The next election will be our 10th under the MMP electoral system. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The next election will be our 10th under the MMP electoral system. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Opinion by Graham Kelly
OPINION
Electoral systems are a product of their time and place.
A current review is set to repeat mistakes of the past unless it goes back to the drawing board before any move to contemplate new legislation.
In 1992 and the following year, when referendums were held to change theelectoral system, the public was disillusioned with broken promises made by National and Labour governments in the name of free-market, neoliberal policies, including massive state asset sales.
The public wanted more control over politicians and the political process. A vote for proportional representation was a vote to get rid of majority governments.
The public mood was akin to lemmings charging to the edge of a cliff and going over in their desperation to support the one alternative that the polls indicated might beat the old first past the post system.
Illustration / Rod Emmerson
At the time, I was the Labour MP for Porirua. Along with barely more than 5 per cent of voters, I supported a Supplementary Member (SM) system. This, along with the Single Transferable Vote (STV) was also on offer.
The two alternatives are mixed systems and less extreme in their outcomes. They blend the best of both ends of the spectrum (majority versus proportional) and tend to produce stable governments on which the tail is not wagging the dog in a kingmaker position.
Instead, the Independent Electoral Commission Review Panel has limited its much wider brief to an interim report that addresses only how MMP could be improved.
Its main recommendation - to lower the party threshold from 5 per cent to 3.5 per cent - is simplistic and would likely risk the almost ungovernable state that occurred in France and Italy after World War II, and currently in Israel, because of the low thresholds for parties to be represented in Parliament.
Italy now has a 3 per cent threshold but has had 70 governments in 77 years. Israel with a 3.25 per cent threshold is unstable with small minor parties wagging the tail with extremist policies in their 120-seat, 10-party Knesset.
Today’s political party environment is unlike that of 30 years ago, given how social media and disinformation are coalescing dangerously misguided views into new parties seeking to erode democracy rather than work within it.
It is naive to think that lowering the threshold would not lead to a proliferation of small parties in Parliament and eventually cause pressure for the bar to be lowered again in New Zealand.
Graham Kelly, QSO, was an MP for Porirua and Mana for 15 of the 16 years he was in Parliament and then New Zealand High Commissioner to Canada. His book: Keeping the Party in Tune: How politics and music shaped my life is published on August 22.
All it would take is for a small party to make it a condition of a coalition agreement, particularly if they only just made the threshold and didn’t think it would happen again.
So, this proposal is a step too far. And for what?
Proportional representation in Aotearoa has created a culture of trying to win the middle ground, but with watered-down policies, followed by more compromises with another party during coalition negotiations to form a government.
A chapter in my new book is devoted to a change of system rather than an ill-considered tweak in what we have (that could include removing the one-electorate seat threshold for a minor party to enter parliament).
In a SM system, list MPs would make up only 25 per cent and not 50 per cent of Parliament. This would be enough to continue the changed behaviour of Parliament that has occurred since proportional representation.
We don’t want to jump from the frying pan into the fire because a wider perspective has not been taken into account.
The government-appointed panel in 1996 made a similar mistake when sending out information on how MMP worked, prior to the first MMP election, because it never once said that the party vote was far more important and significant to determine which party would become government.
It didn’t say the electorate vote would only backfill the number with List MPs that were determined by the party vote totals.
We deserve better this time.
- Graham Kelly, QSO, was an MP for Porirua and Mana for 15 of the 16 years he was in Parliament and then New Zealand High Commissioner to Canada. His book: Keeping the Party in Tune: How politics and music shaped my life is published on August 22.
