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Time for Change?

Entry 625, on 2007-10-16 at 20:39:24 (Rating 3, Politics)

Yesterday I was invited to read an article at a right-wing web site disguised under the misleading title "The New Zealand Center for Political Research". This isn't really a political research site, its a propaganda site for middle to far right political opinion, and there is almost no discernible research going on there at all. The last time I saw this sort of thing was with a cynical organisation called "the Campaign for Better Government" which was specifically designed to spread FUD against electoral reform. They almost succeeded, but we did switch to a proportional representation electoral system after a referendum.

Now the NZCPR are pushing the idea that we should abandon the proportional system we use (mixed member proportional, or MMP) and return to a first past the post system (also known as FPP, a system where the party with most votes governs alone) possibly with a modification known as supplementary member or SM.

Like any debate its possible to make something look bad by being selective with the evidence that is presented. MMP does look bad if you just look at the bad points, but so does any other system. For example, a party once won an FPP election here with between 30% and 40% of the vote (I can't remember the exact number). Is it OK to have a government where twice as many people don't what them as those who do?

I don't think MMP is the best possible electoral system, but I do think we need a proportional system of some sort. I haven't analysed the consequences of SM but it looks OK on the surface. There are also other voting systems which are worth considering, such as STV. It seems to work quite well for local body elections.

A major argument against proportional systems (where representation in parliament is proportional to the number of votes the party gets) is that its almost impossible for one party to govern alone, so governments tend to be weaker. But I think this is an advantage. If the most powerful party can't get sufficient support from smaller parties to make up a 50% vote then what they are trying to do probably shouldn't go ahead anyway. Maybe the real problem is that the big parties can't get voted in with certain policies, then do whatever they like in government like they used to. Yes, I can see how they would dislike MMP after it stopped them using that little trick!

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