The Spinoff marked twenty years of MMP with an evaluation by various people – ‘It was New Zealand’s Brexit’ – weighing up MMP on its 20th birthday.
No system of democracy will be perfect, but our system of MMP is probably amongst the best, providing a more representative Parliament.
Systems of democracy aren’t usually a problem, it is the way in which they are misused and abused by political parties that is a concern.
The biggest flaw with our MMP is a ridiculously high threshold of 5%, something decided on by the large parties it benefits and left unchanged despite reviews criticising it by the parties who want to minimise competition.
Metiria Turei supports a lower threshold but she also illustrated the self interest of established parties:
We can tidy it up, lower the 5% Party vote threshold to 4% increase representation. We can get rid of the coat tailing rule so that all parties have to meet the same threshold of voter support to be in parliament.
A 4% threshold and no coat tailing will suit the Greens, but if we get rid of coat tailing then the threshold needs to be much lower to be fair to smaller and new parties.
Andrew Little:
We’re reviewing policy in this area but our position at the last election was to adopt the Electoral Commission’s recommendations: get rid of coat-tailing, which causes so much game-playing, and lower the threshold to 4%, to make parliament more representative.
All political campaigning is game playing. Labour also favoured maintaining an uneven playing field that favours the larger parties, and would unfairly treat small parties that get an electorate MP or two or three.
Judith Collins has a more extreme large party view:
I did not support lowering the threshold of votes required to get parliamentary representation. That threshold is either winning an electorate seat or winning 5% of the party vote. We already have eight parties represented in parliament. My view is that if we can’t get 5% of the country to support us or at least an electorate seat, then as a party, we probably don’t have a lot to offer. That 5 % threshold tends to keep out the truly fringe element and standing and winning an electorate seat, means quite a lot of voters in an area have confidence in you.
Fringe elements have never got 1% so that’s just scaremongering in trying to justify a 5% threshold.
Incumbent large parties have a huge advantage over small and start-up parties. Wasn’t Collins involved as Minister of something when the recent recommendations to reduce the threshold were ignored?
Richard Prebble lays the blame where it should be.
The Commission advocated a 4% threshold and no threshold for minority parities. The two old parties combined to reject these features for party political reasons.
Laila Harre
Eliminating the threshold or lowering it to 2% (the latest review cowered around 3-4% but couldn’t explain why even those heights were needed) and at the same time abolishing the coat-tails rule might help.
If the threshold is lower enough the coat tail rule becomes irrelevant.
Ben Thomas:
The 5% threshold is generally agreed to be undemocratic and arbitrary. We’ve consistently seen, for example, that there is a constituency of about 4% who would support a conservative Christian based party in NZ. So, careful what you wish for and all that, but that seems a fairer threshold in terms of achieving what was intended for MMP.
But why set the threshold to suit just once constituency? That’s also arbitrary, albeit a slight improvement. Surely it’s fairer to remove rather than tweak an undemocratic feature of our system.
Politically independent Andrew Geddis:
We know what needs changed about MMP, because the Electoral Commission undertook extensive public engagement and produced a very good report on this issue back in 2012. Get rid of the “electorate lifeboat” rule. Cut the party vote threshold to at least 4% (and I’d go lower to 2.5%).
And Graeme Edgeler:
The 5% threshold is far too high. 120,000 voters could vote for a party, and get no representation at all, yet, if they’d voted for a different party, it would get six more seats. If we think a party’s policies, or candidates are wrong for the country, we should try to persuade other voters why that is so, not rely on a law which tells them that all voters are equal, but some are more equal than others.
I’d probably just get rid of the threshold altogether, but even if I can’t convince enough of you of that, it doesn’t need to be nearly as high as it is. Many arguments are advanced in favour of having a threshold, which could be met with a threshold no higher than 2.5%. Even then, a party would need to convince more than 60,000 people to vote for them to get into Parliament.
If we are to have a threshold, we should decide what we want it to achieve, and set it as low as possible consistent with that aim. And one of the things we should aim for is a voting system where one of the things that can happen is that new political forces can emerge. Even staunch partisans should support this, as the threat of it, should keep the parties they support true to their beliefs.
Lastly Annette King demonstrates the political self interest of the larger parties:
I’d like to see changed the loophole that lets parties like ACT win a seat and bring in extra MPs.
Would she prefer that loopholes allowing NZ First, Greens and National to get in closed as well?
MMP has given us a more representative Parliament, but by rigging things in favour of stale old parties and making it practically impossible for fresh new parties with fresh ideas to join the mix it still has a serious flaw that is becoming more flawed as time goes on.
We now have a Parliament dominated by one party, and that party has entrenched a rigged system of MMP. It’s not MP that’s the problem, it’s the abuse of power of large parties that needs to be addressed.
Substantially reducing the threshold is one of the best ways of doing this.