Seymour has also advised Labour to rule out working with Te Pāti Māori. Labour leader Chris Hipkins has engaged in some ruling out of his own, indicating he won’t work with Winston Peters again. Before the last election, National’s Christopher Luxon ruled out working with Te Pāti Māori.
And while the Greens haven’t yet formally ruled anyone out, co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick has said they could only work with National if it was prepared to “completely U-turn on their callous, cruel cuts to climate, to science, to people’s wellbeing”.
Much more of this and at next year’s general election New Zealanders will effectively face the same scenario they confronted routinely under electoral rules the country rejected over 30 years ago.
Under the old “first past the post” system, there was only ever one choice: voters could turn either left or right. Many hoped Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP), used for the first time in 1996, would end this ideological forced choice.
Assuming enough voters supported parties other than National and Labour, the two traditional behemoths would have to negotiate rather than impose a governing agenda. Compromise between and within parties would be necessary.
Government by decree
By the 1990s, many had tired of doctrinaire governments happy to swing the policy pendulum from right to left and back again. In theory, MMP prised open a space for a centrist party which might be able to govern with either major player.
In a constitutional context where the political executive has been described as an “elected dictatorship”, part of the appeal of MMP was that it might constrain some of its worst excesses. Right now, that is starting to look a little naive.
For one thing, the current National-led coalition is behaving with the government-by-decree style associated with the radical, reforming Labour and National administrations of the 1980s and 1990s.
Most notably, the coalition has made greater use of parliamentary urgency than any other government in recent history, wielding its majority to avoid parliamentary and public scrutiny of contentious policies such as the Pay Equity Amendment Bill.
Second, in an ironic vindication of the anti-MMP campaign’s fears before the electoral system was changed – that small parties would exert outsized influence on government policy – the two smaller coalition partners appear to be doing just that.
It is neither possible nor desirable to quantify the degree of sway a smaller partner in a coalition should have. That is a political question, not a technical one.
But some of the administration’s most unpopular or contentious policies have emerged from ACT (the Treaty Principles Bill and the Regulatory Standards legislation) and NZ First (tax breaks for heated tobacco products).
Rightly or wrongly, this has created a perception of weakness on the part of the National Party and the prime minister. Of greater concern, perhaps, is the risk the controversial changes ACT and NZ First have managed to secure will erode – at least in some quarters – faith in the legitimacy of our electoral arrangements.
Much more of this and at next year’s general election New Zealanders will effectively face the same scenario they confronted routinely under electoral rules the country rejected over 30 years ago.
Under the old “first past the post” system, there was only ever one choice: voters could turn either left or right. Many hoped Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP), used for the first time in 1996, would end this ideological forced choice.
Assuming enough voters supported parties other than National and Labour, the two traditional behemoths would have to negotiate rather than impose a governing agenda. Compromise between and within parties would be necessary.
Government by decree
By the 1990s, many had tired of doctrinaire governments happy to swing the policy pendulum from right to left and back again. In theory, MMP prised open a space for a centrist party which might be able to govern with either major player.
In a constitutional context where the political executive has been described as an “elected dictatorship”, part of the appeal of MMP was that it might constrain some of its worst excesses. Right now, that is starting to look a little naive.
For one thing, the current National-led coalition is behaving with the government-by-decree style associated with the radical, reforming Labour and National administrations of the 1980s and 1990s.
Most notably, the coalition has made greater use of parliamentary urgency than any other government in recent history, wielding its majority to avoid parliamentary and public scrutiny of contentious policies such as the Pay Equity Amendment Bill.
Second, in an ironic vindication of the anti-MMP campaign’s fears before the electoral system was changed – that small parties would exert outsized influence on government policy – the two smaller coalition partners appear to be doing just that.
It is neither possible nor desirable to quantify the degree of sway a smaller partner in a coalition should have. That is a political question, not a technical one.
But some of the administration’s most unpopular or contentious policies have emerged from ACT (the Treaty Principles Bill and the Regulatory Standards legislation) and NZ First (tax breaks for heated tobacco products).
Rightly or wrongly, this has created a perception of weakness on the part of the National Party and the prime minister. Of greater concern, perhaps, is the risk the controversial changes ACT and NZ First have managed to secure will erode – at least in some quarters – faith in the legitimacy of our electoral arrangements.
The centre cannot hold
Lastly, the party system seems to be settling into a two-bloc configuration: National/ACT/NZ First on the right, and Labour/Greens/Te Pāti Māori on the left.
In both blocs, the two major parties sit closer to the centre than the smaller parties. True, NZ First has tried to brand itself as a moderate “common sense” party, and has worked with both National and Labour, but that is not its position now.
In both blocs, too, the combined strength of the smaller parties is roughly half that of the major player. The Greens, Te Pāti Māori, NZ First and ACT may be small, but they are not minor.
In effect, the absence of a genuinely moderate centre party has meant a return to the zero-sum politics of the pre-MMP era. It has also handed considerable leverage to smaller parties on both the left and right of the political spectrum.
Furthermore, if the combined two-party share of the vote captured by National and Labour continues to fall (as the latest polls show), and those parties have nowhere else to turn, small party influence will increase.
For some, of course, this may be a good thing. But to those with memories of the executive-centric, winner-takes-all politics of the 1980s and 1990s, it is starting to look all too familiar.
The re-emergence of a binary ideological choice might even suggest New Zealand – lacking the constitutional guardrails common in other democracies – needs to look beyond MMP for other ways to limit the power of its governments.
Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article
6 comments:
All political parties are now"ruling by decree". When was the last time an important issues was decided by public referendum? The coalition could well be pushing through their agendas, but so were Labour with He puapua(and secretly to boot). What about both governments pushing through a requirement for English speakers to adopt the Maori language? It is no different than requiring Londoners or Sydney or Boston residents to change all their government departments , street signs and everything else to Maori as well. We are, whether people like it or not, all English language speakers. Peak idiocy has been reached by our politicians and bureaucrats. The citizens are merely bystanders now. We need a governmental system like the Swiss.
That is sort of correct in my view but if you consider a right of center coalition where National are 40% of the required 50% as apposed to National at 27% of the requited coalition of 50% so a weak NZF and ACT or a strong NZF and ACT those are very different in outcome.
We have a right of Labor National the people must next decide if more ACT and NZF is the way forward. Labor light is underwhelming.
MMP has been a disaster since its inception.
All it did was allow "the fringe" to gain a foothold in the corridors of power whose sole purpose was to pervert democracy.
Their only function has been to create disorder and mire the issues that a nation should address.
The bar was set too low and enabled inferior parties with weak mandates an overly generous assisted jump to representation.
If National continues on its way of ignoring their supporters sentiments they'll be lucky to be the 3rd ranking party in the next
( hopefully ) coalition government.
A view expressed to Minister James Meager at a Nat. meeting today.
Hahaha… at last a comedy attempt in this otherwise dreary old blog site. Honest Govt representing the people with honest intentions? Hahaha.
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