The day after the election is crucial

After an inauspicious beginning, this year’s election campaign has transformed into the most gripping in living memory. However, amid all the talk of imaginary fiscal holes, stardust and generational change, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that, in some respects, the really important day this year is not September 23, but the day after.

For that is the day on which at least two and possibly more parties will begin discussing the shape and political complexion of the next government, barring the unlikely but not impossible event that either Labour or National are able to govern alone.

After seven MMP elections – Saturday will be our eighth – New Zealanders are pretty familiar with the general principle that while we directly elect our Parliaments, we do not directly choose our Governments. The French and the Americans may get to vote for their president, but we don’t get to do the same thing for our prime minister.

Instead, the identity of the next prime minister will be determined through a process of Government formation that will begin after Saturday’s election. And while we are generally pretty good these days on the relationship between the party vote and the shape of the next Parliament, my sense is that we are far less familiar with the critical business of how Governments are formed.

Our citizens’ role in this process is limited to casting our votes and thereby determining the distribution of seats among successful parties. What happens next is in the hands of those we have elected to Parliament. Curiously, it transpires that there aren’t terribly many formal rules governing how the politicians we elect on Saturday will go about cobbling together the next government.

As Victoria University’s Professor Jonathan Boston explained some years ago, virtually all other countries have a framework of rules that wraps around Government formation. These range from the requirement to have a ‘‘formateur’’ (a person who oversees the Governmentformation process), rules governing the sequence in which inter-party negotiations must take place, and the requirement that a putative Government must win a vote of confirmation in the House before it can take office.

Here? Not so much – in fact, none of the above apply. In the absence of formal procedures, about the only thing we can be sure of is that the requirement that Parliament must meet roughly two months after the election will provide a strong political incentive for parties to have completed discussions by the time they all reconvene in the new Parliament. Beyond that, it’s over to them – which leads Boston to characterise as ‘‘free-style’’ the process through which we go about forming governments here.

This isn’t to suggest that it’s all madness and mayhem. In fact, since 1996, the political and bureaucratic classes have become very good at putting Governments together.

There has been a great deal of change in the shape and operations of our Governments since we adopted MMP, but there have been few political and no constitutional crises emerging from the ‘‘free-style’’ manner in which we go about cobbling Governments together.

There is something a little disconcerting about the relative absence of formality in the way we build Governments here.

Rules are important: They provide a measure of certainty and predictability, and they help the wider public to understand what’s going on in their democracy.

Faced with a genuine conundrum on Saturday – such as (implausible though it might sound) a dead heat between the centre-left and centre-right blocs – it is not clear how well we would respond.

Should such a situation begin to emerge late on Saturday, let’s hope the governor-general, who would be the ultimate arbiter in such a situation, gets a good night’s sleep.

Professor Richard Shaw is a senior lecturer in politics at Massey University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.