KEY POINTS:
Brian Rudman's robust attack on me (New Zealand Herald, May 21) demonstrates how out of touch he is with ordinary people.
He steadfastly clings on to MMP in the vain belief that the system he voted for actually works and delivers a Parliament that makes New Zealanders proud.
Independent research I commissioned last year (Insight Research), which he also refers to, shows that 68 per cent of New Zealanders want a referendum on the electoral system, irrespective of whether they support MMP or any other voting system.
That is not me saying that, or any particular business group, but ordinary Kiwis who view the daily decisions of politicians and bureaucrats as out of step with reality and not in keeping with the policies of the parties they voted for.
There is ample evidence to demonstrate that MMP is the electoral fraud of all time, not least the declining turnouts in general elections and the ill will it fosters (against the bold promises of a happier, more inclusive Parliament). But the purpose of the group I am part of is not to denigrate MMP - my views are well known in any case - but to restore to New Zealanders the right to have a vote on how we vote.
Mr Rudman, perhaps the last of an ageing breed of unreconstructed socialists, instead chooses to attack people like me and Peter Shirtcliffe as part of some dark force trying to subvert democracy.
I am, according to Mr Rudman, in cahoots with the Business Roundtable and Mr Shirtcliffe is my paymaster. This is as unfair as it is defamatory.
For the record, it was I who took the initiative to seek the support of others to lobby certain National Party members to make them hold true to earlier commitments to hold a referendum on MMP. I did this in my spare time, fitting it around family, my work as a freelance journalist and author and my service on a high school board of trustees.
I did it because I was and remain passionate about democracy.
Peter Shirtcliffe is a friend but I am not his paid spokesman and he is not my paymaster. I have not received one cent of funding from Mr Shirtcliffe, the Business Roundtable or anyone else for my recent lobbying to achieve a referendum on MMP and I was never part of Mr Shirtcliffe's earlier anti-MMP Campaign for Better Government.
My contribution to the electoral debate was a book I wrote in 1998, Why MMP Must Go: The Case for Ditching the Electoral Disaster of the Century. It still sells because many people can't get their head around why the country voted for such an awful electoral system and why there was there was no provision for a second referendum.
The views I held about MMP then remain true now, though I imagine the system electors would vote for would be a hybrid comprising an element of proportionality and a large dollop of first-past-the-post. The supplementary member system would suit me if the public chose not to return to first-past-the-post.
This would mean reducing Parliament to, say, 100 members, something the Margaret Robertson citizens-initiated referendum called for - of which 80 would be elected under first-past-the-post - and the remaining 20 on a top-up system proportionate to their share of the party vote.
The Greens would survive in a truncated form but New Zealand First and any other parties without constituency members would probably disappear. The Maori Party would actually be strengthened because it is a constituency party and would not take quite the bath it does now in the party vote.
My challenge to the cantankerous Mr Rudman is: forget about central planning, proportional representation, big governments, regulation and those other ugly features of socialism you're wedded to and embrace the modern age. This means allowing people the right to have a vote on how they should vote.
* Graeme Hunt is a freelance journalist and author lobbying for a referendum on the voting system.
