Southland riders shine at showjumping champs
The Government’s 100 days of action could well be the most far-reaching rejection of a previous administration’s work programme in recent political history, writes Peter Davis.
The tracks may have been trickier than he was used to, but that didn’t stop Tyler McKee from winning this year’s Archibalds NZ Grand Prix Championship.
The title win, in March, meant ending the showjumping season on a high for the Southland rider and his horse, Corrida.
“It was pretty good. It was a close competition,” said McKee, who lives at Wendonside, near Gore.
“The tracks were probably a little more tricky and technical, being a national [competition], but it’s what we trained for.”
Winning with Corrida was especially satisfying for McKee, given he had developed the 10-year-old horse, bred by his parents.
It was the second time the pair had competed for the national Grand Prix title together, and McKee said Corrida had done seven more shows at the same height since then.
The Grand Prix is part of the four-day Archibalds NZ National Jumping and Show Hunter Championships held at the National Equestrian Centre in Christchurch.
It is the South Island’s pinnacle showjumping event, and this year was a good one for Southland riders, who took home four other national titles and made up nearly a quarter of all placings.
Nicole White, from Invercargill, won the Double J Stud NZ 6-year-old Horse title with her horse, Danny De Vito ECPH.
Summer Roy, of Gore, and Windsor Gangster won the Zealandia NZ 1m Pony title, while Briar Sharp, of Gore, and her pony, Second Edition, won the Vulcan Blacksmiths 90cm Pony Emerging Talent title.
Eilish Greene, of Riversdale, won the National 90cm Horse Emerging Talent title with her horse, Aramis.
Southland Show Jumping president Anna Clearwater was thrilled with the results. “Winning titles at Grand Prix on a horse bred and trained locally – and at the emerging-talent level with young riders and young horses – shows that not only can Southlanders win at the highest level, but we also have a fantastic pool of riders and horses coming through for the future.”
Suzanne Black, from Gore, is another Southlander with a major win under her belt after claiming the Dunstan Horse Feeds Amateur Rider Series award for the 2023-24 season with her horse, Castellane AF.
Series competitors have to be consistent throughout the season to accumulate the points needed to win, and Clearwater said it took a lot of commitment from those riders who had to travel further to compete than others from elsewhere in the country.
She was keen to see the sport grow. “I’m looking forward to the new season kicking off in August with our local ‘have a go’ and training shows. Hopefully, we’ll see even more riders keen to start showjumping, now they have seen what’s possible.”
The early days of the coalition Government have prompted questions about MMP, but its behaviour and policy preferences cannot be explained away simply as a fundamental flaw in the electoral system we operate under, writes Richard Shaw.
As the new coalition Government beds in, some are seeing uncomfortable parallels between its conduct and the winnertakes-all approach of Labour and National administrations under the old FPP electoral rules – and concluding that this points to a flaw in the current MMP system that needs fixing.
This view reflects, among other things, the coalition’s unparalleled use of parliamentary urgency during its first 100 days in office and the growing concentration of executive power (including via the fast-track consenting legislation).
It also flows from questions about the possible cancellation of the school lunch programme, a somewhat cavalier approach to transparency requirements for ministers, and the suggestion that the state might take it upon itself to decide when school students are sick enough to stay home.
There are concerns, too, about running the public sector along corporate lines, and whether this could lead to citizens being redefined as customers, and a drive for cost efficiency squeezing out considerations of justice and equity.
But whether or not the Government is to your taste, it is worth reflecting on what we can – and cannot – expect of our electoral rules. The primary function of an electoral system is to translate votes into parliamentary seats. In our parliamentary democracy we do not directly elect the political executive (the prime minister and Cabinet). We elect a parliament.
Citizens’ direct involvement in the formation of a government ends at that point – it then falls to political parties to stitch together an administration that can command a parliamentary majority on big-ticket issues such as the Budget and confidence votes.
Different electoral systems perform this core function in various ways. The mechanics of the old FPP system were such that we always wound up with single party majority governments that (nearly) always commanded a minority of the popular vote. The last government formed under FPP, Jim Bolger’s returning National administration, won a parliamentary majority with just 35% of the vote. In fact, before Labour pulled it off in 2020, the last time a single political party won a majority of the vote was way back in 1951.
With their parliamentary majorities safely tucked away, those single-party governments were free to dominate parliament, and could – and often did – adopt a “winner-takes-all” approach. In time, enough voters tired of this style of governing to force a change in electoral arrangements via two referendums held in 1993.
Crucially, many supporters of change assumed that the new MMP system would lead to policy moderation and produce a more consensual style of politics. But that assumption does not necessarily stack up. An electoral system influences the process of government formation. It also provides certain incentives for cooperation. (Which is why, between 2020 and 2023, Labour mostly did not behave like the singleparty governments of the 1980s/1990s: its leaders knew that at some point they would lose their majority and need to fall back on relationships with other parties.)
However, the electoral system does not fundamentally determine the way governments behave or the policies they implement. Put differently, the rules under which governments are formed should not be confused with the subsequent conduct of ministers. What governments do and how they do it is shaped by other political considerations, including the nature and calibre of the leadership of the prime minister and the state of relationships within and between governing parties. In short, whatever your views on this Government, its behaviour and policy preferences cannot be explained away simply as a fundamental flaw in the electoral system.
That said, there are lessons to be learnt from our political history. One is that voters punish instability. In the two-party coalitions we are used to, junior coalition partners generally reach the limits of what is politically possible or publicly palatable fairly quickly.
That constraint is missing in this Government. We are not yet fully familiar with the internal dynamics of a threeparty administration, but that it comprises three players makes political management that much more challenging. Jeopardy is baked into the current arrangements because, between them, the two smaller coalition partners possess more leverage than either would have under standard two-party coalition conditions.
The risk for the prime minister is that this becomes the political equivalent of the three-body problem, in which interactions between the governing parties become increasingly unpredictable. Voters would not react well to that.
A second and related matter is that small parties which enter into a governing arrangement with a larger party invariably suffer at the next election. Winston Peters knows better than most that voters generally do not like political tails wagging dogs.
ACT and NZ First may be exercising more policy leverage than their respective shares of the vote in 2023 suggest they should have, but as NZ First’s experience in both 1999 and 2008 suggests, that is no guarantee that things will end well for either party.
Finally, the sanction available to voters is much more effective under MMP than it was under FPP. Once upon a time an incumbent government could shed significant votes and still remain in government. That is no longer possible. These days, irrespective of who is in office, if you oppose the government of the day, MMP may well be part of the solution, not the problem.
The Government’s just-completed 100 days of action could well be the most comprehensive and farreaching rejection of a previous administration’s work programme in recent political history.
And we are not just talking about potentially controversial policy innovations such as Three Waters or the Maori Health Authority. There are also mainstream items of legislation with bipartisan buy-in that are at risk.
For example, the Therapeutic Products Act has been repealed. This piece of legislation is a major item of work involving a large amount of effort by policy professionals, a considerable degree of select committee activity and more than 16,500 submissions. Work in this area started in the 2000s, continued fitfully under the subsequent government, and was reactivated by the Ardern administration. It was passed into law last year, and has now been repealed.
Another example is the resource management legislation. This has been a project worked on by both Labour and National for 40 years, again with substantial policy input. Yet the new Government has repealed the legislation implemented by the previous government in its entirety, rather than seeking just to amend it.
What explains this rejection, not just of potentially contentious policy innovations, but also mainstream items of work of long standing which have been considered and worked on by both sides of politics? Perhaps it has been the polarising effects of the pandemic – a kind of political “long Covid” – or an unexpected twist to our MMP political system which, rather than encouraging coalitions around the centre has instead maximised competition at the extremes.
Regardless, these are troubling developments, and it is in this context that the Helen Clark Foundation hosted a discussion on recent events with former Prime Ministers Helen Clark and Sir Geoffrey Palmer, exploring current policy debate and the state of checks and balances in the New Zealand political system
One area where the bipartisan centre has held for many years is in foreign and trade policy. But even here there are tensions. For example, relations with China. New Zealand has a very successful free trade agreement with that country which has greatly lifted the economy since its inception in 2008. Yet at the same time there are growing geopolitical tensions between China and the United States.
How far will New Zealand go in working with Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom on the Aukus defence agreement if in doing so it risks harming relations with China?
Another topic of importance to New Zealand is how the Treaty of Waitangi is observed. It has always been a “work in progress” but has recently become a focal point for political tension.
A previous leader of the National Party, Todd Muller, said in his valedictory speech in Parliament last year that where the centre could hold and Labour and National were able to find common ground, then the issue of Treaty relations was in good hands. But once one or the other side of politics (or both) make some departure from that common ground, those relations are at risk.
The centre can hold, but it requires work from both sides. An area which the incoming Government is targeting is the speeding up of consents for largescale projects through the reduction of regulatory and other hurdles. This concern has a long history in New Zealand: since the National Development Act of 1979, and then through various iterations of the Resource Management Act from the 1980s, until the latest version ushered in by the previous Environment Minister, David Parker, now to be repealed.
How is it possible for our legislative system to work for nigh on 40 years in a key area of balancing environmental and economic interests, and still find it difficult to find a solution that will “stick”?
Inevitably this is an area of contention with conflicting interests and priorities, but there are some institutional issues that stand out. - There is a lack of transparency, whether it be around lobbyists, donations or development of initial policy outside public view before it gets to Cabinet.
- There is the dominance of the executive – i.e. Cabinet – in a numerically small legislature, with a relatively weak select committee process, and a constant churn and chopping and changing of public service capacity and capability available to facilitate the policy development process.
- A major issue is the decline of the mainstream media and public interest journalism, and a growth in its place of the unmoderated platforms of social media driven by algorithms designed to maximise engagement and monetary returns.
- Finally, New Zealand has a shrinking “public square” for high-quality independent policy scrutiny and development. As the universities concentrate on academic research and the media struggle for survival, the demise of the likes of the Productivity Commission further narrows this space.
- New Zealand has a limited forum for independent policy scrutiny and development. The Helen Clark Foundation was established to contribute in this area, and this discussion was mounted to mark the fifth anniversary of its existence. The contribution of bona fide think-tanks is needed now perhaps more than ever before.