Tyranny of the majority is what democracy means
In the welter of comment about coalition possibilities, little if any attention has been paid to the elephant in the political room — the profound unsuitability of our present MMP system for New Zealand.
In the early 90s, when new National Prime Minister Jim Bolger signalled his intention to honour his pre-election undertaking to hold a referendum on proportional representation (PR), Jim Anderton, MP for Sydenham, who had left the Labour Party to form, first, NewLabour then the Alliance, pronounced PR “the tyranny of the minority”.
So it proved, right from its inception in 1996, when Winston Peters kept the country in suspense for weeks before coalescing his NZ First party with National.
Twenty-one years on, nothing has changed. A system supposed to widen and add certainty to the “voice of the people” again narrows that voice effectively down to one man, generally acknowledged to be the sole decisionmaker in his 7.5 per cent party.
Let it be acknowledged at the outset that Peters has some justification for delaying his decision until the final results are declared on October 7. Complaints that he is holding the country to ransom are not fair — it's not his fault, but that of the system under which he and other parties are required to operate.
For that we have to thank the Royal Commission on the Electoral System, whose report in 1986 recommended the mixed member proportional (MMP) system, adapted from Germany. Overlooked was the profound unsuitability for a small, compact country like New Zealand of a system devised postwar for a large country comprising a federation of states, and imposed with the aim of preventing the possibility of another Nazi Party.
In 1992, New Zealanders voted in a nonbinding referendum on proportional representation, with 84.7 per cent voting to change, and 70.5 per cent preferring MMP. Voters had been given four options: MMP as recommended by the royal commission (which prevailed by a huge majority), preferential voting (as used in Australia for the Lower House), supplementary member (see later comment) and single transferable vote.
The National government put a binding referendum — a run-off between the existing first past the post (FPP) system and MMP — to the country in conjunction with the 1993 general election. In a turnout of 82.6 per cent, 53.86 per cent voted for MMP, 46.14 per cent for FPP.
There was widespread angst at the time that a question of such constitutional importance had been allowed to be decided by a simple majority of those who voted, when, if it had been put to Parliament, it would have needed affirmative votes by a minimum of 75 per cent of all MPs.
The Bolger government stuck to its word, and the next election in 1996 was the first under MMP.
By now, and spectacularly so this year, it has become obvious MMP fails to respect the will of the people by transferring the balance of power to a small minority party, in this case either NZ First or the Greens.
The time has surely arrived to say taihoa to this constitutional farce by giving to the party with the most votes the right to go to the Governor-General for a mandate to establish a minority government, and then that government to negotiate with other parties for a majority of votes in the House, whether by formal coalition or agreement to support on votes of confidence and supply.
Alternatively, switch to a form of proportional representation more appropriate for a country of our size. Of those alternatives, the supplementary member (SM) system appeals most.
Under SM, there would be 120 MPs, and 90 electorates including the Maori seats. Each electorate would elect one MP under FPP, known as the Electorate MP. There would be a separate party vote as at present for 30 list MPs, allocated according to the share of the party vote but unaffected by whatever number of electorate seats a party has won.
Thus, SM would be similar to MMP in allowing for proportionality for minority parties, but the overall decision would lie in the hands of the voting public. We might not get the satisfaction of knowing on election night who our new government would be, but we'd certainly know by the following Monday.
Then we’d be back to the tyranny of the majority, which is what most of us understand to be the hallmark of democracy.