Ideas about how to negate the overhang in the MMP voting system have been punted regularly in the last week.
The Political Editors at both Stuff and the New Zealand Herald must have had a beer one night and decided together this dreadful, unfair, immoral and unfair tactic (sarc) must be stopped. The next day, October 17, both wrote columns decrying the concept and suggesting ways to ensure it can’t happen again.
The prospect of an overhang can’t be undone in time for this year’s election but Stuff’s Henry Cooke reckoned the National and Labour Party leaders should agree before the election that neither would form a government based on such an outcome. They would then form a grand coalition, change the electoral law without consulting the voting public and hold another election.
The arrogance of the idea is breathtaking.
Thomas Coughlan of the Herald punts various solutions like top-up seats in the House of Representatives to ensure the party vote proportionality is maintained. But that might mean 170 or more MPs, which frankly is the last thing we want. We have too many MPs already.
Various other thoughts have been pitched. Nick Clarke at the New Zealand Initiative brought up the German idea of not allowing elected MPs to actually sit in the parliament.
I mean, really.
There’s a suggestion the number of electorates could be reduced from 71 to 60 so we have a halfway split between constituency and list MPs.
Worth considering but the number of Maori electorates would have to reduce from 7 to 6 to ensure about 83,000 voters in each electorate, and Te Pati Maori would almost certainly play the same game as they are this time so there’d still be an overhang.
On reflection, there are only two ways to solve this issue.
We have to drop the Mixed Member system of electorate and list MPs.
Either we have to have either an electorate by electorate system of 120 MPs with each constituency having around 41,000 voters. It’s the way we used to do it. When MMP came along we started calling this FPP - First Past the Post of half the seats.
The Maori roll has 520,000 voters on it this year so there would be 12 Maori seats and 108 general seats.
The centre right of politics - National, Act and NZ First - would never agree to that because they’d start 12 seats behind as the Maori seats would always vote left. They tried NZ First in 1996 and it didn’t go so well.
If we are to have proportional representation then it has to be pure. We would have one vote - for the party we want to govern us.
It seems the most honest way to form a government. The parties who can form the largest coalition would win the election. The target would be 50.1 percent of the popular vote to reach 61 seats with no overhang.
The pushback against this idea is that local representation by your electorate MP would be curtailed. Is that really a big deal? How many of us interact with our local MP anyway? How effective is he or she in dealing with local issues?
Ask the residents of Queenstown about how much impact their local (National Party) MP has had in stopping housing approvals in the tourist town.
Then there’s the complaint that local voters want to have a chance of electing their local MP and that the lists will be made by a party Head Office in Wellington or Auckland. But how much local input is there into an MP’s selection at the moment?
Many is an aspiring politician with no connection to an area becoming the local MP. John Key never lived anywhere near Helensville. Ingrid Leary had no relationship with Dunedin until she won her seat in 2020.
National at least pay lip service to local thinking with a system allowing local voices to be influential, although it doesn’t always work out. Labour’s Head Office essentially controls who’s in each electorate and on the party list.
A clever party executive will ensure a party list with a geographical spread representing the country’s population. Yes, it must be based first on talent but then a wise mix of urban and rural residents and North and South and Islanders will ensure all localities will still have a Member of Parliament living somewhere near them and available for consultation if need be.
It can’t be much worse than some cases at the moment. My local MP lives three hour’s drive away. Maori roll voters in Invercargill have a Christchurch based MP.
The purity of a list only proportional representation electoral system is hard to argue against. As the parties campaign and debate ideas and organise themselves the political talent will emerge as it does at the moment. No party will have widespread appeal if its list members all live in Auckland and Wellington.
New Zealand’s fragmented multi-ethnic society with its socio-economic splits is such that the two old parties, Labour (110 years old) and National (90) are highly unlikely to ever regain their past glories.
The referendums of the 1990s ushered in a future of coalition governments. A good democracy represents the true will of the people. From now on parties in parliament are likely to have vote shares of between 5 and 25 percent.
The only way to ensure that true will is to have a truely pure representative proportionality in parliament with a popularity threshold to be set by referendum. I’d vote to keep it at 5 percent.
National and Labour will hate this idea as their popularity will continue to slide. They only have themselves to blame.
For now the overhang is a legitimate political tactic. It may well produce an unproportional result this time but that’s not the fault of the voters or the parties. This is the system.
For the sake of the country I fervently hope that National can claim a massive electorate overhang this time in order to gather a majority coalition, but the left will justifiably complain about the outcome as they did in 1978 and 1981.
However the next parliament needs to start work early on a new electoral system.
Having one vote only, for the party, seems so simple and pure it’s a wonder nobody hasn’t thought of it before (sarc).
Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack - Where this article was sourced.
The arrogance of the idea is breathtaking.
Thomas Coughlan of the Herald punts various solutions like top-up seats in the House of Representatives to ensure the party vote proportionality is maintained. But that might mean 170 or more MPs, which frankly is the last thing we want. We have too many MPs already.
Various other thoughts have been pitched. Nick Clarke at the New Zealand Initiative brought up the German idea of not allowing elected MPs to actually sit in the parliament.
I mean, really.
There’s a suggestion the number of electorates could be reduced from 71 to 60 so we have a halfway split between constituency and list MPs.
Worth considering but the number of Maori electorates would have to reduce from 7 to 6 to ensure about 83,000 voters in each electorate, and Te Pati Maori would almost certainly play the same game as they are this time so there’d still be an overhang.
On reflection, there are only two ways to solve this issue.
We have to drop the Mixed Member system of electorate and list MPs.
Either we have to have either an electorate by electorate system of 120 MPs with each constituency having around 41,000 voters. It’s the way we used to do it. When MMP came along we started calling this FPP - First Past the Post of half the seats.
The Maori roll has 520,000 voters on it this year so there would be 12 Maori seats and 108 general seats.
The centre right of politics - National, Act and NZ First - would never agree to that because they’d start 12 seats behind as the Maori seats would always vote left. They tried NZ First in 1996 and it didn’t go so well.
If we are to have proportional representation then it has to be pure. We would have one vote - for the party we want to govern us.
It seems the most honest way to form a government. The parties who can form the largest coalition would win the election. The target would be 50.1 percent of the popular vote to reach 61 seats with no overhang.
The pushback against this idea is that local representation by your electorate MP would be curtailed. Is that really a big deal? How many of us interact with our local MP anyway? How effective is he or she in dealing with local issues?
Ask the residents of Queenstown about how much impact their local (National Party) MP has had in stopping housing approvals in the tourist town.
Then there’s the complaint that local voters want to have a chance of electing their local MP and that the lists will be made by a party Head Office in Wellington or Auckland. But how much local input is there into an MP’s selection at the moment?
Many is an aspiring politician with no connection to an area becoming the local MP. John Key never lived anywhere near Helensville. Ingrid Leary had no relationship with Dunedin until she won her seat in 2020.
National at least pay lip service to local thinking with a system allowing local voices to be influential, although it doesn’t always work out. Labour’s Head Office essentially controls who’s in each electorate and on the party list.
A clever party executive will ensure a party list with a geographical spread representing the country’s population. Yes, it must be based first on talent but then a wise mix of urban and rural residents and North and South and Islanders will ensure all localities will still have a Member of Parliament living somewhere near them and available for consultation if need be.
It can’t be much worse than some cases at the moment. My local MP lives three hour’s drive away. Maori roll voters in Invercargill have a Christchurch based MP.
The purity of a list only proportional representation electoral system is hard to argue against. As the parties campaign and debate ideas and organise themselves the political talent will emerge as it does at the moment. No party will have widespread appeal if its list members all live in Auckland and Wellington.
New Zealand’s fragmented multi-ethnic society with its socio-economic splits is such that the two old parties, Labour (110 years old) and National (90) are highly unlikely to ever regain their past glories.
The referendums of the 1990s ushered in a future of coalition governments. A good democracy represents the true will of the people. From now on parties in parliament are likely to have vote shares of between 5 and 25 percent.
The only way to ensure that true will is to have a truely pure representative proportionality in parliament with a popularity threshold to be set by referendum. I’d vote to keep it at 5 percent.
National and Labour will hate this idea as their popularity will continue to slide. They only have themselves to blame.
For now the overhang is a legitimate political tactic. It may well produce an unproportional result this time but that’s not the fault of the voters or the parties. This is the system.
For the sake of the country I fervently hope that National can claim a massive electorate overhang this time in order to gather a majority coalition, but the left will justifiably complain about the outcome as they did in 1978 and 1981.
However the next parliament needs to start work early on a new electoral system.
Having one vote only, for the party, seems so simple and pure it’s a wonder nobody hasn’t thought of it before (sarc).
Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack - Where this article was sourced.
4 comments:
Mean while the three left parties have used the overhang or split vote for decades.
It's a feature of the system and National and the greater Right will see more when it's better understood.
The Maori seats have been very biased to TPM and as we see the two big parties become less dominant, very especially Labour the risk for the Left is that National gets 40 plus seats and maybe only 28% of the party vote.
So both sides milking support with the split.
I like the nuanced factors this brings out.
We have a historical view from FPP, one person one vote, we now have MMP which is, one person two votes. The only disadvantaged are those in very safe seats who really are stupid to not consider and focus on the bigger picture impact of their party vote.
It's just a pity we couldn't vote for the person who would do the most good for our country and in our community. The Party system is strange when you think about it. A bunch of "list" people we voters know not much about. Another cohort of people in parliament already, who we are all railing about, and who half of the voters can't wait to get rid of after each term.
At the same time we need to deal with the Maori seats. Abolishing them will never happen. So we need to go the other way. All Maori are on the Maori roll, no choice. A drop of blood and you are on the roll. Forever, you progeny will also be one the roll forever. The proportion of seats then split as a percentage of population.
If ?, one invest time using Google and researching NZ's past Political History, you will find that from the time we had a 2 Party system, the NZ public always voted on the basis of -
- what their grandparents did
- if you worked in a Factory and "had" to join a Union, the union dictated who you voted for.
Then as you look deeper, you will find that we had valiant souls stand and say, we want change and you will see the list of Political Parties that were created to challenge the "norm".
Social Credit is a good example, but was the only one that seemed to 'crack' the 2 party system.
Then, you could not "buck" the NZ public voting mentality - 2 Parties, you voted for one or other.
Yes we had change, to which if you look at who "lead" that change, many being the younger age group, who looked to 'buck' what Mum & Dad, Grandparents had done.
An example - The Green Party, but not all supporters were the younger age group, there were (and still is) many of the older generation who supported them.
Plus many from the Academic domain.
MMP - foisted upon NZ.
Your research at this point will show the many political parties that established a footprint - I always use the McGillicuddy Serios Party as an example of a group whose intentions were not to get elected to Parliament, but to take votes away from both Labour & National, not the only "waste of time" group, but many New Zealander's 'fell for the ploy' and voted accordingly.
With MMP is it not strange that over past
(as well as now) that NZ MSM has their attention focused on Labour & National, the minors get a mention if they do something "stupid", or utter a statement that has no logical sense - an example is The Greens & Railway crossings.
So has NZ and the political environment changed over the years of MMP - if you quietly ask any Kiwi, you may find that they no longer have an affection for MMP and also the constant "barrage" of political polls has lost its mo-jo - now means nothing.
Also the People are seeing that many of those who become a Politician either by election, or tag along to make up the numbers (List MMP's) that many show no dedication to improving NZ, standing up for NZ > examples -
- both Kraft -Heinz & McCains' and their change to operations in food/fruit processing)
- Carter Holt both in the North & South Island, plus the Mill in Northland
- Tokaroa, Kinleith Mills the failure to support the loss of work and produce
> those that do, subjected to heated verbal tirades' from other Politicians ( I can think of one at the moment - which involves NZ Health Systems - not that she made significant change in her time) and social media outrage.
Me thinks it is time we had a total change on who becomes a Representative of a Constituency, how they are elected, their service time frame in Wellington, and how they can be removed (by The People, there & then) if they fail to deliver.
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