Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow
149 Responses
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maybe it's a leftist position, but it's pretty clear the laissez faire policies National holds at its core are damaging both the environmental and social fabric, in a very much connect manner.
of course it's a terrible position for poor national, to have only the one option, NZF. having another would, at the least, give them so much more bargaining clout. But beyond a misunderstanding of green thinking (which sees people and ecology as part of the same whole) has anyone - any of the commentariat who push this unlikely partnership - given any serious examples of what national might offer?
that's the rub, alas. while they keep scoffing 'fart tax' and nanny state, there's just nothing there. -
Why don't we all cut the bullshit and just say the major block on any Teal Coalition is that the other grand coalition would be the grassroots of both parties uniting to burn the motherfucker down?
Credit to Jesse Mulligan for keeping a straight face. The audience couldn't.
Really, I thought they were giggling at Bolger not having Mulligan trying to coalition-splain his arse.
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Dennis Frank, in reply to
I joined the Greens after the 1990 election because they got 7% of the total vote, so I read that as indicating enough of the public were rejecting the left & right to make a better future viable. Worth spending my time & energy on. So, because that was prior to the party deciding to adopt the leftist parliamentary alignment, the party was representing the Green movement on the authentic basis.
When I later persuaded our conference to adopt the leftist alignment, I did so with emphatic advocacy because the Bolger govt had recently enlisted leading environmentalists and the spectre of National capturing the Green movement in Aotearoa loomed large at the time. The need for us to oppose that trend was essential & I don't resile from what I did but do regret inadvertent creation of the sectarianism within the party that has become toxic.
Seeing that 7% as the bedrock real Green support base, I've watched the oscillations around it at every election since. I predict that special votes will bring the current Green vote up to that and confirm that my opinion remains valid.
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izogi, in reply to
There really is probably room for a second Green party in NZ, but the 5% rule means that such a party will never evolve.
This really annoys me. I like MMP far more than what came before it, but to me this recent election has been a clearer demonstration of what's been happening for a while now: the small parties are withering away and not being replaced.
We've had MMP for 21 years. That's 8 elections! So far it's been impossible for any new party to be elected without help from a rogue incumbent, or from another party. ACT and the Alliance both started with incumbents. JA's Progressives had Jim Anderton. The Maori Party started with incumbents. NZ First has been built around a single incumbent's personality cult. The Greens had Helen Clark asking Labour's supporters in Coromandel to elect Fitzsimons. Mana was/is Hone Harawira. United Future has always had Dunne (until now). NO new party has been able to enter parliament without somebody on the inside unlocking the door to let them in, despite several very well resourced parties trying.
Over that 21 years, these parties have been disappearing and they haven't been replaced. It's only been mildly less obvious because National decided to keep United Future and ACT alive as zombie puppet parties, to exploit overhang thanks to National's instructed supporters in trusted seats, but without those parties having any inspiring policies that anyone realistically wants to vote for. Even NZ First will, most likely, vanish once its leader leaves. Then we'll be left with just Labour, the Greens (if we're lucky), National and possibly a yellow National finger puppet.
New parties with new ideas that people get inspired by simply cannot break through the 5% barrier, in part because many of those inspired people are too concerned about their vote being wasted and possibly also because the threshold is simply too high. We seriously need to fix this, at least as much as anything else on an incoming government agenda.
In 2011 we voted to retain MMP with the understanding that there would be a review towards making it work even better. That review was published, and I found it quite offensive when Judith Collins threw it out on arbitrary grounds. It was essentially using the privilege of being in government to trample on everyone who might want to be. Probably Collins and National's strategists were after short term gain, and saw changes as a threat which might allow un-planned parties to come along and challenge National's traditional vote and campaigning style, which largely relies on everyone in that voting bloc being forced to target their vote at a rusty bucket of conflicting ideas.
That decision of Collins' is finally coming back to bite. National + puppets failed to get enough votes, Labour+Greens failed to get enough votes, and there are so few parties remaining in the mix that the options for forming a government are very limited, and largely reliant on the unpredictable guy who nobody wants to deal with.
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Sacha, in reply to
The 5% threshold will be lowered when a party makes it a negotiating bottom line. Not holding my breath for that from either of the big two, though Collins is a particularly disgusting example.
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Sacha, in reply to
I read that as indicating enough of the public were rejecting the left & right
Do we know where the earlier Values party supporters saw themselves?
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izogi, in reply to
Talking about the party of bottom lines, I was surprised to see Tracey Martin, on the final episode of Back Benches, arguing that 5% was a good value for the threshold. Apparently it's the fault of the small parties "for not perfecting the art of surviving".
If that's a genuine view then I seriously wonder if NZ First MPs, if not just Tracey Martin, are deceived about the impact which their leader has on the votes they get. Or maybe I'm wrong and all those people are voting for the party rather than its leader of exaggerated personality?
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tbh the Commission’s recommendation on thresholds (–> 4%) was too weak, and in combination with the recommendation to remove the so-called “coat-tailing” exception, would not have improved the proportionality of MMP at all — so it was a relief those got tossed, so we can try again.
As I’ve said before, the threshold should be set below a level equivalent to support that can win more than one electorate (which solves both problems at once). A plurality in an electorate can be reached with votes equivalent to 0.5% of the total, so a 1% threshold is sufficiently high. Sure, this could allow some strange minority views into Parliament; but giving everyone a chance of representation is really the point of a representatative democracy, isn’t it? (And it’s not like we haven’t already had anti-fluoridists, anti-vaccinationists, racists, sexists and bigots in Parliament under our systems to date.) -
Bart Janssen, in reply to
this could allow some strange minority views into Parliament; but giving everyone a chance of representation is really the point of a representatative democracy, isn’t it?
Absolutely!
The idea that we exclude some views from parliament because less than 5% hold those views is just wrong. 5% is 150000 out of the 3 million odd voters!
By contrast ACT has 11000 voters.
The coat-tailing is stupid
But the 5% rule is simply wrong
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linger, in reply to
leader of exaggerated personality
Am I wrong for immediately thinking of the "rodents of unusual size" from The Princess Bride ?
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BenWilson, in reply to
Seeing that 7% as the bedrock real Green support base
It's credible. But I still don't buy that a significant proportion of those 7% are not inherently left wing. And the high water marks, the best results ever reached by the Party are almost certainly swingers on the left.
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izogi, in reply to
Hi @linger. I agree that the 4% thing really isn't low enough. Certainly if there's not some parallel measure. eg. Giving people an alternative vote, in case their first choice doesn't get enough, would also help people vote for a low-polling party with less concern of their vote being wasted.
What annoyed me most was the seeming arrogance with which it was rapidly thrown out. There was no serious attempt to even discuss the report nor consider change. National spent the better part of the referendum encouraging everyone to support Supplementary Member, which is really just FPP-lite with a pretend gesture towards proportionality. When that didn't work, it asserted its position in government to block any pathway towards making MMP work more effectively for parties that weren't National.
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linger, in reply to
Oh yes: the fact that what was tossed wasn't good enough doesn't make the tosser any less of a tosser.
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Front page of the Press today has Michael Wright arguing that it is time to ditch the threshhold entirely. I like that idea but doubt it will get much traction amongst the elected ...
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Sacha, in reply to
Michael Wright arguing that it is time to ditch the threshhold entirely
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Dennis Frank, in reply to
Do we know where the earlier Values party supporters saw themselves?
Only partially: their schism was created when those who were not leftists and those who were became unable to collaborate any further. Only someone who participated could say if it was a 50:50 split. That's the members. As far as voting supporters goes, I don't recall if polling was done to find out - maybe someone else here knows? I'd guess that they'd all self-identify as progressive, whereas Labour pretended to be progressive but was obviously part of the establishment.
Because I was part of the earlier more-radical green movement, I never took Values seriously, only voting for them in '78 because Shadbolt had become one of them. They were suit-wearers, so nobody in the counter-culture identified with them in the early seventies, and the counter-culture was mostly apolitical anyway. We were non-violent in those years when radical leftists were fighting the establishment in countries all over the world. Fighting doesn't work anymore. We sussed that in the sixties as teenagers, so the leftists in our generation seemed antiquated. But I hung out in the Resistance Bookshop with them. It was just across the road from the Town Hall in Ak, constantly full of people with hair as long as you could get it to grow, an intense ferment of a multitude of simultaneous conversations, very trendy...
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linger, in reply to
I like that: essentially the same outcome as, but simpler mechanism than, a 1% threshold.
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Sacha, in reply to
their schism was created when those who were not leftists and those who were became unable to collaborate any further
Like the German green realos vs fundis?
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Dennis Frank, in reply to
Like the German green realos vs fundis?
Interesting question. The easy answer is yes, but political reality is always composed of nuances and complexities, so the simplest response is misleading. Political reality is created via praxis (rather than via political philosophy or values).
You can probably say that alignments and paradigms (belief systems) create the political context in which the players operate, but I believe identifications are the primary motivators because they produce tribal affiliations ("these people are my crowd, I belong here"). The rise of identity politics in the commentariat was produced by the global shift away from ideology in the seventies.
But the deeper answer to your question explains the realos/fundis divide as pragmatists versus purists: those prioritising short-term gains from compromising their principles & those prioritising adherence to their trajectory toward the sustainable society. It's a false dichotomy in my opinion: competent political players can do both simultaneously.
From an holistic perspective, the common good or public interest is best served by those who collaborate to do so, and their praxis is what produces the real progress that politics sometimes produces. Our problems derive from identity politics promoting (sectarianism) competition between groups rather than collaboration between them - which is what MMP was meant to enhance. So our current challenge is to make the MoU work & extend consensus to include NZF in order to get the change to a better government.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
Why don't we all cut the bullshit and just say the major block on any Teal Coalition is that the other grand coalition would be the grassroots of both parties uniting to burn the motherfucker down?
If NZ First somehow manages to survive Winston's retirement, it'll probably and unfortunately be on the back of the twin tidalwaves of Brexitism & Trumpism - I sometimes wonder if there's always going to be a protest vote for NZers cynical of both major parties. As for the Greens, they're the only minor party to have an active succession plan and stand out in their own right, rather than being dependent on major parties to prop them up. A good MMP threshold for NZ would be anywhere between 3-4%, so long as the coat-tail clause is scrapped (we're looking at you, Judith).
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stephen walker, in reply to
Since 2005 I have advocated for the threshold to be halved to 2.5% (one-fortieth of the party vote instead of one-twentieth). With a five percent threshold that means a party has to win the nominal equivalent of six seats, whereas the nominal equivalent of three seats seems much more realistic, fair and democratic. I think there are valid arguments for retaining a threshold in excess of one seat. Anyway, the convenience of 2.5% is that if it is reached the party is guaranteed at least three seats, which has practical advantages within the way parliament works.
And the coat-tails provision should definitely be scrapped if the threshold were to be halved.
In this election, TOP wouldn't have made it on the face of the result, but I think that if the threshold were 2.5% they would have attracted a lot more votes from people who did not want to waste their party vote on a party unlikely to make the threshold. So there is a strong chance that they would have made it.
The current version of MMP is not functioning as well as it could if it was fine-tuned to make it fairer and more transparent.
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The parties really have no case for objecting to a version of MMP which returns one MP for a party based on a no-threshold party vote, because right up until the 2017 election they have shown themselves perfectly happy to make accommodations that produce one electorate MP for a party that fails the party vote test.
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linger, in reply to
True that: and makes a mockery of the Commission's highly-prioritised concern that parties would need >5 MPs in order to function effectively in Parliament. (That concern was arguably misplaced by many miles: (i) it's not true if a larger party has agreed to provide logistic support; and (ii) it would not be true of any genuinely single-issue and therefore single-portfolio party, were such a thing to be made practical by removing the threshold.)
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linger, in reply to
And the coat-tails provision should definitely be scrapped if the threshold were to be halved.
Nah, that would still maintain the possibility of inequality in value of votes between electorates and/or between electoral and party votes in some electorates. As it stands the coat-tail provision acts to increase the possible proportionality in the face of limits imposed by the threshold; much of the criticism it has received seems based on who has benefited most from it to date. If the threshold is removed, then coat-tailing becomes unnecessary; similarly, if the threshold is lowered to anything under 1.2%, coat-tailing has no practical effect and so becomes moot; but if the threshold remains above the level where a party would get 2 seats (minimum % of non-excluded party vote = 1.5/120=1.25%), then coat-tailing can increase proportionality and should remain.
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