Government must be decided today
The New Zealand public is to be congratulated for its extraordinary patience over the past three weeks since the general election. The wait to hear who will form the new government will be over soon – we hope.
Winston Peters’ choice, due today, will be met with disappointment and anguish by some people. That is not an outsider’s observation – those were the words used on the NZ First party’s Facebook page last week anticipating the reaction he will receive.
Peters knows he is about to alienate a substantial part of his own voting base, which had already lost more than 20,000 votes to 187,000 between the 2014 and 2017 elections.
Of course, Peters’ remaining supporters will be divided about whether he should support National or a Labour-greens coalition, and no doubt that will have played on his mind in the past three weeks.
How divided they are is anyone’s guess, but a post-election Colmar Brunton poll suggested two-thirds would prefer to go with Labour. It is only a suggestion – the number of NZ First supporters within the pollsters’ generic sample group was so small that the reliability of the figure is questionable.
But it is likely the number of people who both voted for NZ First and who will support Peters’ choice of government is only about 100,000. Let’s put that into perspective – 100,000 of the 2.59 million who voted last month.
But it will not be that 100,000 who will make the decision. It will be Peters, the other eight MPS in his caucus (none of whom were directly voted into an electorate) and about 13 members of the NZ First board.
Until the weekend, it was difficult to even find out who the NZ First board members were.
Their names are not listed on the party website. Peters declared they were not public figures and they had a ‘‘right to privacy’’.
Actually, no. If they are involved in a decision as significant and farreaching as the one they will be asked to participate in today, the public has a right to know who they are.
The delay in deciding the new government – Peters had promised an announcement last Thursday – has been partly because the board members needed to be brought together for a meeting.
Some people have expressed misgivings about the MMP system after this election, but it is the system we have and that we endorsed at two referendums, in 1993 and 2011.
However, even its most ardent supporters couldn’t have imagined things being settled like this.
A party that 92 per cent of the electorate did not want will make a decision that will be unpopular with possibly half its supporters, in a room mainly occupied by party members it is reluctant to even name, and who have been given that responsibility by a process that had nothing to do with the election.
The least Peters can do now is stop playing the waiting game. The country needs to know who will govern it.