Shifting lines in MMP conflict

By Colin James

Lasting stability in the northern European models on which our MMP system is based needs two strong parties consistently able to win more than 40 per cent of the vote.

In the past 25 years, National and Labour have each managed that only three times. Only once did they both top 40 per cent.

In 1996 they hit seven-decade lows. If MMP is to last, they will have to do better.

The 1990s have been a bad case of Labour's loves lost. In the coming election battle, one-time Labour luminaries will launch three parties' campaigns as leaders: the Alliance's, Act's and United's. And that does not include Jack Elder, who will stand alongside Winston Peters, nor five onetime aspiring Labour candidates led by Tau Henare under the Mauri Pacific banner.

It might have been even worse. National in 1994 wooed - and says it nearly won as a partner - 1990-93 Labour leader Mike Moore, who then dithered for months from late 1995 over joining then National MP Michael Laws in a new party, only backing Helen Clark late in the 1996 campaign.

This dismal dispersal ends a cen-tury which started full of hope for the social democratic cause, and which at midpoint seemed to have fully vindicated that hope.

The Labour Party going into this campaign is not the triumphant party of 1938, or even 1973. It is a party groping for philosophical direction along a murky "third way."

Yet voters have been drifting, edging, some even returning with conviction, to Labour. Disciplined, enlivened and confident, Labour is realistically expecting to lead the next government.

Jim Anderton, renegade founder in 1989 of NewLabour (now part of the Alliance), is proclaiming he will be "the heart of a new government." He means a Labour-led government in which he heads the junior partner. Together, Labour and the Alliance - which since 1996 has lost four of its 13 MPs in its own mini-dispersal - are a coalition in waiting.

This is the biggest difference from 1996. Then, voters who wanted National out had no clear means. Labour was woefully weak.

The Alliance said it would not join after the election with any party that would not declare its intentions beforehand, and none would. New Zealand First said it was the only party that could get National out - then kept it in. This year, voters whose top priority is to unseat National know that if they and enough like-minded people vote Labour or Alliance, that will do it.

"Us, too," the Greens would butt in, having skipped from the Alliance. But they are an uncertain bet, well below the 5 per cent barrier and needing leader Jeanette Fitzsimons' Coromandel seat to stay in the House. Contrast Labour with National's "Houdini" 1990s decade.

National was effectively "beaten" in 1993, suffering a 13 per cent drop in its vote, enough to finish it off except that Labour was still too discredited to profit. It was "beaten" again in 1996, when a majority voted for parties vowing to put National out.

Through all that, National stayed in office, if not always in power. This is despite shedding MPs wholesale. Between 1990 and 1993, three defected, to NZ First and the Liberal Party (which became part of the Alliance but folded in 1997, leader Frank Grover this year joining the right-wing niche Christian Heritage Party).

Between 1993 and 1996 nine National MPs deserted - for the Conservatives (now defunct), Christian Democrats (now Future New Zealand and scarcely a blip on the opinion poll radar), United and NZ First. This year, Christine Fletcher gave up the National whip.

Now, having shed Mr Peters for the second time when it broke up its coalition with him last year, National is a flotsam and jetsam Government, dependent on Act to its right, Alamein Kopu (another refugee from the Alliance) to its far left, Peter Dunne in the centre and assorted deserters from NZ First. To many voters, this is the unacceptable face of MMP.

National's nightmare is that to win office again it may need another such hotchpotch.

Act is determined that will not happen, saying it will not even support, let alone join, a National government that includes NZ First. Act aims thereby to turn this election into a straight fight between Labour-Alliance on one side and National-Act on the other.

And this is how most voters are likely to see it - a landscape eerily like the two-party contests of the 50 years from the mid-1930s to the mid-1980s, although with the difference that the two major parties' left and right flanks are separated out. But it is not so simple.

First, the Alliance is not just Labour's left wing but has fundamental differences with it. Labour accepts the open economy, the Alliance does not. Labour endorses relatively light-handed regulation, including of the labour market. The Alliance wants more regulation.

If voters are looking for the faultline that opened during the 1980s earthquake, they will find it between Labour and the Alliance.

Nor is Act just National's right wing. It is the product of the 1980s argument within Labour about ends and means, not a party of Roger Kerrs driving towards the market utopia.

Leader Richard Prebble and deputy leader Ken Shirley were ministers in the 1980s Labour Government. At an Act conference, besides those who came from National such as Derek Quigley and Patricia Schnauer, you will find many former Labour people.

Mr Prebble's instinctive target is those who should be the core Labour vote in modest-income middle New Zealand. This year he has shifted from principled advocacy of deregulation, a smaller state and social reform to more populist issues, including a sunset clause for Treaty of Waitangi claims, tougher penal policy and more demands on beneficiaries.

Another big difference from the 1950s and 1960s is that protest votes can count. NZ First thrives on bewilderment, on those who want a transcendental deliverance from capricious and powerful forces unleashed by the free market and rapid changes in society.

To such a constituency, NZ First can respond only with a grab-bag of policies from all points of the political spectrum, which makes it a difficult coalition partner.

Maori politics have also radically changed, MMP having delivered much more potential for leverage through the interaction of non-aligned Maori electorate and list MPs, as Mr Henare has partly demonstrated in the past year. Leverage for what? For the 54 per cent of Maori voters who chose to enrol in the Maori electorates, the drivers are different from the rest of the population.

This time, with NZ First having failed them these past three years, the question is whether they will default back to Labour or give Mr Peters a last chance - or, in particular seats, let Tau Henare, Tukoroirangi Morgan and Tuariki Delamere back in, or go independent with Derek Fox.

The major parties would much rather deal with a genuine centre party. But Mr Dunne's earnest, unrelenting belief in common sense does not yet have a place because, for 60 years, the centre, where he plants his United standard, has been National and Labour's battleground.

His chance will depend on whether, over time, a series of alternating coalitions involving Act and the Alliance (or the Greens) pulls the major parties far enough apart to make a space.

Mr Dunne offers stability, on the northern European models on which MMP is based.