Last week, the Greens announced they were standing aside for (spit) Greg O’Connor in Ohariu. Today, the Maori Party cut a deal with Mana to split the Maori seats. And sometime in the next six months we will no doubt see National cut a similar deal in Epsom to ensure David Seymour continues to receive a Parliamentary salary.
These deals are incentivised by the rules of MMP, as the one electorate rule magnifies the effect of certain seats by making full representation of smaller parties dependent on them – thus encouraging parties to either step aside to allow an ally to be represented, or gang up to prevent the representation of an enemy. Lots of (mostly older) voters hate them, seeing them as a perversion of democracy (apparently all parties are obligated to run in all seats or something, regardless of whether its in their interests or they can afford it or not). Their response is to remove the incentive by revoking the one-electorate rule. But this would have a negative effect on proportionality, by arbitarirly denying parties their full representation. Fortunately, there are other ways of doing it.
The first, and most obvious, is to completely remove the 5% threshold. Its an arbitrary limit, put in place by the big parties to limit competition, under the guise of “Keeping extremists out”. Except New Zealand has no extremists, and in the historic case it is supposedly there to prevent – Nazi Germany – those extremists won 30% of the vote. The 5% threshold undermines proportionality for no good purpose. What it does do is incentivise electorate deals in order to sidestep it. So, remove the threshold, give every party its full allocation of seats according to the modified Sainte-Lague formula, and electorate deals (and indeed electorates) simply cease to be relevant. Problem solved.
Another solution is to introduce preferential voting in electorate seats. This is something we should be doing anyway to ensure that every electorate candidate has majority support, but it would have the bonus of removing any incentive for the sorts of deals we are seeing in Ohariu or the Maori seats, by removing “vote splitting” from the electoral calculus. Parties would be free to stand (and compete for the party vote) without fear that by doing so they might be advantaging or disadvantaging some other party. Instead, the preferences can flow where they may.
Either of these would remove, or strongly reduce the incentives for electorate deals. Either would be a far better change to our electorate system than removing the one-electorate rule, in that they would improve proportionality and/or return power to the voters rather than the parties. The question is whether the big parties will support them, rather than trying to distort the system to their own advantage. Sadly, given their response to the Law Commission review, I suspect it will be the latter.
I agree with bith suggestions: removing 5% threshold, and preferential voting in electorate seats.
Though I wonder if preferential voting, plus party vote, would increase the complexity of voting, and thus put some people off – as possibly happens with local council elections.
People really aren’t that simple minded you know. In fact, it sounds like BS made up by the intelligentsia as an excuse not to change the system for the better.
What happens with local elections is:
1. It’s a postal vote and so, IMO, there’s no urgency to it and thus people forget until too late
2. People don’t think that it makes any difference
People do look at Auckland forms and not know who everybody is and how to select people for local boards, health authorities, etc – it is a lot.
The media focuses on election of Mayor, but the rest gets little coverage.
Which tells me that we need better communication. IMO, that’s why we ended up with political parties. It’s simply easier to tell people who and what a party is rather than trying to describe all of the individuals in the party.
Local politicians are holding on to this delusion of being independent and it’s actually making elections harder.
Of course, to me, this says that we should all be voting on policies rather than voting for people to represent us.
Also, for electorates in general elections, it isn’t going to be “Rank these 20 people you’ve never heard of for 7 positions on the local DHB, from vague blurbs that tell you nothing useful about the candidate’s policies or politics”, so should be way easier.
Good post, good ideas to think about!
Although with under the 5% you might have to be careful that people did not start a party as they were lobbying something to put through. Or just got some money and thought they would add to it, by starting a party and pushing their ideas through on economics or religion or commercial interests.
Not sure what the problem is you are getting at here, with lobbyists and “people starting a party and pushing their ideas through…”.
You seem to be describing “single-issue” parties (e.g. The Cannabis Party, or Ban 1080 Party, or Internet Party).
There doesn’t any drama with such parties; it doesn’t really matter what the motive is in forming them.
Even without the 5% threshold, a single issue party will still need to get around 0.8% to get an MP, and if that many people vote for the party, then they should get representation.
The Internet Party isn’t a single issue party. It doesn’t have the policy depth of Labour or the Greens but that’s more due to its short time. It certainly has multiple policies across multiple fields.
It probably does have greater policy depth than National but a child playing in the sand has more policy depth than National.
I’m more concerned about groups like the Business Roundtable putting up candidates and having the money to get them through the threshold.
Then like ACT and United Future, use their votes to prop up a government and have their politicians on the political teat – we already have that problem with the aforementioned!
And as you say yourself, would we want someone who just has one idea on the parliamentary staff who get through because they are the voice of a popular movement like Cannabis reform or banning 1080 but have few other ideas?
With the changes specified in the post neither ACT nor Dunne would be in parliament today.
Neither of them got enough party votes to get a seat that way and preferential voting in the electorate would ensure that the most preferred candidate got in.
At least they’ve got one idea!
If they get the votes (i.e. about 0.8% of the electorate) then it doesn’t seem a problem. It’s what we (the electorate) voted for. At least, the electorate knows the single issue party’s position on one thing. The position of mainstream parties on anything is often quite opaque / surprising to the voter.
If a single issue party causes problems and / or don’t appear to attempt to resolve their single issue, then they won’t get voted back in.
I thought the Business Roundtable had merged into the New Zealand Institute!?
Yes you are right,.
That’s the other issue for the modern age, organisations and corporations keep changing their names to fool people as they catch on to the organisations/organisations true intentions!
Anyone wondering should watch Borgen – I learnt a lot about multi-party systems from that show. Upshot – they can work, and not only that, they can work well, and are more representative. More frequent elections of course, so that means getting people interested and STAYING interested.
Surely every voting option is open to gaming. That’s the human way. Pointing out one apparent fault and therefore changing to another is lacking in logic. Nothing can be perfect for long, somebody will muck it up slightly. I can live with parties having to talk about common aims when absolutely forced to work together. In the main isn’t that of benefit to we citizens? Sorry if your blood is too pure and noble for you to have to share the same thread with me.