The election is done and dusted. While nearly a quarter of the votes – the special votes – are yet to be counted, the overall composition of parliament is unlikely to change. The next government will probably be something led by National, with ACT and New Zealand First in supporting roles.
Now is the time when the election winners slink into the shadows to hash out their grubby deals. The news goes into hibernation, as no-one really knows what is happening in secret phone calls and back-room discussions. Despite the best attempts of journalists to wheedle out every man’s bottom-line, the fact remains that nothing can be sacred around the negotiating table.
This is not Winston Peter’s first rodeo. It is the third time in three decades he has played at kingmaker. It is a regrettable flaw of MMP: parties may campaign on their own merits, but to form a government they will have to throw out half of their promises - and you never know whether the half that’s going to be thrown out is the bit you care about, or the bit you don’t.
There were grubby deals in the old days too. But these were ideally sussed out before the election, leaving voters to choose which sordid compromise they liked best. And since FPP tended to produce strong majorities, the winners of the day had a free hand to implement their platform in full.
Yet that system ran its course long ago. It was better suited for the age in which it was born, that of independent politicians and decentralised boroughs. It gave us several patently unfair results, like the 1981 election in which Social Credit won 21% of the vote, but only 2 seats in parliament (about 2%); or in 1984, when the New Zealand Party won 12% of the vote, but no MPs. In both those years the National government led by Robert Muldoon lost the popular vote to Labour, but stayed in power anyway.
Discontent was high. Yet our adoption of MMP was anything but enthusiastic. We only wound up with it by accident. The story goes that David Lange, either misreading his notes or having been handed incorrect notes, accidentally committed to holding a referendum about electoral reform. His party never followed through on the promise. Jim Bolger picked up the issue and ran with it at the 1993 election, where 54% of voters confirmed MMP as their preferred system. In 2011, 58% voted to keep it. These were slim but important majorities.
Despite a vigorous campaign against its introduction, the question of our electoral system is now settled. As if to assure us of having made the right choice, reflections on MMP’s 25th anniversary were typically favourable. Jim Bolger said: “I think it has done one of the jobs that it was hoped to do, and that is to give a more diverse parliament”. Journalist Henry Cooke asserted that “MMP has definitely delivered more diversity to parliament”. The Electoral Commission published a series of charts confirming that the number of Pasifika, Asian, Māori, and women MPs has increased since 1993.
How much credit does MMP deserve for all this? The Electoral Commission charts do show a clear upward trend, but since they start in 1993, they conceal the fact that this has been going on since the 1980s. The Canadian and British parliaments, both of which retained FPP, also became more diverse in the same period. The choice of electoral system seems immaterial.
It is impossible to prove the counterfactual. What is clear though is that our parliament continues to lack in certain kinds of diversity. A study by Geoffrey Miller and Mark Blackham in 2016 found that politicians in the Beehive tend to come from similar walks of life:
... a full third of our MPs have worked only as political “insiders” in taxpayer-funded jobs. We also discovered the biggest single job category for MPs is not having any definable career or work history (23 MPs). These parliamentarians typically leave university, work briefly in largely dissimilar office-based jobs, before finding employment as MPs... The most common single career before Parliament was employment in the business world, largely in management roles – not as business owners or operators. But tellingly, the second-most common career is within government.1
The typical path to parliament is to be born into a middle-class family, get a certain degree at university (lawyers are vastly over-represented), work various white-collar jobs (preferably for the government), and schmooze your way up the ranks of an existing political party. We might say this is the professionalization of politics: “Being an MP is now a job, not a calling.”
Gone are the days when the Prime Minister could be some “everyday bloke” who, having first made a name for himself doing something else, accidentally falls into his political role, which he serves out like a prison sentence. William Massey reportedly received the notice that he had been elected to parliament while sitting atop a bale of hay on his farm; he took it from the postman by stabbing his pitchfork through it. Norman Kirk, on the other hand, left school at age 13, and worked a succession of blue-collar jobs before breaking into politics as mayor of Kaiapoi at 28.
The virtues and life experience of the individual MP are increasingly irrelevant. A good chunk of our politicians don’t represent any particular segment of the public. They are chosen by their party apparatus for their loyalty to its goals. Dissension from the party line has thus become increasingly rare. The domination of parties over their members was further entrenched by the recent ban on waka-jumping, according to which parties may recall list MPs who switch allegiance mid-term.
The idea occasionally pops up that we should go through the hassle of changing everything again, usually by copying what some other country is doing, such as Australia with Single Transferable Vote (STV). However alluring this may seem, any proposed system will have its own shortcomings; to take but one example from the Australian experience, Fraser Anning was elected to the Queensland senate in 2017 with just 19 votes. This is hardly an improvement.
How many of our current problems can we honestly blame on MMP? Perhaps none. While there are better and worse ways of doing things, the incremental refinement of democratic procedures can never wholly eliminate that human dimension of politics, the uncertainty and error of individual or collective judgement. The value of democracy, it seems to me, has never rested on the promise of a well-oiled machine that would take the hard decisions out of our hands; rather, it is the vigour and hope that, whatever the issues ahead of us are, all the people will come and combine their efforts and imaginations to overcome them. We must see the uncertainty of coalition talks in this light. Conflict, compromise, and cooperation sit at the heart of democracy. They are not technical glitches to be patched out of the system, but the product of a genuine cleavage within it that cannot be hidden in clever charts.
Certainly, if I had a magic wand, I would make certain alterations to MMP. But there are many more pressing issues within our democracy. There is an emerging career-politician pipeline, as highlighted by Miller and Blackham. There is the increasing influence that parties have over the views and actions of their MPs. There is a worrying relation between governments and private consultants, with former ministers cashing in on their insider knowledge (Kris Faafoi, Stuart Nash, and Kiritapu Allan are only the most recent examples). Finally, there is the ubiquity of PR techniques and targeted campaigning, which degrades the overall integrity of and belief in the possibility of the political process; in the words of George Eliot, the “cautious weighing of consequences” overshadows “an ardent faith in efforts of justice and mercy.”
All of these are problems we would wave away if we could. But there is no magic wand. A perfect system is not coming. Democracy requires us to steel ourselves anyway, to grit our teeth and get on with it, regardless of who is sitting around the table. Not because we want to - because we have to.
You can read a summary of the study at the New Zealand Herald. Studies on subsequent parliaments have found that the overall diversity of careers has increased somewhat since 2017: “The demise of New Zealand First could have put overall career diversity at risk because many of its MPs came from small business backgrounds. But the Act Party has largely filled this gap.”