Written By: - Date published: 4:06 pm, November 12th, 2008 - 117 comments
Categories: Deep stuff -
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[I'll just preface this post by saying I have no love for Winston Peters' politics and I'm happy to see New Zealand First out of Parliament but, then, I would also be happy to see National out of Parliament and, surely, we shouldn't base an electoral system on particular outcomes for particular parties, rather, on morality and justice]
According to the preliminary count, 88,000 New Zealanders voted for New Zealand First this election (the number will be nearly 100,000 once specials are added). There will be no MPs representing those voters’ choice of preferred party in this Parliament. In contrast, 78,000 New Zealanders voted for Act but, despie being fewer in number than NZF supporters, their voice will be represented in this Parliament because National voters split their vote in Epsom to ensure Act won the seat. It is largely due to these two factors, the wasting of NZF votes and the inclusion of the smaller number of Act votes, that we have a National/Act government rather than a Labour-led government.
There seems to me no logical reason why Act voters should get their voice heard but NZF voters shouldn’t. It’s one of these ‘quirks’ of MMP. But it is an unnecessary quirk arising from the fact that we have a 5% threshold. So, why do we have a threshold and why is it 5%?
MMP was introduced in post-War Germany, replacing the pre-Nazi fixed list proportional system. It was felt that a threshold of 4% would prevent extremist parties gaining a toehold in the Bundestag. A sensible, if probably ineffective, precaution in a country that had just been wrecked by the Nazis’ actions. But hardly a reason for us to have it. The Royal Commission that recommended we adopt MMP also said we should adopt the 4% threshold as part and parcel of it. For reasons I’ve never seen satisfactorily explained, that was raised to 5% when MMP was enacted.
Since MMP was introduced, nearly 400,000 votes have been wasted on parties that won enough support to justify at least one seat on a proportional basis and two incumbent parties (NZF and the Alliance) have been knocked out of Parliament in that manner. In 1999, the Greens would have been out of Parliament and 103,000 voters would have lost their representaiton if just 3,300 fewer votes had been received by the Greens. All because of the threshold.
Now, people will say that if we didn’t have a threshold then the Bill and Ben Party would have won a seat last election. To which I respond, not really and so what? If there was no threshold fewer people would make protest votes on joke parties. And if they did and the Bill and Ben Party won a seat, who are you and I to say that is wrong? The day we start deciding that some people’s voice shouldn’t be represented because they’ve made a dumb choice is a dangerous day indeed. If we’re going to start deciding some parties are not ‘worthy’ enough to be in Parliament irrespective of the support they receive, we would have to get rid of United Future for starters.
If there were no threshold, it would not be a free-for-all (not that there’s any reason why a free-for-all would be bad). A party would still need to get 20,000-odd votes to get in and most people would still vote for larger parties. As with the introduction of MMP, removing the threshold would make Parliament more diverse and representive of the opinions of voters – surely good things to have in a democracy.
It is a complete injustice that 88,000 votes doesn’t get a voice just because there weren’t 16,000 more people who agreed with them while 78,000 people do get a voice just because 16,000 voters who support a different party tactically supported one of their party’s candidates.
MMP is a great system, the best I’ve yet studied. There is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. But to make MMP fairer we should remove the threshold.
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Steve P.
Read about it here: Wiki – STV
Graeme, you’re right, of course. I just hadn’t thought about it With no threshold at all, you would effectively be rounding up those parties that get between 0.5 and 1 seat’s worth of votes. Don’t really see the problem with that, it’s better than wasting 100,000 votes an election. and it has only occurred twice so far.
A 0.8% or 1% threshold would eliminate the issue and effectively eliminate the wasted vote too.
insider – Man you’re a fucking genius “I don’t think you guys were talking about this before the election so it must be true.” Have a read of Idiot/Savant’s No Right Turn blog. He was talking about it before.
Graeme. Ah, but STV doesn’t yeild anything like proportional results in practice. Look at Aussie – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_federal_election,_2007
in practice, STV outcomes are essentially the same as FPP. If you equate a 1 ranking with a tick, it is nearly always the candidates with the top number of 1s that get elected, just as under FPP the top number of ticks gets elected. I had a look at a large number of STV elections substituting 1s for ticks and the results were exactly the same (we can haggle over how fair it is to equate a one with a tick but I believe it’s valid most of the time).
Steve P.
Yet 10 minutes ago you had no idea how STV worked… Do you always only study the things you have already decided are good ?
Key is doing something very risky with MMP. He is setting up the Maori Party to be the fall guy if/when his government loses popularity. When the government is threatened with collapse he will blame it on MMP, just before a referendum on MMP. So what happens? – FPP wins the referendum.
With that Hollow Man Stephen Joyce as his right hand man and chief adviser, any devious plot is possible.
The other thing I expect is for there to gradually be less openness and more secrecy. How long before the weekly press conferences stop (as happened with Shipley)? Key is already refusing to tell the public the true state of the books and the Maori Party are not revealing the terms of their deal. They are just doing rapid hui to ask Maori to ‘trust us’.
Watch this trend continue.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist – have just been watching politics for a long time.
Burt I know how STV works. That’s how I know, in spite of what people think, it is not a proportional system.
Janet, I don’t know if such calculations are in the equation, but they don’t need to be for a deal with the MP to be beneficial to Key/National. It stops Key being dictated to by ACT. OTOH he appears to be offering the entrenchment of Maori seats and the Foreshore & Seabed Act are on the table. Alternatively, no deal between the MP & National could mean the Maori seats are abolished – really this would be a deal the MP can’t refuse, and would earn a lot of Kudos for the MP amongst Maori.
burt if you can’t tell whether a question is asking for “the” answer or “your” answer then I think you have bigger problems than what type of electoral system we use.
Like how to tie your shoelaces, or how to walk and breathe without choking. Unless you were just being a cock, in which case I take it back.
Steve, the Aussies use Instant Runoff (single winner) which necessarily does not deliver a proportional result like STV could.
“[because I had no infuence whatsoever over the Labour-led Governments' legislative programme. Anyway, just because good things were done doens't mean that all good things could be done in 9 short years. Oh and if you want to complain about what we choose to write about, you can go and do it on Kiwiblog. To help, I'm happy to ban you if you tell me what to do with my time on me and my mates' blog again. SP]”
Why do you ban everyone who has an opinion different to you? Have you ever thought of arguing your case in an attempt to bring them over to your side?
[lprent: That isn't the objective. What we're after is getting a range of informed and articulate people arguing their viewpoints with each other. That allows events and ideas to be examined from all sides. Of course you have to be able to argue.... Banning is very seldom for directly based on opinions. It is for expressing the opinions in a manner likely to lose other opinions from the site - ie bad behaviour.]
Pretty simple really, if you can’t articulate it in a polite manner your not welcome.
I’ve worked out why communist and socialist countries produce so many great chess players. It’s no wonder people in these self serving regimes choose chess as their hobby. In chess both sides play by the same rules and if the person who expected to win looses they don’t rewrite the rules retrospectively or insist the rules need to be changed before the re-match.
Felix
My answer is from Wiki as I posted above. “The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a system of preferential voting designed to minimize wasted votes and provide proportional representation while ensuring that votes are explicitly expressed for individual candidates rather than for party lists.”
I don’t like MMP, I like FPP less. I just can’t understand how before the election MMP was the best thing since sliced bread and now that it didn’t deliver the result Steve P. (and possibly 40% of the population) wanted it now should be changed. Hopeless case of sour grapes. So Labour lost the election… Well tough – that is democracy.
Felix
Steve P. also said;
So has he studied it and not thought about it? Why do you want to fight Steve P’s battles for him – do you think he is not capable of defending his position himself?
KINO
I have always been polite, but still this spectre of banning hangs in the air. Might explain why the left lost.
[lprent: You aren't always polite (not that I particularly care), and sometimes your behavior veers at the edge. But bans are there to protect the diversity of site's comment section and to ensure that we have authors. It is a private site after all and you are expected to stay within the rather broad bounds of what is acceptable. The certain degree of uncertainty about what cause s banning is to ensure that people self-moderate rather than litigate. Usually there has to be a pretty good reason to ban from a consistent set of behaviours or hitting a standard pattern of troll behaviour. The nett result is that there is a substantial range of opinion engaging with each other - which is part of the objective.
Besides I just scanned your identity comments (6 pages of them). You haven't actually been banned - just lower grade actions. Like having your name amended and numerous notes by various moderators with a few warnings about banning.]
No. STV is a proportional system. Australian Federal elections are conducted under two systems – the House elections are preferential vote (and thus not proportional, as you describe), and the Senate elections are under STV (and proportional).
There are members of the Green Party in the Australian Senate (close to proportional – they earned 3.6 seats, an got 3); there are none in the Australian House – despite there being more seats, and a similar vote level.
Carol – I think the gambler Key and associates will be playing a lot of brinkmanship. I hear the Greens are advising the MP to be very careful in their dealings with National – I hope they heed this.
Felix
Here is some info here on the different systems in use in Aussie.
The election of the house of representatives is not an STV election. It is very much an FPP style home grown thing-a-me-bob. But since Steve P. knows all about STV he knew that and was trying to trip me up I guess, luckily I didn’t fall for it.
The overhang in MMP does not create a proportional parliament either. If your tinkering with the threseholds then lets fix the overhang whilst we are at it.
MMP Option 2: an upper an lower house.
Electorate Vote forms the lower house and gives electorates a voice.
The Party Vote forms the upper house, making it truely representative of the public mood.
Each house’s powers would need to be decided upon and that would take a fair amount of debate but I’m sure if enough people thrash around ideas we could come up with something that works.
Janet
the Greens lost out big in this election. How long have they been in parliament now, and how many times have they been in government? Their colours were nailed to the labour mast, and as such, have zero voice in a National led government. Maybe the Maori Party should advise the Greens.
‘Mixed Member’ seems to me to be a problem. It arises obviously from the two types of elected members. Given how I’ve heard so-called list members elected via the party vote rated as “less than” individual electorate members, allow me posit elimination of such inequalities by having proportionality set around the sum vote of an electorate MP.
For example, a couple of results I looked over had electorate votes made at around 31,000. Set the minimum overall per party vote to access parliament at 90,000 and we end up with 3 MPs for that party.
This could also offer a solution for say a specific electorate party.
Just a thought.. the point is whether it is just..?
In actuality the Greens would not have missed out on seats in the ’99 election by the margin you cited, Jeanette won the Coromandel electorate that year.
However, the threshold is too high and 4% would be a better threshold to settle on. Your argument for no threshold has no bearing and your rationale is lacking. I seriously doubt that people who vote for the Bill & Ben party and other joke parties would cease to do so if the threshold were to be removed.
Had the threshold not been in place I doubt that the Bill & Ben party would have put themselves on the ballot in fear of being elected. No reason for or against a removal of the threshold, merely a punt.
4% of the vote is a satisfactory requirement. Anything less would therefore create arguments in the case where one party received, for eg., 0.4% more than another and managed to receive an extra seat. How many ‘quirks’ are we prepared to give way to in the event of removing another?
You moan that nat voters split their vote to get ACT in epsom but apparently have no problem with labour splitting their vote in Wigram for Jimberton’s Regressives. Hypocrisy and sour grapes is not a good look.
Sweetd
On the contrary the Greens are winners in that they are still in parliament and growing. Consider NZ First, the Alliance, and after the next election there will be no more United Future and probably not Act either.
The Greens are patient, untainted, and their time is coming. See Gordon Campbell’s post.
They are certainly not going to fall for the fatal charms of the smiling assassin.
I have read the discussion and I am impressed. I know too little to contribute- just watch and learn. (Sorry and baffled to watch Burt and Sweetd, and George writing about something else altogether.) This is a discussion away from Party politics and one about ideas and practical implications. Keep it up.
No threshold?? Then you’d get Poland in 1991, despite the argument that people wouldn’t vote for joke parties. (Where’s the evidence for that people wouldn’t vote for joke parties?)
In the first totally free elections the Poles didn’t have a threshold. 29 parties won parliamentary seats including the Polish Beer-Lovers’ Party with 16 seats. Funnily enough, there is now a threshold of 5%, except for ethnic minority parties.
I suggest lowering the threshold here a little — say to 4% — and doing away with the rule that gaining a seat sees all the party votes counted. That such a rule would have changed the outcome of the election last week is completely coincidental.
PS, Steve, I *can* justify the threshold and therefore I support it. Think of the Polish Beer-Lovers’ Party and join me in supporting the threshold. Which is not to say that Polish beer isn’t perfectly good.
“It is a complete injustice that 88,000 votes doesn’t get a voice just because there weren’t 16,000 more people who agreed with them while 78,000 people do get a voice just because 16,000 voters who support a different party tactically supported one of their party’s candidates.”
But its totally ridiculous when you need to get over 300,000 signatures on a petition to get a non-binding referendum. A black mark on real democracy.
Peter: what happened in Poland? did they make decisions with 29 parties or did everything grind to halt?
[lprent: You're still banned for another week and a half. But I'll let this through - I want to know the answer myself]
“A black mark on real democracy.”
meh. If the referenda were written so that the answers told us something definitive and they were binding, maybe so, but as it stands, not so much.
You need to get 300 000 sigs to trigger a meaningless ballot on crap questions that can be taken to mean whatever barrow you care to push. The horror.
Janet
On what grounds do you think ACT would not make it to parliament at the 2011 elections. Hide increased is majority many times this election over 2005; which in tern gave security to all those people voting ACT in the nationwide party vote. By contrast, there was no certainity that the Greens would make it over the 5%. Epson voters understand MMP.
Secondly as for untainted, your last remaining goodwill vote is in Ginette Fitsimmons (sp, my bad, too much cab sav); once she is gone how do you think you will be able to in all good measure hang on to the ‘green’ banner when all you scream is socialist policies?
Ianmac
A discussion away from party politics… Are you a comedian?
Here is Steve P. describing how to get Jolly Jim elected.
Vote smart: Progressives and Wigram. In this post he describes how Jim won’t get above the threshold and how under MMP people can work around that.
Yet, he then says we should change MMP because of thresholds. So he wants it both ways. Typical lefty, work the system… oh that didn’t work – change the system.
What is wrong with working within the rules and accepting the outcome?
There will no threshold after the referendum SP, in fact there will be no more MMP.
sweet, green politics are about more than what you think they are. The ‘socialism’ as you see it is an intrinsic part. Your question is akin to asking how can ACT claim to want growth when all they blabber about is capitalism.
Ah the left.
They don’t like it up em.
The current system was all fine and good while Labour was putting together its coalitions and arrangements on supply and confidence, even accusing National of being anti MMP.
But the moment the system works for National and all of a sudden, it sucks.
Funny that.
marco
You mentioned the upper house idea earlier. I think this is the answer. The problem we have in NZ is that there is no upper house and the Governor General is not a workable check point.
Arguable law like the EFA would never be passed in NZ if we had an upper house. An upper house would say ‘send it back when the Human Rights Commission are not complaining’. or ‘send it back when the electoral commission are not saying it will be extremely difficult to interpret’. The GG waves it by and bang – we (the collective we – the country) are stuck with the will of a self serving govt.
The fact that Goff now suggests the EFA should be re-worked via a bi-partisan approach with two rounds of consultation (which is what National were fighting for in the first place) shows just how out of touch the Labour party had become.
Unless the Govenor General is going to become a one person dictator over assent of legislation then the govt de-jour has complete unfettered control of this country.
Chilling for some to think over the last nine years, chilling for some to think about today. I think it’s always chilling, I support ACT but I don’t think I’d like Rodney (or Sir Roger) whipping their party to support them with complete unfettered control of everything.
The upper house (IMHO) must be proportionally elected.