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MMP: How does New Zealand stack up?

Peter McKenzie puts forward brave, but simple suggestions on how we can redeem MMP after what many viewed as an undemocratic disaster

In the aftermath of this year’s election, many mourned what they saw as the disastrous performance of our MMP electoral system. Julian Lee asked whether “MMP has done it’s dash” on Stuff.co.nz. The Otago Daily Times lamented that our current system only serves politicians. Richard Pierce wrote into the Whanganui Chronicle criticising MMP’s "undemocratic" nature.

All of this is based upon the poor result for minor parties in this year’s election. Whatever the result of the special votes, it is likely that New Zealand will have only five parties in Parliament for the next three years - National, Labour, Greens, NZ First and ACT. Importantly, while ACT is currently just one MP, the party will likely grow now that it can throw proper punches without fear and distinguish itself publicly in Opposition. This list of five is a downgrade from the seven parties we had in the last Parliament, and a sharp fall from the halcyon days of eight parties in 2005. “Minor party bloodbath” indeed.



Yet if we take a step back and examine our system in comparison to other MMP systems around the world, we can see that we are actually doing quite well. There are five countries in the world using MMP. The most famous is Germany, which has used MMP for 68 years (it was introduced in 1949). Usefully, Germany also held its parliamentary election last weekend at almost the same time as us. The result was a German Parliament with six unique parties - one party on 32.9 percent, one on 20 percent, and four others between 12 percent and eight percent.

In other words, this year an MMP system which has existed three times as long as ours gave a result only somewhat more diverse than our system. Our system has five Parliamentary parties, they have six. The only major difference is that their vote share was more evenly distributed than ours.

Even more interesting is comparing the 1972 German election (when it had been using MMP for 23 years) to the 2017 NZ election (with 21 years of MMP under our belt). Given how long it takes for a population to adjust to using a new electoral system, this reveals more about our relative performance. In 1972, the German Parliament had three separate parties. The Social Democratic Party won 45.8 percent, the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union alliance won 44.9 percent, and the Free Democratic Party won 8.9 percent. With that in mind, our 2017 result is a triumph, with two substantial minor parties (NZ First and the Greens) to 1972 Germany’s one, and one small minor party (ACT) to Germany’s zero.

If this slide in diversity were to continue, the situation would become problematic. Further, greater diversity could stop NZ First from having sole control over the Kingmaker position.

The conclusion to be drawn is that mourning the performance of MMP in New Zealand is hugely overblown. Certainly the Parliamentary extinction of the Māori Party means we have lost a hugely valuable perspective. Nonetheless, with 21 years under our belt, we are doing far better in achieving political diversity than Germany did at an analogous time. Indeed, we almost match their current performance.

None of that is to say New Zealand’s electoral system doesn’t have problems and shouldn’t be improved. If this slide in diversity were to continue, the situation would become problematic. Further, greater diversity could stop NZ First from having sole control over the Kingmaker position. Most importantly, in our election this year, 4.3 percent of voters voted for parties who won no seats. That’s almost 100,000 voters who will have no representation in Parliament. We must take action to speed up the evolution of voter behaviour so that we can achieve a more diverse and truly representative Parliament.

Luckily, there are solutions available. The following three changes are simple tweaks to our current system which would have a significant effect on the ability of minor parties to grow and challenge Labour and National’s power.

The most obvious change is to reduce the threshold at which a party can enter Parliament. Currently, a party needs five percent of the overall vote to get into Parliament, which would have been roughly 110,000 votes at this election. This is an overwhelming barrier for small parties, and one which should be reduced. The biggest attack parties like The Opportunities Party and United Future faced this election was that voting for them would be a ‘wasted vote’. They would not reach five percent, so every vote for them would be irrelevant. That is a powerful disincentive, and one which surely dissuaded many from voting for the party they thought better represented them in favour of a ‘lesser evil’. The lower the threshold, the less power such an attack holds, and the more likely people are to vote for the party they actually like the most. The Electoral Commission in 2012 recommended reducing the threshold from five percent to four percent. I would recommend an even greater reduction, to three percent.

The reason we have a five percent threshold at all is that the drafters of the MMP system did not want a system with a proliferation of tiny parties, which would make forming a stable government impossible. But at three percent of the vote, a party would have three or four seats in Parliament. We’ve already seen that a Government with multiple one or two seat parties within it can avoid being too fractious or anarchic. Having a threshold where parties larger than some we had last term would be allowed in makes sense.

We should not consider a small dip in minor party performance to be an indication that we must engage in a wholesale change of our electoral system, akin to opening an electoral can of worms. However we cannot be complacent.

In order to support this reduction in the threshold for entry to Parliament, we should also consider abolishing the ‘coat-tails’ rule - where if a candidate wins an electorate seat they can bring in list MPs with them to match their percentage of the party vote, even if that percentage is vastly under five percent. Contrary to popular belief, this would not affect ACT’s David Seymour, who holds an electorate seat without bringing in any other MPs due to his poor party vote. However it would restore faith in the system after years of griping about ‘dirty deals’. This recommendation was also made by the Electoral Commission in 2012. Like the recommendation to reduce the entry threshold from five percent, it was totally ignored.

A second idea for improving the representativeness of our system is to increase the amount of public funding available to parties. New parties like TOP received only $41,478 to support election advertising this election. Even older parties like ACT and United Future received only $93,326 - less than a tenth of what National and Labour got. It is little wonder that new and small parties are often backed or founded by rich businessmen like Gareth Morgan, Colin Craig or Kim Dotcom - without that financial backing, it would be nearly impossible to advertise yourself to more than a small portion of Kiwis. Unfortunately, by finding a rich backer like TOP, the Conservative Party or the Internet Party, you simultaneously condemn yourself to ridicule as an ego-driven pet project - the ultimate catch-22. We need to set aside more funding for our smaller parties to allow them to capture more of the limelight currently hogged by National, Labour, and to some extent the Greens and NZ First.

A third idea for improving the representativeness of our system is to support comprehensive civics education in our schools. Currently civics education is limited to a few brief units in Years 9 and 10, which vary drastically in quality between schools - from in-depth analysis of ideology and current politics, to a few token mock elections. That paucity of education is a contributor to many voters voting based on an almost tribal allegiance to one party or another, not actual policy. If we could actually ensure that every would-be voter has a basic understanding of the political landscape and their options prior to leaving school, we could be assured that more would take the leap and vote for someone better representing their interests and policy preferences.

MMP has drastically diversified our political system from the Labour-National duopoly that existed only 21 years ago. This election, 4.2 percent of votes were ignored. By contrast, in 1993 under the First Past-the-Post system 25.76 percent of votes were ignored. MMP has introduced viable new options to our once stale political diet. We should not consider a small dip in minor party performance to be an indication that we must engage in a wholesale change of our electoral system, akin to opening an electoral can of worms. However we cannot be complacent. There are remarkably simple solutions to our current challenges. We just need to be brave enough to implement them.