Anti-MMP feeling a symptom of deep discontent

By Jan Corbett

By the winter of 2002, a yet-to-be-appointed parliamentary select committee will have decided if we will continue to elect governments under the MMP system or if we should try again for something new.

The 18-year-olds who cast their first votes in the inaugural MMP election of 1996 will then be 24, with only the vaguest recollection of how things used to be under first-past-the-post (FPP) - the landslides and the frustration of smaller parties.

Even fewer will remember how FPP became so despised for the way it allowed Governments to cynically manipulate election results by massaging electorate boundaries. Which is how in both 1978 and 1981 National retained power with a slim majority, even though Labour won the total vote.

By the 1992 electoral referendum, and after eight years of painful economic reform forced through with scant consultation, the public mood towards politicians was nasty.

As if we saw it as the only opportunity to wrest back some control over our democracy, that year 84.7 per cent of us voted to scrap FPP and 70.5 per cent said we should replace it with MMP (Mixed-Member Proportional).

We thought we would get fairer representation and clearer consultation.

But 12 months is a long time in politics and the decisive referendum on MMP at the 1993 general election was more closely fought, thanks to the anti-MMP Campaign For Better Government led by then Telecom chairman Peter Shirtcliffe. MMP was still preferred but its majority was trimmed - 53.9 per cent still wanted it, 46.1 per cent preferred FPP.

In the cynical manoeuvrings that followed, politicians looking for advantage under MMP nearly signed its death warrant.

Suddenly the landscape became, and remains, crowded with small parties held together by only one tenuous thread - the desire to hold the balance of power.

While party fragmentation was already happening under FPP, Dr Helena Catt, an Auckland University specialist in electoral systems, says it certainly has not helped MMP's image.

However, she sees it as a phenomenon of a new electoral process as it beds down. She predicts this phase will pass and by 2002 we should have clearer party alignments.

But do we want to wait? After three years of coalition chaos, fluid allegiances and embarrassing antics from the more inappropriate list members, are we ready to admit that MMP has been a colossal mistake?

Surprisingly, even during MMP's nadir the answer was "not yet," although only by a 5 per cent margin.

In July 1998, a month before the coalition collapsed, a poll by Waikato University political scientists showed 47 per cent of the 535 respondents believed it was too early to judge MMP. But 42 per cent wanted it dumped.

The survey was part of their ongoing New Zealand Election Study, led by Associate Professor Jack Vowles. Although he has not formally updated that research, he suspects support for MMP will have grown slightly since the coalition collapsed. "Minority government has delivered the outcome New Zealanders wanted from MMP - the Government cannot push anything through," he says.

But that 1998 survey found another trend that the researchers regard as a matter for deep concern - "New Zealanders feel highly alienated from politicians and government, probably more so than at any other time."

In 1996, 73 per cent said they were satisfied with the way democracy worked in this country. By 1998 that figure had plummeted to 45 per cent.

Further, 76 per cent believed most MPs were out of touch with the rest of the country, 68 per cent disagreed with the idea the Government can be trusted to do the right thing most of the time, and only 66 per cent believed their votes counted.

That this degree of alienation could see more New Zealanders opting to cast a fishing line rather than a vote come election day is already worrying the people at the Electoral Enrolment Centre.

By mid-September, only 85 per cent of those eligible to vote were on the roll.

"I'd like it a little higher," says centre national manager Murray Wicks.

So he did some research of his own on 354 eligible voters not yet enrolled. One-third had not even the vaguest idea when the next general election was due. But he also found 84 per cent were aware of the need to enrol, so ignorance was not the problem.

Worldwide, young people typically have less interest in politics than the old. Certainly here two-thirds of those not enrolled are aged 18 to 39. But Mr Wicks has also noted an overrepresentation of lower socio-economic Maori and Pacific Islanders among the unenrolled, a feature "that is more pronounced than in the past."

Yet at the first MMP election in 1996, the decline in voter participation - a pattern that began in the 1980s and is a common feature across the Western world - was halted when 80 per cent of those eligible voted, compared with 78 per cent at the previous election.

The New Zealand Election Study reported that not only had MMP raised participation but that those on the left of the political spectrum and Maori were more likely to vote than they had been under FPP.

But the authors noted that the coalition of National and New Zealand First, "a coalition that neither party's supporters expected or preferred" might have again saddled voters with a feeling of impotence and "it remains to be seen whether these attitudes will encourage or discourage voters from going to the polls in the next election."