Winston Peters has said that having binding referendums on the Maori seats in Parliament and the number of MPs in Parliament is non-negotiable. Sort of. Winston-speak means anything can change if it suits him.

RNZ:  Peter’s referendum call would sideline Māori – Fox

At his party’s annual convention in Auckland, Mr Peters said the Māori seats should go and promised a mid-term binding referendum on whether to abolish the seven seats. Voters would also decide whether to reduce the number of MPs in Parliament to 100.

“My strategy is to tell everyone out there that you will not be talking to New Zealand First unless you want a referendum on both those issues – mid-term after this election.”

That effectively rules out both Labour and the Greens on the Maori seats. National has a policy to do away with the Maori seats but that’s on the back burner as they make use of Maori Party votes to maintain a majority.

But in The trouble with Winston Peters’ referendums Andrew Geddis says that “One is daft and the other is daft and dangerous”.

First, reducing the number of MPs from the current 120 to 100.

Even if you believe that voters generally should get a greater direct say on public policy, these are particularly silly things to promise a vote on.

Take the number of MPs. Asking people if they would like fewer politicians has some immediately obvious appeal. So, it’s little surprise that at a 1999 non-binding citizens initiated referendum, 81.5% of voters approved of reducing the number of MPs to 99.

But a parliamentary backgrounder at the time of that referendum showed that there really was no justification for such a reduction in parliamentary numbers. That message then was echoed by Parliament’s Justice and Electoral Committee in a 2006 report on a members’ bill proposing to cut MP numbers in line with the referendum result:

“The current number of 120 members ensures proportionality and diversity in Parliament and thus contributes to its effectiveness; and we consider it essential that these benefits are not compromised. We do not consider that New Zealand is over-represented compared with other countries, especially given that it is a unicameral system.”

And the proposal is even dafter now than when it was when mooted at the end of the 1990s. Parliament last had 99 MPs back in 1993, prior to MMP’s introduction. At that point New Zealand’s population was 3.6 million, meaning we had one MP for every 36,363 people.

Today, our population is 4.8 million. If we want to use the apparently halcyon pre-MMP days as our baseline, today’s Parliament actually should have 132 MPs on a straight population growth basis.

So going the other way and reducing the number of MPs and would significantly reduce our representation.

Second, whether to retain the Māori seats in Parliament.

Similarly, his call to allow voters to decide the future of the Māori seats is superficially attractive. However, it ignores the fact that the five-yearly Māori electoral option already provides a de-facto referendum on this question.

During this option period, every voter of Māori descent can choose whether to be on the Maori or General electoral roll. If enough Māori voters decide to switch from the Māori to the General roll, then the Māori seats automatically will cease to exist.

Instead, 55% of all Māori voters prefer to be on the Māori roll. That point really needs emphasising; a majority of those Māori enrolled to vote consciously have chosen that the Māori seats should continue.

Peters now is proposing the non-Māori majority will get to decide the future of these seats for Māori. That is just a really, really bad idea. Putting aside the sheer injustice of the proposal, it is a recipe for divisive social conflict.

Peters thrives on promoting divisive issues. There’s votes in it, and his priority is getting votes, not what’s democratically sound.

Geddis has A little bit more on Winston’s proposed referendums:

Peters is flat out lying about the Māori seats. Today he told RNZ’s Morning Report that:

The vast majority of Māori, entitled to be on the Māori roll, are on the general roll.

Here’s the actual statistics from the Electoral Commission at the end of the 2013 Maori Electoral Option period (the last time that voters of Māori descent got to choose which electoral roll to be on).

At that time, there were 228,718 voters on the Māori roll, or 55% of all voters of Māori descent. On the general roll there were 184,630 voters of Māori descent, or 45% of that cohort. So far from the “vast majority” not being on the Māori roll, a small but significant majority of Māori voters positively have chosen to do so. And by making that choice, they thereby indicate their support for the Māori seats continuing in the future … because the more Māori on the Māori roll, the more such Māori seats there are.

He also has two additional reasons why the thinks it is bad to reduce the number of seats in Parliament from 120 to 100.

First of all, even if the number of parliamentary seats were cut to 100, the number of electorates would remain at 71. This is because the statutory formula that provides that number is entrenched – you can’t change it except by a 75% vote of MPs or a separate, stand alone referendum.

I guess Parliament could get enough support to change that.

That means there would only be 29 list seats to apportion in order to create overall proportionality in an MMP Parliament. And this simply isn’t be enough to do so – we will frequently see Parliaments that are distorted by “parliamentary overhangs” where parties win more electorate seats than their share of the party vote actually entitles them to.

Furthermore, at present there are 27 Ministers in the executive branch, or 22.5% of the total number of MPs. Cut the size of Parliament to 100, and that executive branch becomes some 27% of total MPs – tightening the stranglehold that it already applies to the legislative branch.

So cutting the number of MPs to 100 will not only damage how MMP functions, but it will lead to even greater executive dominance of Parliament as an institution.

So there are obvious problems with the proposed referendums.

There is also no guarantee National would agree to having them, and Labour and Greens would seem to rule out considering it.

And the reality is that Peters is unlikely to be able to insist on all his bottom line policies. He is extremely unlikely to get anywhere near a majority say in a coalition.

See  Number of Electorates and Electoral Populations: 2013 Census  –  Media Release