Written By: - Date published: 7:01 am, October 26th, 2008 - 67 comments
Categories: election 2008, john key, labour, maori party, national, spin -
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So, let me get this straight. The Right says that the minor parties have to support a National-led government if National gets more votes than Labour. Even if a National government would go against everything a party stands for, even if it is a complete betrayal of the people who voted for them, minor parties are meant to kneel before Key if his party gets the most votes. What dream world are these people living in?
The Herald reckons only a government including the largest party would have ‘legitimacy’. Key says the Maori Party and other small parties would have a “moral mandate” to make him PM if National gets more votes than Labour. Morality eh? That’s an interesting one. After all, they say that you know you’re winning when your opponents start whining ‘no fair’.
Where does this supposed moral mandate arise from? The opinions of people who voted for another party, even if that overrides the wishes of their own supporters?
Would the Maori Party, United Future, and the Greens be ‘morally obligated’ to back National if it won 2 more votes than Labour? Or does this moral maxim only kick in at 20 votes? or 200? or 2000? or 20,000? or 200,000?
Did this moral absolute apply when it was National with fewer votes in 2005? I’m trying to remember the Herald and John Key saying that Labour would have to govern, that Brash shouldn’t even try to form a coalition and, if he did, it would be illegitimate. Maybe my memory is getting rusty.
Did this same moral mandate exist when Labour won more votes but fewer seats in 1978 and 1981? Did National let Labour govern owing to its clear moral mandate? Maybe some of our older readers can inform us.
Or let’s take a theoretical example. What if we had situation where one wing was split between two middling parties,(say, Labour and the Greens or National and ACT), each polling around 25%, and the other wing had one party polling 40%. Would the wing with only one major party get to rule every time simply because its votes were consolidated in one major party?
Hmmm, this morality thing turns out to be a bit complicated, eh? What seems to be a highly principled statement (to borrow a phrase from Bill English) often turns out to be just self-serving drivel.
The fact is the Government is the party or group of parties that has the confidence of the House. It is the party or coalition that has the mandate of the most voters to govern that ought to govern. There is absolutely no reason why that should need to include the largest party.
The Right is just scared because an LGP+M government is looking ever more likely. Well, Key and the Herald can cry all they want, the fact remains: the legitimate and moral government is the one constituting the largest alliance of parties, whether or not it includes the single largest party.
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NeillR: the results of the Herald?s survey show that 60% of voters would consider a government that was not composed of the highest polling party under MMP to be ?a rightful government?.
No, that’s not what it found, as I’ve explained (and you’re been unable to refute) on the other thread. My response now has the important bits highlighted; I encourage you to address them (if you can):
“Are you genuinely suggesting we change NZ’s electoral rules if an election produces a result the NZ Herald’s focus group doesn’t like?
Aside from the obvious idiocy of electoral reform by straw poll, the question to which they responded was particularly fallacious. According to the link “they were asked whether New Zealanders would see a party that finished second as the rightful government.” Let’s be crystal fucking clear: a party does not form a government, unless it gets a majority. Parties comprising a majority in parliament form a government. That means, on the basis of the hypothetical five-party coalition, Labour would not be the government, they would be a part of the government, and the remainder of the government would be formed by other parties who between them made up majority. The question is misleading, so it’s hardly surprising that the answers are meaningless.”
L
ok
Lew, I agree with all your points, with one rider:
In the past two parties have either said in advance that they will give negotiating preference to the largest party, or have used the justification after the fact. The examples I highlight are NZ First in 1996 and 2005, and United in 2005. There is no constitutional basis for this position, but it’s probably reasonable to argue that a party that has a plurality is likely to need fewer partners to build an effective majority, and that the relative power of the minor partner is likely to increase where there are fewer smaller parties within the majority.
For example, if hypothetically National had 55 seats, Act had 4 seats, and United had 2 seats, United might feel it would have more relative power within a National-led government than forming a coalition with Labour, Greens, Progressives, New Zealand First and the Maori Party.
My conclusion that an effective majority based on an overhang which denied the parties representing the majority of the party votes from forming a government would be the “death knell” of MMP was a political comment, rather than a constitutional one. Of course, constitutionally an overhang can exist and effective majorities can be formed based on it, and parties can collude to maximise the overhang.
My view is based, however, on an observation that there is a reasonable dissatisfaction with the MMP system at present (probably not 50%, but not far from it); that MMP was introduced in order to provide what its proponents claimed was greater “fairness” that stemmed from several elections in which the party that received the plurality of the vote was unable to achieve a parliamentary majority, and that the exploitation of the overhang would undermine that advantage over FPP. I think that deliberate manipulation of the overhang, as some Left commentators have advocated, would further increase dissatisfaction with the MMP system.
SP has put together a whole lot of straw-man arguments. I haven’t heard John Key say any along the lines of “the Right has the right to govern if it gets more votes than Labour”. His whole premise is flawed.
Tim: Yes, and having given the undertaking to work with the largest plurality, I think they have a responsibility to abide by it – but I think this is largely irrelevant in 2008, since every incumbent party bar the mÄori party have declared their allegiance already. It bears repeating that the process of forming a government is extremely simple: get 50% plus 1 votes in the house and tell the Governor-General. Gentleman’s agreements aren’t worth a damn except inasmuch as they’re backed by parliamentary votes.
I understand that your prediction that MMP would end if a coalition exploited the overhang to form a government without the popular vote was political, and I think it’s a possibility. However to an extent it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater, because the problem is caused by the threshold, and can be solved by removing (or reducing) the threshold.
I think a greater danger in exploiting the overhang is the chance of a resurgence in the (for want of a more neutral term I’ll use the one employed by National’s strategists) redneck wing of the Nats, blaming the mÄori party and by extension all MÄori for having lost the election. That said, I don’t agree with the doctrine of sacrificing democracy for stability, so neither this possibility nor the `five-headed monster’ rhetoric has much currency for me.
L
… and with my conspiracy theory hat on: In the NatRad debate, Peter Dunne said a short while ago that `whatever party forms a government, there will be a mini-budget in December’. I wonder whether he and John Key talk about in in their ersatz nuptials? The test will be whether National stops its `why won’t they tell us now’ line about Labour’s declared December mini-budget.
L
Lew said:
I disagree. Minor overhangs may exist in general electorates from time to time, of the order of one or two seats. They tend to happen when independents win electorates. Peter Dunne and Jim Anderton will probably be examples of this in 2008. The existence of the Maori seats, however, is likely to exacerbate the overhang (and changing the percentage threshhold for qualification doesn’t change that).
When you ring-fence a community based on either regional or ethnic lines, then there is a probability that a Party will emerge to represent that community. The Maori Party is likely to get 6 of the 7 Maori seats. There is no incentive for them to go chasing the party vote in Maori seats, let alone general seats.
Ironically, despite being a creation of MMP, the Maori Party doesn’t rely on MMP for its continued existence. It owes its existence solely to the Maori seats. If New Zealand returned to FPP, it’s likely there would be as many as 10 Maori seats, if the Maori electoral option was retained.
There could well be a backlash against the Maori seats if the overhang was exploited to deny the majority of the vote the ability to form a government; I don’t see a way of eliminating the overhang issue without either abolishing the Maori seats, and perhaps reducing the threshhold to say 2%, or changing the electoral system dramatically.
Clomar Brunton poll out now:
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/1320238/2232258
Election race starts to narrow
“he last poll a week ago showed National 14 points ahead of Labour, but this has now narrowed to 12 points.
The National Party has dropped back three points, down to 47%. Labour has also dropped back by one point, now on 35%. Labour’s friends, the Green Party have bounced back, up to 8%. Meanwhile, New Zealand First is on 3%, edging closer to the magic 5% threshold.
The Maori Party is sitting on 2.8%, however, their focus is on the electorate seats, so they will not be too concerned with the low party vote. The Act Party is still just above 2%.”
“Key is still the preferred choice for Prime Minister on 38% but the race has closed right up. Clark is now breathing down Key’s neck on 37%, up by three points. Meanwhile, 3% of voters w”
pawprick,
‘The the views of the majorty should be respected! its called Democracy!’
No, that is majoritarianism. There is a very big difference.
This election has just seen the New Zealand Parliament revert to what Parliaments used to be about: loosely aligned factions with similar ideas rallying around one leader to get their more salient points across more effectively. As a Labour supporter I say more of it, from both the right and the left. The more that different parties have their input in to governance, the more the true will of the greater population is served when it comes to policy making.
Tim: They tend to happen when independents win electorates. Peter Dunne and Jim Anderton will probably be examples of this in 2008. The existence of the Maori seats, however, is likely to exacerbate the overhang (and changing the percentage threshhold for qualification doesn’t change that)
Tim, I understand how MMP works and what causes the overhang, and it’s nothing to do with independents. The overhang is caused when a party wins more electorate seats than their share of the party vote would otherwise entitle them to. Dunne and Anderton are a red herring in this case – pre-election polls notwithstanding, their parties tend to get about or above the 0.8% which would entitle them to their leader’s electorate seat, so that’s not it. The MÄori seats are also a red herring – any party which can win seven seats while gaining only 3% of the party vote would trigger the same 3-seat overhang.
I don’t see a way of eliminating the overhang issue without either abolishing the Maori seats, and perhaps reducing the threshhold to say 2%, or changing the electoral system dramatically.
It’s really not an either/or situation, though I understand it can be seen that way, and the opponents of MMP would be keen to paint it that way. Just reducing the threshold will solve the overhang issue, because it’s not caused by the MÄori seats, it’s caused by the presence of a bloc of seats where one party has clear electorate dominance out of proportion with their party vote share. The other thing which would solve this would be if the mÄori party continued its current two ticks campaign.
L
By the way, the Nats just prior to the election in 2002 were talking up the prospect of a National + ACT + NZ First + United Future coalition (English apparently wasn’t intending to concede on the night, in hope of being able to stitch together a deal, until the late night results made such a coalition impossible). At one point on the night, with Labour leading by a good 12-15 percent, the TV media was saying that it might all hinge on Peters (only for Labour’s lead to then balloon out to 20 percent).
All of which does, of course, indicate that the Right has no problem with multi-headed monsters when it is *their* multi-headed monster.
[lprent: Nuked as requested]
I don’t see a way of eliminating the overhang issue without either abolishing the Maori seats, and perhaps reducing the threshhold to say 2%, or changing the electoral system dramatically.
I do.
Its bullshit to say that the existence of Maori Seats exacerbates the overhang. Complete bullshit. An increasing proportion of a party’s share of the vote being less than the number of electorate seats gained does. The overhang issue can be eliminated without abolishing the Maori Seats, without reducing the threshold (that can help, tho) or changing the electorate system. The only thing that will solve it other htan reducingthe threshold is if a higher proportion of people vote for the the party likely to be in overhang Thats why:
The other thing which would solve this [overhang] would be if the mÄori party (or any other party in an overhang situation for that matter) continued its current two ticks campaign.
It would also solve it if it encouraged those in General electorate to vote the Maori Party, meaning that even fewer would vote Labour as well as reduce any overhang .And of course if the overhang lowers to the extent that the share of the Party vote is proportionally equivalent to the number of of electorate seats thanks to this combined with the two ticks campaign , then the 5% threshold does not cause an overhang, so its not a problem, as any Government can have a majority with fewer seats than a Parliament in overhang – ie 50% plus 1..
.. and for those who think the 5% threshold should be scrapped and a party should be proportionally represented in Parliament ONLY if it gets one elected member is effectively advocating a 0.8% threshold with a caveat
.If no members get elected even if they get 18% of the vote, its Social Credit all over again. If one member gets elected, they `re technically in overhang if the party does not get 0.8% of the vote, and will have list MPs if they get more than 1.6% as per now, if four get elected with 2% of the vote – like the Maori Party – we still have an overhang, but a parliament with the likelihood of fewer parties – meaning the parties left will each have a higher proportion of members in the House.
dave: I think that if we’re looking at getting rid of anti-democratic seats stuff, that you’d also be hanging out to remove the fixed quotient for electorates in the south island.
There are all kinds of interesting factors that will fall out of that distortion over time.
I Think that if we’re looking at getting rid of anti-democratic seats stuff, that you’d also be hanging out to remove the fixed quotient for electorates in the south island.
Not before we agree that the Maori seats are democratic
Elsewhere there is discussion on variations (Based on suggestion started by Idiot Savant.). If the electorate seats were abolished and there was fixed number of seats say 100 seats for ease of explanation. Percentage determines the outcome thus:
1% = 1 seat.
15% =15 seats
51%= majority
< 1% = no seats.
Maori Party would be part of the %??
% rounded to nearest whole
Outcome simple eh?.
Bah, I’ve misread and mis-edited my own post in haste. Ignore, if you can, the amendment above. Lynn, if you’d delete it I’d be obliged, even though it’s public record now.
dave: I agree with your point about the mÄori party’s party vote and the general roll.
I argued to some success with an ACT activist recently that the mÄori party were using the MÄori seats as a platform for normalising a political philosophy based in kaupapa MÄori and thereby giving the next generation of MÄori public figures a leg-up into politics, a field in which they’ve historically been marginalised. I think the endgame (and it won’t be soon) is that the mÄori party accedes to the repeal of the MÄori seats, having established a sufficient basis of support among both MÄori and PÄkehÄ voters. It’s early days yet.
L
Ianmac: Why is simplicity an especially important criterion? Should robustness and representation not be more valuable?
L
dave said:
I disagree. And here’s why. The Maori Party is running a first-past-the-post campaign in the seven Maori seats. It takes, on average, about 20,000 party votes to win an additional list seat. To get five percent of the seats, a party needs to achieve around 100,000 party votes.
To win an electorate in a Maori seat means winning around 9,000 electorate votes, as an approximate, given that Maori seats only have around 20,000 voters participating.
For the Maori Party to normally get 7 MPs on the list, they would need 120,000 party votes. Or they could get 63,000 electorate votes. Given that they are only really campaigning in Maori seats (they say otherwise, but that’s the reality), if the Maori Party win all the Maori electorates, the Maori Party has to campaign strongly for the general party vote, and win a far higher proportion of the Party vote in the Maori seats than they do at present in order to avoid an overhang.
In other terms, the Maori Party has no incentive to chase the Party vote anywhere. Once they have won seven electorates, they have to get more than twice as many party votes as electorate votes in order to get an additional MP. There’s no incentive for the Maori Party to do that when they’re appealing to a Maori constituency.
Tim Ellis said: <i…the Maori Party has no incentive to chase the Party vote anywhere.
Actually, Tim, they do. Because they are runing a long-term campaign, not just interested in maximising votes atthis election.
So while increasing their Party vote and attempting to be credible on the list, rather than just the Maori electorates, will gain them nothing electorally this this time around, they are looking long-term to getting Party votes from the general roll and eventually becoming a Party that can win list seats.
Which actually pisses me off in the context of this election. The Maori Party could do much better policy-wise in the next 3 years by telling their supporters to vote Green on the list, becasue the Greens and the Maori Party have considerable policy synergy and maximising their numbers as a bloc would be in both their best immediate interests imo.
I don’t understand that logic toad. I’m not being facetious, and tell me if I’ve misconstrued what you said, but I’ve never heard of a political party not trying to maximise its vote at every election.
That’s not the campaign they’re running this time around though toad. The Maori Party got 48,000 party votes last time. About 75% of it was in the Maori seats. The campaign they are running at present, from what I can see, is not in the general seats. They aren’t even running candidates in general seats. Their focus is on winning the other three Maori seats that they don’t currently have. The top seven candidates on their list are all their constituency candidates.
I absolutely do not comprehend this argument. This would absolutely confine the Maori Party to a constituency-only party, and would absolutely guarantee a much larger overhang than is likely at present. It would seriously undermine any attempt from the Maori Party to campaign for party vote in the general seats in the next election, which is what you claim should be the Maori Party’s strategy now. The reality is that if the Maori Party get 6 seats (and I reckon there’s about a 70% chance of that), we’re likely to have a 125 seat parliament. If they get all seven Maori seats, and I think there’s about a 50/50 chance of that happening, then there will be a 126 seat parliament.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with the Maori seats per se, or using mechanisms to guarantee Maori representation. I just don’t see a justification for the Maori seats within an MMP system because of the likely hazard of an overhang. I also don’t believe that Maori seats are required to guarantee Maori representation. Maori representation is already much higher in almost every political party than it was pre-MMP. If there were a risk that representation might be lost, then there might be a good argument for list quotas by registered parties.
I also don’t believe that Maori seats are required to guarantee Maori representation
What about effective representation, Tim? That’s more than just Maori bums on seats y’know. The Maori seats are needed for both guaranteed proportional representation and effective representation as they are the only seats that are drawn from a dedicated Maori constituency. You don’t see a justification for Maori seats because of a likely hazard of an overhang, but you think it is ok if the seats were ditched fora likely hazard of under proportionality? That’s a pretty inconsistent argument, and hardly effective or proportional representation of Maori representation
Maori representation is already much higher in almost every political party than it was pre-MMP
It would be proportionally lower without the seats – and you consider that Jill Pettis, Clem Simich and Georgina Beyer were effectively representing Maori? Yeah right. Oh and the Maori Party is running a two ticks campaign in the Maori seats.
Not true. (The possibility of) Overhang is completely unrelated to the threshold. The threshold can create disproportionality (imagine a result where the Family Party, and Kiwi Party each get 4.9%, and get no seats to add to National’s lone 44%), but the threshold does not create disproportionality through overhang.
Weather Eye Of The North:
Can I suggest we not use misogynistic language to attack the Right? The Left as a whole is far more vulnerable to the consequences of sexism and general identity bigotry than the Right are, and we shouldn’t hand them ammunition from a purely practical sense.
And that’s completely ignoring how much it personally offends me.
There is nothing wrong with girls, (in fact, they’re pretty damn awesome in a variety of ways) and the National Party doesn’t need to “grow up” like some ageist tagline, it needs to “face the music” of what New Zealand is really like, and stop repeating its hollow and misleading talking points about how the absolute number of crimes and beneficiaries has gone up along with our population. Any statistics student would laugh at them.
Tim Ellis:
In terms of strategic voting, this is what people should do if they support multiple Left-leaning parties. Telling people how to vote strategically is a little different from endorsing strategic voting, (especially unproportional and potentially undemocratic strategies) especially as many of us consider electoral systems worthy of discussion on their own, and their vulnerabilities as an inherent pitfall to complement their advantages.
I agree with you that overhung party electorate seats (eg. in this election, most likely some of the seats of the Progressive, Maori, and United Future parties) are undemocratic and would like to see their effect mitigated. Then again, I also think the threshold is undemocratic and that any Party should be in Parliament if it can win a list seat outright. (ie. the threshold should be determined by whether number of party votes >= (number of votes / number of list seats in parliament)) However, how is it possible to mitigate the effect of overhang seats without removing electorates? The only way being suggested by these right-leaning commentators is to scrap proportionality entirely, which makes the electoral system just as undemocratic with vote-wastage, third party spoilers, electorate gerrymandering, and other potential FPP disasters. Oh, and conveniently, this system has historically favoured their party, while the only winners from MMP have been minor parties and those who felt disenfranchised by FPP.
If people hate the overhang so much, they should campaign for electorate seats to obey the threshold, too, along with a more sensible threshold that allows reasonable minority respresentation. Yes, *sigh* even Winston Peters, if voters still want him. Hell, I would join you. I want to see Peter Dunne outside of Parliament. I hate populists masquerading as centrists with the fury of a thousand suns.
Were that the case, FPP would’ve been “dead” several times over before the 1990s. Don’t overestimate the impact of political outrage of the vocal. Ultimately it’s about publicity and momentum, not events that could potentially be mere “footnotes”. Some of those potential footnotes cause a revolution, others slip quietly by while a few impassioned commentators yell about them to anyone who will listen, and eventually historians or academics will regard them as interesting facts.
Whether this is a footnote in our electoral history or the start of a revolution (and let’s not kid ourselves, even if it’s much easier these days, changing the electoral system is still a revolution in the deepest sense of the word) is entirely contingent on who and how many take(s) it as an impetus to act.
Finally, you’re presuming that MMP as a whole would be the target. Why are you so intent on throwing out the baby along with the bathwater?
There is both dissatisfaction and support for MMP. I think it’s useless to try and quantify it without a poll, (and Lew has pointed out some of the more obvious difficulties in that approach) and even then, only a referendum really has any final or reasonably accurate or acceptably final say in the matter.
By the by, I’m not even sure if there’s an entirely neutral and sufficiently clear way to word the “moral duty” question for a poll. Every way I can think of that makes it clear exactly what’s happening when we support the single largest party always forming government also draws attention to the disenfranchisement of third party voters.
This post is not about John Key. There is one- presumably flippant- use of his name in the entire text. This post is about whether the single largest party has a moral right to form a coalition government, as some on the right have started claiming since National pulled ahead of Labour, and since supporters of a Labour-led government pointed out National’s lack of secure coalition partners. It seems to me you’re the one (probably inadvertently) engaging in straw man arguments, as the point of this post applies regardless of whether John Key supported the largest party having first shot at government or not.
Graeme Edgler:
Many people give their electorate votes to politicians who overhang their party votes in order to get them into parliament. In that sense, some of the overhang is directly related to the threshold.
The other, more significant source of overhang in MMP is “electorate parties” like the Maori Party. Do they disrupt proportionality? Yes. In principle I dislike that. However given the reality of significant Maori disenfranchisement, I think overall it’s actually better to leave the Maori seats intact, regardless of what we try and do to combat overhang.
Lynn: Thank you,
Graeme: The threshold causes overhangs for behavioural reasons, not technical reasons. There’s an element of cognitive dissonance (thinking their party vote doesn’t matter, even though it does as soon as one MP wins an electorate), and an element of uncertainty (are other people voting for this party?) which increases regret (what if they don’t, and my vote is wasted?). The cognitive dissonance element may decrease as electors begin to understand MMP more (it can take a generation or so). Decreasing or removing the threshold will reduce the uncertainty and consequently the regret, and essentially free people up to cast their party vote for whatever party they want, secure in the knowledge it will count.
Tim: SP has put together a whole lot of straw-man arguments. I haven’t heard John Key say any along the lines of “the Right has the right to govern if it gets more votes than Labour’. His whole premise is flawed.
Key said: `strong presumption of a moral mandate’ this morning, so at worst Steve jumped the gun a little. See here.
L
Except that the same result happens with any threshold, or indeed no threshold. A party which uses its success in an electorate to get list seats doesn’t create an overhang.
I can see the argument, but I’d note for starters that this has yet to happen. Overhang is caused by popular local MPs who win without bringing the party vote sufficiently with them. Yes, the threat of (say) Winston Peters not winning Tauranga may cause people not to vote NZF, and the threat of Jeannette Fitzsimons losing Corromandel may have caused people not to vote Green, but while this artificially diminishes their parties’ votes, it hasn’t yet (and, I’d suggest, is unlikely to) diminished any party’s support to below the approximately 0.7% needed for a seat.
Peter Dunne or Jim Anderton may cause overhang this time ’round, but it won’t be caused by diminished voting out of fear that their parties aren’t going to win 5%.
Graeme: I’d note for starters that this has yet to happen.
Well, all this talk of the overhang is more or less academic since there’s only ever been one overhang, of one seat. I’d argue that the 2005 overhang was caused by this very phenomenon, with traditional Labour voters being reluctant to switch their party vote to a Johnny-come-lately mÄori party due to uncertainty about their support base (but being somewhat prepared to cast electorate votes for the candidates in question).
L
Graeme, As you said the threshold has a bearing if people think a candidate will win a seat and subsequently doesnt but it also has a bearing if a Minor party candidate is unlikely to win a seat and subsequently does as fewer people would vote for that candidate’ party – but more would if they knew the chances of election were great thus ensuring proportionality is closer for that party, diminshing the overhang. So the 5% is a relevant factor in voting choices here, too, and wouldbe as a result of diminished voting out of fear that their parties aren’t going to win 5%
Lew – I think people party vote the Maori party for different reasons than others.In 2008 people will party vote National because they`d like National in Govt (or as a protest vote). They vote Act because they want to see checks on a possible govt in case Rodney Hide doesn’t get in. They vote Green to increase the party vote as that will get more MPs in parliament. They vote Kiwi Party because they like christian values – but they vote Maori Party not because they want their vote to count, not because it will increase the number of MPs in Parliament, not because they want checks on Labour -it may go with National – but because they are Maori, or because they want to see Maori aspirations furthered and the party is the only party drawn from a Maori constituency that has those interests at heart and they consider that even though their vote is wasted, conviction is put before strategy.
dave: Interesting. The rational strategy in the short term (presuming it favours a Labour-led coalition in government) would be for the mÄori party to maximise the overhang by trading off party votes to Green, but that might endanger the party’s fortunes in the long term due to a backlash such as TIm warns about. But their not doing this makes sense in terms of Ari’s idea that the mÄori party are playing the long game, by reverting to a two-ticks campaign in order to mitigate that potential backlash if the overhang prevents a Nat party-vote majority NACTUF coalition from forming a government, and at the same time shoring up support for and increasing confidence in the mÄori party for the future – the prospect that their party vote might in future be worth more than the MÄori electorates.
L
I’m prepared to concede that for the sake of argument.
The conclusion that follows, of course, is that the overhang was unrelated to the threshold.
It’s not just “the right”. There have been two polls in the last couple of days which show that the overwhelming majority of people surveyed believe the same. Given that TVNZ’s poll showed 79% were in favour, it can hardly be seen as just some invention of “the right”.