Peter Williams
Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on www.reality check.radio three days a week.
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 Māori electorates would have to reduce from seven to six to ensure about 83,000 voters in each electorate, and Te Pāti Māori 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 Māori roll has 520,000 voters on it this year so there would be 12 Māori 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 Māori 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 per cent 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 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 a three hours’ drive away. Māori 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 socioeconomic 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 five and 25 per cent.
The only way to ensure that true will is to have a truly pure representative proportionality in parliament with a popularity threshold to be set by referendum. I’d vote to keep it at five per cent.
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 thought of it before (sarc).
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
