Posts by izogi
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Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special…, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
Last night's RNZ Mediawatch episode tried to do some tracing of where the National Green coalition story came from.
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Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special…, in reply to simon g,
media coverage over the last fortnight has found an abundance of “Are we there yet?” opinion pieces, and a dearth of “Here’s where there might be” informed calculations. I’d like to have heard less from the bored kids in the back seat of the car, and more from an adult in the front with a map.
It's almost like the modern media model (MMM) of employing people who are only qualified to write about tactical politics (compared with something like aspects of "real life" which political policies and decisions affect) is failing us, merely because there's nothing to report. ... But still we're getting made up speculative opinion after made up speculative opinion.
We need to end MMM immediately, or at least force them all to take their annual leave when there's clearly nothing happening.
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Obviously, voters would behave differently if there was no threshold
This is an important consideration, I think. It's hard to predict what would really happen with no threshold or a lower threshold. There'd be a much greater incentive for new parties instead of trying to work inside an existing party. So we might see multiple new parties in parliament that've sucked votes from the likes of Labour's and especially National's traditional voting blocs with all their conflicting interests.
That's not an inviting situation for the traditional National and Labour establishment, which is probably why Judith Collins immediately binned the MMP review instead of enabling it to start a real discussion that could have ended in improving MMP.
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In any case, if the main concern is that small parties can't function reliably enough (something I disagree with), it's not as if there aren't still options that would help make the system fairer.
eg. At least give voters some form of alternative vote, so we can express where we want our vote to go if the primary choice doesn't reach the threshold. Having that would do much to resolve the dilemma voters face when trying to decide if a vote for the option they really want will end up hindering the eventual government they're hoping for, and it'd help minor parties to reach the threshold if they're not having to compete with people's doubts about the electoral system.
The fact that we have a situation where parties can legitimately tell voters that they'll risk wasting their vote if they vote for what they really want, is shameful. Even if people can't elect their first choice, we should be aiming for as few wasted votes as possible.
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Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the no…, in reply to linger,
It was not true of the Alliance (10% in 1996), nor United Future (6.7% in 2002), nor ACT. It is unlikely to be true of NZF post-Peters. Even the Greens have recently demonstrated the potential for personal disagreement to disrupt a party
I'd suggest that both National and Labour have also had plenty of their own implosions and scandals of one form or another. The only difference is that they tend to be of the "too big to fail" variety. No matter what happens, certain tribes of voters will keep electing them. Scandals eventually get dusted under the rug, since it's inconvenient to remember one's own scandals when you're too busy trying to point out all the faults in everyone else.
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John Campbell's doing a thing this evening on issues and arguments around ID at polling stations. The main item has just gone online: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/201861502/no-id-needed-to-vote-in-new-zealand
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to ,
I think there's a reasonable argument for lowering the voting age if it were to mean that many people's first election was when they were still in a school environment.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to linger,
Hi @linger. I agree that the 4% thing really isn't low enough. Certainly if there's not some parallel measure. eg. Giving people an alternative vote, in case their first choice doesn't get enough, would also help people vote for a low-polling party with less concern of their vote being wasted.
What annoyed me most was the seeming arrogance with which it was rapidly thrown out. There was no serious attempt to even discuss the report nor consider change. National spent the better part of the referendum encouraging everyone to support Supplementary Member, which is really just FPP-lite with a pretend gesture towards proportionality. When that didn't work, it asserted its position in government to block any pathway towards making MMP work more effectively for parties that weren't National.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Sacha,
Talking about the party of bottom lines, I was surprised to see Tracey Martin, on the final episode of Back Benches, arguing that 5% was a good value for the threshold. Apparently it's the fault of the small parties "for not perfecting the art of surviving".
If that's a genuine view then I seriously wonder if NZ First MPs, if not just Tracey Martin, are deceived about the impact which their leader has on the votes they get. Or maybe I'm wrong and all those people are voting for the party rather than its leader of exaggerated personality?
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Bart Janssen,
There really is probably room for a second Green party in NZ, but the 5% rule means that such a party will never evolve.
This really annoys me. I like MMP far more than what came before it, but to me this recent election has been a clearer demonstration of what's been happening for a while now: the small parties are withering away and not being replaced.
We've had MMP for 21 years. That's 8 elections! So far it's been impossible for any new party to be elected without help from a rogue incumbent, or from another party. ACT and the Alliance both started with incumbents. JA's Progressives had Jim Anderton. The Maori Party started with incumbents. NZ First has been built around a single incumbent's personality cult. The Greens had Helen Clark asking Labour's supporters in Coromandel to elect Fitzsimons. Mana was/is Hone Harawira. United Future has always had Dunne (until now). NO new party has been able to enter parliament without somebody on the inside unlocking the door to let them in, despite several very well resourced parties trying.
Over that 21 years, these parties have been disappearing and they haven't been replaced. It's only been mildly less obvious because National decided to keep United Future and ACT alive as zombie puppet parties, to exploit overhang thanks to National's instructed supporters in trusted seats, but without those parties having any inspiring policies that anyone realistically wants to vote for. Even NZ First will, most likely, vanish once its leader leaves. Then we'll be left with just Labour, the Greens (if we're lucky), National and possibly a yellow National finger puppet.
New parties with new ideas that people get inspired by simply cannot break through the 5% barrier, in part because many of those inspired people are too concerned about their vote being wasted and possibly also because the threshold is simply too high. We seriously need to fix this, at least as much as anything else on an incoming government agenda.
In 2011 we voted to retain MMP with the understanding that there would be a review towards making it work even better. That review was published, and I found it quite offensive when Judith Collins threw it out on arbitrary grounds. It was essentially using the privilege of being in government to trample on everyone who might want to be. Probably Collins and National's strategists were after short term gain, and saw changes as a threat which might allow un-planned parties to come along and challenge National's traditional vote and campaigning style, which largely relies on everyone in that voting bloc being forced to target their vote at a rusty bucket of conflicting ideas.
That decision of Collins' is finally coming back to bite. National + puppets failed to get enough votes, Labour+Greens failed to get enough votes, and there are so few parties remaining in the mix that the options for forming a government are very limited, and largely reliant on the unpredictable guy who nobody wants to deal with.