STVonly council elections petition
ONE system should be used for all New Zealand councils for every election and that system should be the single transferable vote, Dunedin’s Peter Barron says.
Prompted by a petition under way in the city calling for a poll of electors that could return Dunedin to a firstpastthepost system, Mr Barron, a former Southern District Health Board member, said he would call on Parliament to amend the Local Electoral Act.
The Waverley pharmacist said he had not finalised the wording on his petition, but he presented in favour of the proportional representation system at a Dunedin City Council public forum last month.
As calls for change to the way Dunedin votes continue through the city, he said he did not want the voting system to be up for constant debate.
‘‘There can be no debate that STV [single transferable vote] is the most equitable, representative and powerful form of reflecting the wishes of the community at large,’’ Mr Barron said.
Mr Barron said after speaking to Dunedin North MP David Clark, and consequently contacting Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta on the matter, an Otago Daily Times report of First Past the Post working group chairman Pablo Dennison’s petition circulating in Dunedin seeking a change to the status quo prompted him to start a petition of his own.
Unlike Mr Dennison’s petition, seeking at least 5% of those who were enrolled to vote at the 2019 Dunedin election, or 4674 voters, to demand a vote on the issue, a petition to the House of Representatives does not have a threshold of signatures it needs to reach before an MP can present it to Parliament.
At the end of July, the city council voted to continue with a single transferable vote system.
In February, in a submission to the justice committee inquiry into the 2019 local elections, the council identified the single transferable vote system as its preference for a national voting system for local body elections.
Mr Barron said asking the council to confirm the present electoral system of single transferable vote pushed the elected officials into a position that was technically a conflict of interest.
‘‘It just seems to me totally inappropriate that the body that is sitting at the moment is then asked to make a decision as to how they will be reelected,’’ he said.
‘‘I’ve always just regarded it as a dereliction of duty from central government. I think they just took the copout.’’
Those ‘‘aggrieved’’ by the system in Dunedin ‘‘ feel for some reason’’ their chosen mayoral candidate was not elected, Mr Barron said.
A change to first past the post would be the first time the city changed how residents voted for the mayor and city councillors since the single transferable vote system was adopted for the 2004 local election that made Peter Chin the 56th mayor of Dunedin.
Mr Barron said he heard no pushback at all about proportional representation (Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) voting) being used at a national level.
While the Otago Regional Council uses a first past the post method, the Southern District Health Board is mandated to use the single transferable vote.
❛ There can be no debate that STV [single transferable vote] is the most equitable, representative and powerful form of reflecting the wishes of the community at large