Editorial: If it ain't broke, don't dump it

Photo / Chris Skelton

When the country voted, in a referendum held in conjunction with the 1993 election, to change the system by which elections are conducted, many thought we had been promised a chance to change our minds in another poll a few years later.

It was a reflection, perhaps, of our ambivalence - the 54-46 margin was scarcely resounding, after all - about overturning the system that had been in place for 140 years, but it was a misapprehension that persisted and flourished in the years that followed.

No such promise had been made, of course. A review was provided for, and one was undertaken, by a multi-party parliamentary committee, which concluded that there was no reason to change things.

In doing so, the committee took a wider view than voters, disgruntled by the dog-wagging that some tails had been engaging in, might have managed. Its members understood that the system should not be written off because of the behaviour of individuals.

That is not to say that the two-stage review announced this week by Justice Minister Simon Power is not worth holding.

By the time the process he proposes is complete, 21 years will have elapsed since the referendum that ushered in proportional representation and the public discussion leading up to the 2011 and 2014 votes will bring valuable and important scrutiny to bear.

But there is no discernible groundswell of opinion in favour of wholesale change.

And neither should there be. Those whose political memories reach back to the Muldoon era will remember that the late MP for Tamaki led National to victory in successive elections - 1978 and 1981 - despite the party's having won fewer votes than Labour.

In the second of those two elections, Social Credit had 20.65 per cent of the vote - more than half National's tally - but secured only two of the 92 seats.

These anomalies arose under the solely electorate-based "first past the post" (FPP) system when a party narrowly won more electorates than it heavily lost.

The resulting disproportionate relationship between voter support and electoral fortune is actually mathematically measurable by the so-called Gallagher Index: the changeover from FPP to MMP has reduced that statistical skew - called "disproportionality" - by 90 per cent.

A whole generation of voters who have never known anything other than MMP may need reminding of that as the debate gathers momentum.

In announcing that MMP will be tweaked even if voters want to retain it, the minister has hugely increased the chances of that retention.

Few voters will relish the task of getting to grips with the complexities of another proportional system but many want some of the bigger wrinkles of the MMP system to be ironed out.

Chief among those is the provision that allows a party with a popular vote beneath the five per cent threshold to scurry into Parliament on the coat-tails of an electorate MP.

It makes a mockery of the entire concept of proportional representation that NZ First, with more than 4per cent of the party vote in the last election, won no seats, while the Act Party, with 3.65per cent, got five MPs because Rodney Hide took Epsom.

Good sense suggests a lower threshold - the Royal Commission suggested four per cent - and the removal of the coat-tails provision. By the same token, a dumped electorate MP should not be nursed back into the House by a cosy position on a party list.

These are all matters that deserve, and will get, widespread debate. In the meantime, the Government is to be commended for initiating the review, and in particular for listening to minor parties' views on how it should be designed.

But before the first vote, Power will need to be specific about what amendments to MMP are envisaged. It makes sense that voters have the new, improved version - and not the vagaries of past experience - in mind when they tick the boxes in the first referendum.