New Zealanders go to the polls in a little over a week’s time. It will be the first election under a new electoral system. In the past New Zealand has used the British system of simple-majority, single-member electorates. Voters put a cross against one candidate and the candidate with the most votes won the seats. The party with the most seats won government. It had the virtues of simplicity and stability. It was stable because it is usual for the two major parties to win all but one or two seats and for one of them to have a clear majority. Further, as New Zealand has no upper house, it has meant that governments invariably could run a full term.
But it also meant that there were few checks to Executive power. Governments could get Parliament to rubber-stamp any legislation they wanted. It resulted in widespread, sudden and major reforms: wholesale privatisation and deregulation and sweeping industrial-relations changes. For some it provided opportunity and made things more efficient and vibrant. For others it made the world less certain, cut their pay and cut government services that they had relied upon.
It made New Zealanders think that the winner-take-all electoral system required reform. They thought that a system in which, typically, a political party with 40 per cent of the vote got 55 to 60 per cent of the seats and total control of government was not such a good thing. They thought it unfair that minor parties, especially those opposed to some of the radical reforms put forward by Labour and the Nationals, got a significant amount of the votes, but very few, if any, seats.
A referendum changed the system to a modified proportional system which delivers seat numbers in almost exact proportion to the number of votes a party gets.
It will mean that neither of the major parties, the governing Nationals nor Labour, will be able to form a majority government. According to polls, the Nationals have about 40 per cent and Labour about 20. Significant parties from the right and left have emerged. The New Zealand First Party under Winston Peters is now attracting 15 per cent; Jim Anderton’s traditionalist labour Alliance party is attracting about 10 per cent and independents are getting the rest.
Under the new system voters have a constituency vote and a national vote. There are 60 single-member constituencies which are voted for in the usual simple-majority way. The other 60 seats are national seats. These are distributed so that the final total of 120 seats are divided in proportion to the national vote of each of the parties. So a party that got, say, 40 constituency seats and 50 per cent of the national vote would have 20 national seats added to its 40 to make 60, or exactly 50 per cent of the 120-seat total. If it got only 20 constituency seats and 50 per cent of the national vote it would get 40 national seats to make up its 50 per cent entitlement of 60 seats. A party must get a constituency seat or 5 per cent of the national vote to be represented.
The system will bring electoral fairness, but at considerable price. With no party getting a majority, there will be a huge amount of jockeying for power after the election. The system has delivered Mr Peters leverage beyond his support base. He has appealed to simplistic urgings among some New Zealanders and offers simple solutions to complex problems, playing on nationalistic fears. He has promised to nationalise large areas of forest; he wants to reverse foreign ownership in key industries; he denounces those who have made profits through privatisations; and he wants to slash immigration.
Mr Anderton, too, has made similar appeals, calling for reversals of privatisations, higher governments services, high taxes, and a re-regulated labour market. In short these two have appealed to those disaffected by past economic reform and promised them a nirvana by turning back the clock. Those who vote for them will be sadly disillusioned. A trading nation integrated with the world in the way New Zealand is, cannot afford nationalistic isolationism.
However, in the jockeying for government, these two parties will offer to support either the Nationals’ Jim Bolger or Labour’s Helen Clark as Prime Minister at a price of agreeing to some of their agenda items. They may demand a role in government with a number of ministries. It will mean government by horse-trading with the ever-looming threat to withdraw support. That in turn could lead to an early election because New Zealand, very foolishly, did not incorporate two essential changes that must go with any proportional electoral system if it is to provide stability. One is a fixed term for Parliament and the other is to have an effective way of determining who is to be Prime Minister. The Europeans do it with more active constitutional monarchs. A more elegant mechanism is to insist that the first business of Parliament is to elect a Prime Minister (as in the ACT) and to insist that any no-confidence motion must contain the name of the new Prime Minister (as in Papua New Guinea).
All the signs are that the maverick Mr Peters will play his political cards hard to give himself as great a role as possible, but thereby causing maximum instability. The electoral system itself is likely to result in more votes for Mr Peters and Mr Anderton because people will not feel a vote for them would be “”wasted” as it was under the old system.
It may well be that the instability might drive the Nationals and Labour together to add some stabilising elements to the electoral system. Until then, New Zealand is in for interesting times.