United Future could become New Zealand's version of the Taleban.
By the last election United Future's boilover of support had noticeably cooled: the party got three MPs, one of whom has since defected. And in the latest Herald-DigiPoll survey, it is at the very bottom of the party-vote pile, on a paltry 0.2 per cent.
Right now, Dunne is the very last person in our politics who should be complaining about a party's over-representation in the House on the strength of its showing in electorate contests. That same poll has Maori Party support at 2.4 per cent well short of what it needs to get list seats in Parliament, but some 12 times as much as United Future can muster. Dunne has always had a wildly inflated sense of his place in the scheme of things, as his tantrum on election night in 2005 famously demonstrated, but numbers like those should give even him pause for thought.
It is looking increasingly likely that the Maori Party will hold the balance of power after the election, a state of affairs rich in irony and verging on poetic justice. Labour, whose Foreshore and Seabed Act was the catalyst for the creation of the Maori Party may find itself in coalition talks with the very people Helen Clark described as haters and wreckers when they led a hikoi to Parliament protesting against the law. Meanwhile National, which had pledged to abolish the Maori seats, now finds that, to get its hands on the levers of power, it may be depending on the support of MPs it has vowed to constitutionally exterminate. Little wonder that John Key, looking slightly nauseous, now takes the position that the abolition of the seats is "not a bottom line".
The influence that the Maori Party may exert in the formation of the next Government will strengthen the argument of those who feel that, under MMP, small-party tails are wagging large-party dogs. But that does not, of itself, argue for the abolition of the Maori seats. NZ First, Act, United Future and the Progressives have all, at different times and to different extents, exerted influence disproportionate to their mandate. That is MMP.
There is an argument to be had as to whether a party-vote threshold, perhaps lower than the existing 5 per cent, should have to be crossed before local success can deliver a seat in Parliament. But the need for that discussion arises because of all the minor parties and the different demographics of their constituencies. It is not an issue raised by the case of the Maori Party alone.
