A proportional response

In the dim, dark days before Mixed Member Proportional voting, everything was simple. Everyone got one vote, and the party with the most became the government. No drawn-out negotiations and junior coalition partners and wrangling. Everything was fair, and representative. Right?

It’s true that everyone got one vote. Under First Past the Post, people voted for a candidate, and the candidate who received the most votes in each electorate won. The party that held the most electorates would then form a government.

But in the 1950’s and 60’s, came the “gradual breakdown of public trust and confidence in politicians, Parliament and the simple certainties of the old two-party system. This process… gathered momentum in the 1970s and 1980s, decades marked by economic uncertainty and the emergence of new social and political movements.”

Stella Blake-Kelly spent months poring over maps to create this electoral history of New Zealand. 

FPP tended to favour the two main parties. In the 1981 election, for example, Social Credit gained 16 per cent of the vote but won just two (of 92) electorates. Rob Muldoon’s National Party won 51 seats – enough to form a government – despite gaining only 39.8 per cent of the vote, against Labour’s 40.4 per cent.

 A Royal Commission in 1986, was “surprisingly radical”, and recommended New Zealand adopt a version of the German-Style MMP system. This was put to a referendum in 1992, which asked two questions: Do you think the voting system should change; and regardless of your answer to question 1, which option would you prefer? Only 55 per cent of electors took part, but 85 per cent voted to change the electoral system. 70.5 per cent indicated a preference for MMP from the four options. “The people didn’t speak on Saturday,” said Labour Party leader Mike Moore at the time. “They screamed.”

In 1993, a second, binding, referendum was held. 53.8 per cent of people voted for a change to MMP. From the 1996 election onwards, each voter gets two votes – one for a party, and one for a person. The party vote decides how many seats each party gets in Parliament. The second is for the MP the voter wants to represent the electorate they live in.

The idea is that if a party gets 40 per cent of the party votes around the country, it should get about 40 per cent of the seats in parliament. MMP looks at how many electorates a party has won, and then tops them up with extra MPs from the party’s list until the party’s total number of MPs is proportional to its vote. (Sometimes a party can win more electorates than the number of MPs its party vote entitles it to. When this happens, it’s called an ‘overhang’, and Parliament gets bigger until the next election.)

Since 1996, neither of the two major parties has been able to govern on its own, coalitions have had to be formed with smaller parties. In the most recent parliament, elected in 2011, the National Party got close, with 59 seats of the 61 needed to govern, it has had confidence and supply agreements with ACT, the Maori Party and United Future.

MMP hasn’t been without its own controversy. Normally a party has to win at least five per cent of the party votes to get any list MPs. But if it wins an electorate seat, it gets to ignore the threshold, and this way, a party can take in three or four other MPs, called ‘coat-tailing’. This means parties can make deals, and people vote strategically – an outcome of MMP that not everyone likes.

“ACT and UnitedFuture are parties that barely register a blip of public support; they will likely return to Parliament and have an outsized influence on who forms the next Government,” says one Fairfax editorial. “While the Conservatives, who enjoy much more support than ACT and UnitedFuture combined, remain on the outer.”

In 2012, the Electoral Commission reviewed MMP. It recommended abolishing the electorate seat threshold and lowering the party vote threshold to four per cent. The Labour MP Iain Lees-Galloway introduced a bill which would adopt those provisions, but the Prime Minister has ruled them out.

The Electoral Commission also recommended that consideration be given to fixing the ratio of electorate seats to list seats at 60:40 to address concerns about declining proportionality and diversity of representation. It also said parties should continue to have responsibility for selecting and ranking candidates on their lists but they must make a declaration that they have done so in accordance with their party rules.

Next week, The Wireless will be teaming up with Ask Away, where you can put questions directly to the politicians standing in this year’s election.

Are you enrolled to vote? You can check your details with Elections NZ.