Jumping off the waka

The death of Jim Anderton gives a special twist to the argument over the waka-jumping bill. Anderton rightly claimed when he split from Labour in 1989 that ‘‘I did not leave the Labour Party; the Labour Party left me.’’

Under the new waka-jumping law, an MP like Anderton could be expelled from Parliament by Labour leader Jacinda Ardern if she was backed by at least twothirds of her caucus. The problem with the law is that it would punish the honourable dissident as well as the bad.

This would put far too much power in the hands of the party leader. The proposed new law, written into the coalition agreement at the behest of NZ First leader Winston Peters, assumes that the proportionality of parliament as decided at the last election should trump the rights of an MP who has fallen out with their party. Now parliament’s proportionality certainly matters. But so does the right of an MP to think for themselves.

The great irony of Anderton’s career was that he championed the right to dissent when he was a dissenter, and the right of a party leader to punish dissenters when he became a party leader himself.

Politicians’ opinions change when they gain greater power. Winston Peters openly flouted the National Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But when he left and formed his own NZ First Party, Peters had no truck with dissidents like himself.

Party leaders are all too ready to view dissent as a form of treason or betrayal. The proposed law should not give them the power to hurl the dissidents out of parliament as well as the party.

The bill seems to give more safeguards for dissent than the old party-hopping law under the Labour-led coalition in 2001. Now two-thirds of the caucus would have to back the leader in asking the Speaker to expel the MP.

But party leaders have enormous powers of patronage and promotion and could normally get two-thirds backing for an expulsion.

The Greens’ new face-saving clause – brought in to cover their about-face over waka-jumping – requires expulsion to comply with party rules. In their case this would require party consensus or a supermajority.

But even super-democratic parties like the Greens are all too likely to turn on party MPs if they seem to show ‘‘disloyalty’’, especially to the leaders. Two Green MPs who rightly decried former co-leader Metiria Turei’s defence of welfare fraud got no mercy.

Parties usually split only during serious crises, as Peters’ MPs did when he fell out with the Jenny-Shipley National-led coalition in 1998. Half of his MPs stayed and propped up the National Government.

Peters was of course infuriated and wants to make sure his caucus could not ‘‘betray’’ him again. But who is to say who is in the right when these splits occur?

A party leader is hardly an objective judge, being intimately involved in the fight.

In the end, the verdict on dissenting MPs should be made by the voters themselves, at the following election.