Garth George: MMP referendum better late than never

Have we reason to hope that before the end of the next decade we will have dumped the MMP electoral system and returned New Zealand to a democracy? With the Government's decision to put the voting system to a referendum at the next election, it would seem so.

What depresses me about this move is that it has taken so long to get to this stage, and will take a lot longer before we are quit of a system that has plagued us since 1996 and benefited no one except politicians and their parties, including teensy-weensy single-issue cliques.

The planned 2011 referendum will come only nine years late. It should have been held in 2002, but the Labour-led Government of the day ignored that undertaking, having become dependent on its party list and on coalitions with minorities.

The way our self-serving politicians reneged on the understanding that there would be a review of the MMP system after a suitable trial still rankles with many.

It didn't happen - not even a disinterested review by the Electoral Commission. What we got was a special parliamentary committee, tainted by the preservation instincts of the little parties, which found everything hunky-dory. The public, as this newspaper said in an editorial this week, has nursed a justifiable grievance ever since.

MPs of the minor parties know that if MMP is dumped, or modified to make it more democratic, they could lose the excessive influence they have under the MMP system.

Prime Minister John Key seems to think that there is no mood for change. There is, he said this week, "increasing comfort that MMP is working".

He seems to forget that one of the reasons his party won power so convincingly last year was his promise to proceed with a referendum on the electoral system. And, perhaps, he has lost touch with those voting men (and women) in the street, hundreds of thousands of whom have had a gutsful of MMP and who, given the chance, will say so loudly and clearly.

We gag at the obnoxious wheeling and dealing that goes into forming minority government coalitions and we cringe when we see the compromises which such coalitions entail, and the paucity of decisive governance.

What makes it worse is that this constant political expediency has not been employed for the good of the country but so that politicians can keep their greedy fingers on the levers of power.

The most outrageous example of this, of course, was the appointment of Winston Peters as Treasurer (albeit briefly) by Jim Bolger's minority National Government and the last minority Labour Government's appointment of him as outside-Cabinet Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The electorate made its views on that pretty clear when, at last year's election, it removed New Zealand First from the political landscape, fed up with it attaching itself like a leech to whichever party looked like forming a government, irrespective of political stripe.

Among those who want to see the end of MMP are electors who have watched an unpopular MP dumped by his or her electorate only to sneak back into Parliament on a party list. Many resent the fact that scores of MPs are in Parliament at the whim of a political party and have no accountability to the voters. They understand only too well that far too much legislation has been forced through Parliament by MMP governments, both National and Labour-led, in the face of widespread public opposition. They know this would not have been possible had many of the MPs involved been accountable to the electors rather than being puppets of the party list-makers who put them there.

And a lot of people are sick and tired of a coalition system that gives far too much say to one-eyed minor parties pushing their single-issue barrows.

These we don't need, the Greens and Act in particular. The Greens, who sit far to the left of Labour, have had their day. And Act, which sits so far to the right of National that its members from time to time fall off their seats, has no value to our nation, and never has.

The Maori Party will survive, of course, because all its MPs are democratically elected, whereas of all the Green and Act MPs, only Rodney Hide holds a seat.

The gravest danger in this move towards reviewing our electoral system is that politicians will take it on themselves to frame the questions and select the alternatives.

This must not happen. Political careers are at stake in any change and self-interest will be paramount to many MPs who will fight long and viciously to protect their futures.

The 2011 referendum, and any subsequent one, must be framed by men and women who are totally independent of politics. Only then can we have some hope that power will ultimately be returned to the people.