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.
If you wanted a display on who is the country’s most composed and unflappable politician, look no further than the reaction to Christopher Luxon’s rather bizarre pronouncement that if returned as prime minister after the election he’d hold a referendum on our MMP electoral system.
The whole situation appears completely unplanned. He was on a radio talkback show and commenting on a listener text. It was all very vague. He was “open” to asking voters if they were still supportive of MMP and then pressed further about holding a referendum, he said “yeah, I think I would”.
Can you believe he said that?
“I think I would”!
Then he directly insulted the cabinet ministers from ACT and New Zealand First by calling them yahoos and numpties. He tried to weasel out of it by saying he could do better with a cabinet full of National Party ministers but because he has to put up with the likes of David Seymour and Winston Peters and some of their colleagues around the cabinet table he said he’d prefer they weren’t there.
Is this man for real? Is he capable of getting through a day without putting his foot in his mouth. This reference to “some yahoo or numpty” comes only after he insulted small business operators in Rotorua by telling them they had a “parent-child mentality” and too often looked to the government for help. He later apologized to businesses for the comment.
Then he’d fudged an answer to a press conference question about whether or not he could coalesce with the Opportunity Party. His answer was so non-specific about not working with parties that want to put up taxes, reporters had to ring and clarify his answer.
Let’s face it. The man is just not very linguistically agile.
His yahoo and numpty line produced thoroughly predictable reactions from those to whom he was referring. I don’t know whether Winston was the yahoo or the numpty but he was firing all guns soon after.
“Shutting down and taking away true democratic representation from the people of New Zealand should be seen for what it is – a power grab and an ignorance for what it means to be a democracy.”
And there was more.
“The old parties’ weak and inept attitude to economic sovereignty, immigration, and woke nonsense has seen people move to a party that is offering common sense, patriotism, and old-fashioned Kiwi values.”
And so says Winston.
David Seymour was far more restrained, sensible and diplomatic – yet still cut to the quick.
“Who knows, I suspect that he’s being a bit free-wheeling and may not have thought through what he’s saying there.”
Then this:
“I’m not here to start bagging other parties’ ministers but I think anyone who’s an objective observer would say that ACT ministers have been pretty effective.”
Seymour got it in one, and also noted the serious policy wins his ministers in the cabinet have had in the last three years like school attendance, the holidays act, gun control and in resource management reform.
But Labour leader Chris Hipkins is right. Luxon is just not a very good politician. As Hipkins says, Peters and Seymour run circles around him. Luxon makes the fatal mistake of trying to be nice to everyone. In politics, that never works.
At least we can say that Luxon has held his nose and kept the three-way coalition together for most of this parliamentary term but it’s pretty obvious it’s somewhat falling apart now with the November election on the horizon.
Winston Peters’ retreat into his traditional late-term curmudgeon behaviour is to be expected and you wonder what swinging voters are thinking as they prepare to cast their ballots.
This three-way agreement isn’t ending well, they might say, so can we really trust them with the levers of power yet again if they don’t really like each other?
To that question, I say to every swinging voter – just look at what your options are. Do you really want the redistributive marxists of the Greens and Opportunity and the racist Māori Party anywhere near government?
The polls suggest this could be the closest election for the popular vote since 1981 when the Labour Party won 39 per cent of the vote and the National Party 38.8. The difference between the parties nationwide was a measly 4,122 votes, yet under the old electoral system National took 51 seats to Labour’s 40 and Social Credit, which won 20.7 per cent of the vote, won just one seat.
That, you see, was why we needed a form of proportional representation for our parliament. It took another decade and a half to finally get there but we did and we’ve done it the MMP way for 30 years.
There was an indicative or non-binding referendum in 2011 to see what we thought of our voting system. The decision of the electorate was clear cut with 58 per cent saying they wanted to retain MMP.
That was only 15 years ago and I’d suggest Luxon that if you held a similar referendum sometime in the future the result would be even more clear cut.
That’s because both Labour and National have lost their appeal to a huge chunk of the electorate. In fact if the latest Roy Morgan poll is to be believed, which I don’t, then only 57.5 per cent of the population support one of the two main parties. National at 32 and Labour at 25.5.
But while that poll is often an outlier, others tell a similar story with the combined vote of the two big parties: The Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll puts them on 62, Reid Research has them at 62.7 and Talbot Mills at 64. In round numbers, four out of 10 voters are not supporting either Labour or National.
That’s why a referendum on MMP is likely to convincingly retain our current voting system. That’s why Christopher Luxon was way off the mark suggesting a referendum on MMP.
If he’s back as prime minister after 7 November he’ll just have to put up with yahoos and numpties around the cabinet table.
In fact he’s likely to have more of them.
This article was originally published by RCR Media.
