Votes of confidence
Opinion
New voting system much more representative of New Zealand
Outside New Zealand - especially in Australia, always ready to have a go at its trans-Tasman cousins there was a lot of criticism about this country’s new voting system after the October general election.
The Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system was a mess, the Aussie critics said. It did not produce a stable, obvious government. New Zealand, the country they like to call The Shaky Isles because it is earthquake prone, had made a big mistake and was now headed for political instability as well. This, of course, overlooked Australia’s political reality, with a senate where a single inde pendent can block government legislation approved by the House of Representatives, and a federal system under which the states have the power to frustrate policies developed in Canberra.
But that is by-the-by. The fact is the election outcome was remarkably close to the essential intention of MMP. It was not a defeat for democracy as some critics liked to paint it: it was a victory.
It was not democratic under the old first-past-the-post voting system for a minor party to get more than 20 per cent of the total vote and only two seats in par liament, as happened to Social Credit in 1981. Or for the NZ Alliance to get 18.2 per cent in 1993 and only two MPs. In 1984, the New Zealand Party garnered 12.25 per cent of the votes and no seats at all. In 1981 and 1993, more than 350,000 Social Credit and Alliance voters were effectively disenfranchised. More than a quarter of a million Nety Zealand Party supporters fared even worse in 1984. In neither case did their voters get the repre sentation in parliament they had sought at the ballot box. MMP changed the rules of the game so the smaller parties - and those who voted for them - were no
longer shut out of the political process.
Without proportional representation. New
Zealand’s parliament would still be domi nated by the two parties. National and Labour, that had shared power between them for the last 58 years.
Although the final result has to be ver ified at the time of writing, October’s his toric election saw the New Zealand First Party get 17 seats in the expanded 120seat parliament from 13 per cent share of the vote. The NZ Alliance got 13 MPs from its reduced 10 per cent share and a new party, ACT NZ, got eight members from 6.1 per cent of the vote. An inbuilt MMP safeguard - the requirement that parties win one electoral seat or five per cent of the total vote - worked as intend ed in preventing a rash of fringe groups with minimal public support entering par liament. When parliament convenes this month, 10 years after a Royal Commission recommended the new sys tem, no party will have an overall majori ty; none will be able to govern alone. New Zealanders voted for political moderation and an end to extremist policies of what ever political colour. An MMP govern ment will have to run on the principles of consensus, compromise and, as National’s leader Jim Bolger observed, common sense. The new system has given New Zealand a new-look parliament that is much more representative of the country as a whole. It is no longer the preserve of the white, middle-aged males who have tended to dominate the political scene.
There are 45 new MPs - more than a third of the total. There are 35 women, up from 20 in the old 99-seat parliament, including two 26-year-olds. There will be a considerably enhanced Maori presence in the debating chamber, with 15 Maori MPs, a number that for the first time is roughly proportional to their percentage
of the population.
And significantly for Pacific Islands Monthly readers, there will be three Pacific Island MPs. Labour’s Mark Gosche, a New Zealand-bom Samoan, and National’s Arthur Anae (of Samoan, Chinese and European descent) have joined Taito Phillip Field, who was the first Pacific Island MP when elected in 1993 and the community’s sole represen tative in parliament. In addition, Pansy Wong, an immigrant bom in Shanghai and educated in Hong Kong, looked likely to squeak in on the National list vote as New Zealand’s first ethnic Chinese MP, repre senting her race and about 185,000 Asians in total. In the lead-up to the election, many politicians and commentators expressed doubts as to whether voters would understand the new process.
At one stage, opinion polls showed 50 per cent of people did not know they had two votes - one for a constituency candi date and the other for a party list. There were fears voters might be so confused they would not turn out on election day.
These proved unfounded.
More than 88 per cent of enrolled vot ers went to the polls - close to a record and there were clear signs they under stood the two-vote system very well.
Political scientists estimated that one in three voters split their votes - casting a party vote different from the political alle giance of their favoured constituency can didate to try to bring about the coalition government they wanted. This was double the rate of vote-splitting in Germany, where the MMP system was developed to prevent a single party like the Nazis get ting unbridled power again and where it has been used since the war.
The voters made MMP work for them.
It is now up to the politicians to make it work for the country. ■