Posts by Idiot Savant
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But if you have electorate seats, it's not possible to avoid that. If I win an electorate, but get no party votes, either you ignore or overrule the electorate result, or parliament no longer represents the proportionality of the party vote.
To make MMP properly proportional, you'd have to do away with the mixed membership component, and not have electorates.
Precisely. And since we're not willing to do that, then the question is how to accomodate the disproportionality introduced by electorates in the least harmful way. And on that front, capping the size of parliament makes the problem worse, not better.
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Sainte-Laguë allocation formula
Bill & Ben get a high enough quotient to qualify for a seat. It's that simple.
(And again: no votes are ever redistributed. Every vote counts for the party it is given to, and no other)
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kyle: many people think the evil of an overhang lies in having to increase the total size of the House, and so they seek to address the problem by capping the number of MPs at 120. This misses the real problem: disproportionality.
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JohnS:
How bad would that be?
Pretty bad. It means less proportionality, less representation, and more disenfranchisement for a start. Thse are precisely the things we should be striving to avoid.
Solve the problem with more democracy, not less. Abolish the threshold, and let every vote[*] count.
[*] Because someone will be a dick: every vote within the limit set by having a 120 seat Parliament.
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Tom: AFAIK, no newspaper has published a poll on it. Ditto Mangere. Which is a shame, really.
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wankers
Quite. Who are these people?
Which side?
The Nats were an assortment of greys, hyped up on the scent of imminent victory. The Labour people were students and union people, organised at the last minute by cellphone, and excited by the thought of ruining Key's photo op. There was also a pair from Both Eyes Open, which is how I know this stuff ;)
The guy with the megaphone was being a dick, or at least had no imagination with his slogans. The National people who were trying to get in his face and take it off him were being bigger dicks. Speech you don't like is part and parcel of democracy, and you just have to put up with it. Sadly, many of the National people seemed to have real problems with that concept.
I prefer to protest politely. But its interesting that National's crowd wouldn't even tolerate that. The police, OTOH, had no problem with it.
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I believe a majority of eligible MPs (i.e. non-Ministers) have a bill in most ballots. Certainly not all the Labour and National members all the time
Not even close. National obviously submits more bills than labour (because Labour can get bills through as the government, and its easier to lobby a Minister), but less than half of them bother. Which is one of the reasons we see a high number of bills from minor parties: because they use their opportunities, rather than waiting till they'e in government.
Whether a party wants to distribute or focus their efforts is up to them. But I think they'd all benefit immensely from having the opportunity to pick an issue and push it hard when they need to. Note that the Greens have already tried to do this with climate change, but they had to do it with six seperate minor bills; it was a thematic challenge only, not a push for a single specific reform.
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I've long had the thought that changes in procedure like this could be advanced as part of a confidence and supply deal.
Or cooked up between the minor parties as a united demand, on the basis that whichever major party is in opposition will leap at he opportunity.
Minority government means that this sort of reform can be imposed on them whether they like it or not.
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The chances of your bills coming out would be proportionate to the number of MPs you had.
Precisely. Which is entirely fair.
Superfically, this would advantage the larger parties - but only because they consistently underutilise their ballot opportunities at present. In practice, all it does is allow parties to focus their efforts and push one issue hard, rather than having to disperse them as they do at present.
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There's something to be said for minimal, easy change as being more likely to succeed. And it would demonstrate that letting Parliament (as opposed to just the government) have more say won't be the end of the world. But dammit, I want more as well.
One consequence of allowing spamming of the ballot is that it will provide a strong incentive for the government to get into the game, and advance minor legislation through the ballot rather than as a government bill, simply in an effort to shift the odds away from the oposition. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing either; members bills tend to target small areas of policy that aren't important enough to deserve a real bill; the more people advancing them, the better.