Play the ball, not the woman

If you ever wanted to see a good example of the media and politicians attacking a person and not the policy, or playing the man and not the ball, if you prefer, you only had to look at the response to MMP reform this week.

Green MP Golriz Ghahraman’s Strengthening Democracy Members Bill contains a range of good ideas for making a system that already works well – and that is MMP – work even better. But if you saw only the reaction, you might have assumed that Ghahraman was suggesting that capitalism and democracy should both be abolished tomorrow.

First, the proposals. The idea that we would be better served if the MMP threshold was dropped from 5 per cent to 4 per cent attracted the greatest amount of attention, but for the wrong reasons. A lower threshold was immediately interpreted as selfinterested politics, given that the Greens often hover around 5 per cent at election time and lack the safety net of an electoral seat.

But this was not the Greens’ idea. Instead, it came from the Electoral Commission’s review of MMP in 2012. The commission argued that the threshold is how the objectives of proportionality are balanced with the need to have effective and stable governments. The 5 per cent threshold is higher than it needs to be, and ‘‘it could be lowered to 4 per cent without any risk to effectiveness or stability and this is what we recommend be done’’. In fact, it could arguably be lowered even further, to 3 per cent, the commission said.

The two main parties, Labour and National, won over 81 per cent of the party vote in 2017. Rather than proportional representation, we have slipped back into something resembling a two-party system with small hangers-on. Only NZ First’s so-called ‘‘kingmaker’’ role, and the negotiations and compromises it implies, is MMP really working as it should. A criticism that lowering the threshold would allow for more NZ First-style populism is an elitist argument about leaving politics to the big, traditional players.

The 2012 review also suggested abolishing the one electorate seat threshold, the ‘‘coat-tailing’’ rule that has mostly benefited National’s support party, ACT. When National canned the review, Labour slammed its decision as self-interested. Seven years later, it was Labour’s turn to cautiously park electoral system reform.

Ghahraman’s bill includes removing the coat-tail clause, and adds the reversal of the ban on prisoners voting, greater transparency around donations, and making it easier for Ma¯ ori voters to switch rolls. These are wise proposals, but something about Ghahraman brings out the worst in many of our political commentators.

Broadcaster Duncan Garner used his TV breakfast platform to attack her as ‘‘a cliched leftie’’. Which of her positions ‘‘takes the organic carrot cake’’, he scoffed: the electoral reform ideas or her view that we should help New Zealand jihadist Mark Taylor come home? Like other commentators, Garner saw Ghahraman’s bill as a ‘‘blatant move’’ to protect her party.

That seems unfair. We all want to see a robust and open exchange of views but the belittling of fairly uncontroversial suggestions and personalisation of politics lowers the quality of the discourse and leaves voters uninformed, as well as less represented.