Further to the table posted by David Farrar yesterday on all the parties responses regarding their position on MMP.
Finally someone’s done the numbers on the table: The majority of Parliament appears to support Judith Collins.
s.russell Says:
According to that table:
* There is a 68-53 majority for retaining the 5% threshold
* There is a 65-56 majority for retaining the coat-tail provision Read more »
David Farrar has a useful table showing just how fragmented the political parties are on changes to MMP.
Judith Collins has done the right thing in ignoring the recommendations and all the other political parties who are having a big sook and a cry only have themselves to blame when you look at the facts.
The honest truth about politicians is that they tell lies:
This is not an ideological argument about the moral advantages of a smaller state: it is simple economic necessity. As the man said, there’s no money left. And the only ways that anybody can think of for the state to get more of it are either futile (taxing the “rich”) or destructive of any possibility of recovery (more borrowing). What began as a banking collapse has turned into a crisis of democratic politics. Is this what we have to look forward to? The process of campaigning and voting will be an irrelevance: all parties will tell pretty much the same lies. Whichever one is marginally more credible than the others will gain power (probably in coalition with another bunch of liars), and then have to do what needs to be done in whatever desperate, underhand ways it can devise. Nobody will feel that he got what he voted for, because what he voted for was impossible.
Sad but true…especially in an MMP environment.
Brian Rudman has taken time out from his public campaign, using the Herald as his soapbox, for a theatre to discuss waka jumping:
Just why Prime Minister John Key is cuddling up to Winston Peters in his hour of embarrassment is hard to fathom – unless of course he’s softening him up as a potential coalition partner. But better fun surely just to sit back and enjoy the sight of another of the New Zealand First leader’s hand-picked acolytes going rogue.
Instead, he’s backing the reintroduction of the waka-jumping legislation, first passed in 2001 by the Labour Government and its Alliance allies in response to public disquiet about the level of “party-hopping” by MPs over the previous decade.
The Electoral (Integrity) Act forced “unethical” MPs who deserted their ship or fell out of favour with the party leadership to give up their seats.
Brian misses the point entirely.
Waka jumping isn’t about stopping “unethical” MPs jumping ship – it’s about making party leadership and bosses make “unruly MPs” walk the plank.
From The NBR:
“Prime Minister John Key says Brendan Horan’s expulsion from New Zealand First’s caucus has highlighted public frustration with MMP.”
Maybe the PM will support a Vote for Change?
Oh, wait….
The Herald had an opinion piece from Philip Temple yesterday about MMP. Yes readers, I know you are saying who’s he?
Well he is the beardy weirdy academic who fronted the pro-MMP campaign. Not that you’d know from the disclosure statement provided by the NZ Herald which just calls him a researcher and a writer. It is always best to know where people are coming from don’t you think?
Anyway he says:
Ignoring vast public support for electoral reform would hurt the Government at the next election, writes Philip Temple.
Which is bullshit of course. The public won’t notice much at all.
Just look about, the evidence is before you of the indifference to politicians of public opinion. Increasing penalties for violent crime, this measure passed by 91.78%….ignored. Reduction of parliament from 120 to 99 seats, with 81.47% voting for this proposal…ignored. The referendum opposing Sue Bradfords reforms, 87.4% of votes answered ‘no’ but the politicians ignored it.
There has been no resulting upending of our democracy as a result, nor has any party been punished for ignoring the public will.
David Farrar has crunched the numbers and found that National would have been rooted if the new suggestions for electoral reform had have been in place over the last 18 years.
It makes you wonder why the hell National were so stupid about the referendum last year. Steven Joyce made the call to protect his and John Key’s power at the expense of the National Party in the medium term. In the United Kingdom David Cameron realised the problem and gave the following referendum changing speech.
Joyce wouldn’t even talk to Vote for Change, let alone take a stand on an issue because he was hell bent on protecting his own power. His staff even skite to this day about blocking the Vote for Change people from the National party election night function, despite the fact that they were members.
Talk about myopia. Well, you reap what you sow and now the Electoral Commission is ramming home the advantage to the left.
Labour could lead a Government if an election were held today, the latest political poll shows.
National’s support has tumbled by four points and Labour has gained by almost the same amount in the latest TV3 Reid Research poll.
Labour, the Greens and Mana would have 61 seats in a 123-seat Parliament; and National and Act would have 58.
The Maori Party would hold the balance of power if its three current MPs kept their electorate seats and if the Greens and Mana went with Labour. It wouldn’t matter whether United Future went with the left or right.
Makes you wonder whether he was protecting his own power without any thought beyond the 2011 election.
It makes you also wonder why Greg Hamilton submitted for the MMP review that National was happy
I’m on the Huddle tonight with Larry Williams and the lovely Josie Pagani.
Our topics are:
As usual you can listen live online or the wireless. I will post the audio tomorrow morning.
Graeme Edgeler has produced another of his review pieces about the MMP review. This time he talks about Zombie MPs, those that return off the list after being tossed out of their electorates. And again it seems he has had a change of heart:
But approaching this from the standpoint that I haven’t had a problem with back-door MPs, is a mistake. The question we need to address is whether there would be benefits.
During the referendum campaign, Jordan Williams of the anti-MMP group Vote for Change repeatedly argued that Supplementary Member was a compromise between fully proportional MMP, and the majoritarian, electorate-based, First Past the Post (FPP). The usual response to this argument is that it is in fact MMP which is the compromise: between a fully electorate-based system like FPP and a fully list-based system (such a system is used in most countries with proportional representation); we get a proportional result, but also get the strong local representation missing from systems that rely solely on lists.
That’s how the argument goes, anyway. But does our current form of MMP really allow for strong local representation? Jordan’s greatest complaint about MMP was that it was unfair that when a party lost an electorate it got an extra list seat (and sometimes even the very same MP). He argued that this meant that parties (and MPs) could ignore the wishes of the middle New Zealanders who make up the marginal electorates.
And I think he’s right. The tendency may not be great, but it is a factor. We’ve never had (under MMP or FPP) the Westminster tradition of crossing the floor (I don’t think government backbenchers in New Zealand have ever taken out newspaper advertisements opposing government policy, for example), so the effect might not be as great, but it could manifest itself in other ways. But maybe under first past the post – out of fear of losing their jobs, with no plan B – local MPs in marginal or somewhat marginal electorates were more likely to more forcefully put their constituents’ views in caucus, and were able to forestall unpopular changes, or obtain concessions. It certainly seems likely that an MP who, if they lost their electorate, would be out of a job, would take that part of the representative function more seriously.
Indeed, as Jordan argued, the very existence of a process of ranking MPs on a list, whereby the higher they are on the list, they more likely they are to keep their well-paying jobs, is an encouragement to not stand up to party bosses – even for MPs who represent electorates. While there are other ways to counter this effect – and I’ll discuss the possibility of “open lists” in a future post – it’s worth considering this on its own.
