‘Wakajumping’ Bill raises questions

IT’S controversial, and there aren’t easy answers to the issues it raises. It’s likely to cause soulsearching in the Green Party, as members try to digest the ‘‘dead rat’’ its MPs have agreed to swallow, despite party policy, to honour its confidence and supply agreement with Labour. It’s deadlocked Parliament’s Justice Select Committee.

It’s the NZ First Party’s ‘‘Wakajumping’’ Bill: part of the coalition agreement between NZ First and Labour.

An MP changing party allegiance or being expelled from their party, during their parliamentary term, isn’t new in New Zealand. It’s been happening for well over a century, and there was a flurry of ‘‘jumping’’ associated with the change to a mixedmember proportional electoral system, leading to the enacting of The Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Act 2001, a timelimited Act, which expired at the 2005 election.

Mr Peters himself was a ‘‘jumper’’, leaving the National Party in 1993, but he resigned his seat and stood, successfully, as an Independent, in the subsequent byelection.

It probably became a real issue for NZ First leader Winston Peters when Brendan Horan, a NZ First list MP elected in 2011, was expelled from the party in 2012 but remained an MP for the rest of the parliamentary term.

When every seat in the House of Representatives was an electorate seat, it was accepted that the electors had chosen each individual MP, and, once elected, they should be immune to any suggestion that they could be deprived of that seat by their party for holding to what they saw as important principles, rather than obeying party diktats — particularly important when a government radically changes its policy, as after the 1984 election.

Those old enough, like Civis, to remember that FPP environment, may also remember MPs like Mike Minogue and Marilyn Waring who were prepared to stand up to party leaders, even the dominating and ruthless Robert Muldoon.

For those MPs who have seats in the House solely because of their place on a party list though, it’s easy to argue that MPs leaving or expelled from their party should forfeit those seats.

It would be possible to have different rules for the different types of MP, so that electorate MPs kept their seats even if they left the party under which they were elected, but list MPs only held their seats while members of the party under which they gained them.

But it could be argued that many electorate MPs are only elected because of their party affiliation and support, and that on leaving the party they should be subject to elector reaffirmation (or not).

And there’s a stronger argument why all MPs should be treated the same if they leave or are expelled from the party under which they’re elected.

It’s in Section 3(b) of the 2018 Bill, which states that one purpose of the Bill is to ‘‘enhance the maintenance of the proportionality of political party representation in Parliament as determined by electors’’.

With a few exceptions, such as the ACT and (now unrepresented)

United Future parties, the number of seats held in the House by any party depends, not on the electorate seats it wins, but on the party vote.

So it can be argued that disruption of that number by any individual defection or expulsion should be corrected by removal of the individual from the House, to be replaced from the party list or (for electorate MPs) through byelection, as the Bill allows.

But there’s a flip side to that argument.

What about when the proportionality of parties in the House is disturbed the other way, as it was when Winston Peters, holding a list seat, won the Northland byelection, and his list seat was filled from the NZ First list, giving NZ First an extra seat?

Consistency in maintaining proportionality should mean that in such a case the exlist MP’s list seat lapses.

But there’s no such amendment to the Electoral Act contained in the Bill.

Why not?