LilBaP
Plenty of people say they want FPP back so governments can actually get things done. They may want to be careful.
The most radical government New Zealand has had since MMP started in 1996 was not a multi-party compromise. It was the 2020–23 Labour Government. They took 50 per cent of the party vote and 65 seats: an absolute majority. No coalition partner required and no one inside the House with the numbers to stop them. New Zealand by a clear majority voted for the ‘podium of truth’.
Under that majority, they pushed Three Waters – taking water assets off councils and handing them to new entities with equal mana whenua representation on the regional representative groups that appointed the boards. They introduced vaccine mandates and vaccine passes that restricted work and public spaces for the unvaccinated. They created a Māori Health Authority.
These were not minor adjustments; they were structural changes that many voters later rejected at the ballot box and look back on with disgust years later.
Under this same Government, education, immigration and policing took a hit, and the promises they made such as KiwiBuild and Light Rail cost taxpayers billions and never eventuated.
That was not the fault of MMP. That was the result of the voters’ choice to side with one governing body – the kind of outcome FPP is more likely to produce.
That is the opposite to the story that ‘MMP forces weak government’.
Under FPP one vote decides the local seat and the party with the most seats forms government. Large numbers of votes elect no one, so a party can win a clear majority with well under half the overall vote.
Under MMP, the party vote sets the overall numbers. Win more electorates than your party vote allows and parliament grows – the overhang currently in the headlines. In practice it usually produces coalitions and depends on voters knowing which vote actually matters.
There is good and bad in both systems. FPP did not deliver the golden age some people remember.
Under pure FPP a single-party majority is more likely when one side is clearly ahead, but it is not automatic. New Zealand has seen unconstrained majorities under FPP as well.
Muldoon’s National Government in the early 1980s imposed wage and price freezes and heavy economic controls.
The Labour Government that followed in 1984–1990 floated the dollar, removed agricultural subsidies, introduced GST, cut top tax rates sharply, corporatised state businesses and removed interest-rate controls. Mortgage rates rose sharply, peaking around 20 per cent-plus in 1987 while inflation stayed high. Later called Rogernomics, it was a radical break from what many Labour voters had expected.
A sharp fiscal response followed in the early 1990s under Ruth Richardson to climb out of the high-debt position the previous Labour Government had left.
Both sides had used majorities to push well beyond what a large part of the public had signed up for. Plenty of people who want FPP back seem to have forgotten the periods when one party simply decided the rules and the public lived with the consequences.
Whether you agree with the policies is not the point. Under an unconstrained majority no one gets a real chance to challenge or put a handbrake on them until the next election – by which time the money has already been spent.
The 2026 results have also shown how many voters still do not understand the two votes. National supporters who wanted a centre-right government but stayed tribal and gave both votes to National did not achieve the certainty of a right-leaning coalition remaining in power – they now wait nervously.
Their tribal instinct let them down in this instance and they were misled by both the mainstream media and National hierarchy. If more National supporters had realised the significance of splitting their party vote, we may have had a government already decided. Some voters still treat the electorate vote as the one that really counts and the party vote as optional. That is not how the system is meant to work.
Many of them will be wondering how this happened and then blame a system that they did not understand or chose not to.
Stuff and other mainstream media outlets spent months promoting Opportunity and other left-leaning parties and gave little air time to ACT and NZ First. They did all they could to nudge people in one direction, rather than just report the events.
The result showed the mainstream media still has serious pull with a large portion of voters.
An FPP system will only make the message from a biased media even louder to the uninformed tribal or first-time voter.
Then there are the Māori seats. They existed long before MMP and were kept. They regularly produce overhangs when a party wins more of them than its party vote would normally justify. In recent elections, that has been deliberate.
It is a structural contradiction inside a system whose main purpose is overall proportionality. Reviews have pointed it out. Nothing serious has been done about it. This is not the fault of MMP, but the fault of politicians on all sides.
MMP can reward tactical games, produce odd seat numbers and leave governments looking weak even when the public has given one side a clear lead. These are not illegal.
It just leaves the losing team calling it ‘gaming the system’ when it goes against them. Aunty Helen’s recent rhetoric is a prime example: if anyone knows how to repeatedly game a system, she does.
Fine-tuning around the Māori seats and the overhang rules is reasonable and a clearer explanation of the two votes would not hurt either.
But treating a return to FPP as the obvious fix skips the part where New Zealand already tried that system for decades and rejected it twice. FPP creates its own distortions but the 2020 election showed MMP can still deliver unconstrained power when voters choose it.
The 2026 election showed that a lot of people are still working out which vote does what. But, do you feel either National under Luxon or Labour under Hipkins would be the answer if we were under an FPP system?
Blaming the system for every political failure is easy. Fixing the design problems is harder. Assuming FPP will restore trust and provide better outcomes is a very big assumption.
