Public Address | Cafe | Legal Beagle: Election '20: The No Threshold Hypothetical

izogi

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 18:06:55 +1300

4% is what the review recommended at first, although it also noted that it wasn’t clear what would work best between 4% and 3%.

Its fuller recommendation was to run three elections at 4% and then to consider if it should be dropped further. If Judith Collins hadn’t binned the…

Kumara Republic

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 21:02:52 +1300

It appears that keeping the 5% is intended to reduce representation diversity. While I am not sure about the sense/effect of 0%, surely 2% or even a mere 3% would not lead to a downfall of ‘democracy’!

The original rationale for the threshold in the German version of MMP was…

Bruce Ward

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 10:03:34 +1300

izogi

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 09:18:00 +1300

Surely the recent election was evidence of how the NZ electorate favours competence over democratic purity.

I guess this comes down to perception, but in 2020 7.9% of votes were spent on parties that ultimately weren’t represented in Parliament. By my count, that’s the highest portion of lost votes ever…

Ben Austin

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 04:32:31 +1300

That seems like an odd thing to say but even if it was, what interest has Jaime-Lee's lawyer got in a counter factual 2020 election without a threshold?

Because if JL is paying a lawyer to have an opinion on that, then JL needs to add this to his list…

Craig Young

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 11:28:52 +1300

If people wanted a more representative (?) electoral system than MMP, then they should have voted for the Single Transferable Vote, which tends to reward large demographic concentrations of specific constituencies without a five percent threshold. In practice, it's worked over in Ireland and Tasmania, but at the Australian federal…

Ben McKenzie

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 14:56:16 +1300

If so, then he's got incredible foresight. He's been doing these hypotheticals since before Advance NZ was even a twinkle in JLR's eye.

Jackson James Wood

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 13:55:11 +1300

Imagine Billy TK all alone in parliament. It would be gold.

Fentex

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 21:44:50 +1300

I don't know where you heard any myth about 'Rugged NZ individualism".

NZ is generally pragmatic, and I think support for that approach is what we saw and incidentally why national did so badly.

Tom Semmens

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 10:45:27 +1300

I detect no appetite in the NZ electorate to turn away from establishment consensus, competent centrist technocracy in favour of more chaotic but more representative coalition government. Surely the recent election was evidence of how the NZ electorate favours competence over democratic purity. COVID has in this country, in the…

linger

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 08:00:19 +1300

What keeps nutcases away from power is, (i) parties having a wide range of different potential coalition partners, and conversely, (ii) governing parties being forced to run policies past the scrutiny of their partners. The threshold is a blight on NZ democracy.

Moz

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 22:59:04 +1300

keep nutcases like Advance NZ away from power

Doesn't work – ACT and United Future have both been elected, as well as Winston First.

Tom Semmens

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 21:47:46 +1300

The whole point of the threshold is to keep nutcases like Advance NZ away from power. It might not be a pure democracy, but I'll settle for the compromise.

Moz

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 21:35:18 +1300

I struggle to see how that would be a worse parliament than what we got. Even people I disapprove of deserve representation… and that “have to get a full quota” idea is just silly.

Albeit I don’t know off the top of my head how fractional MPs get rounded (hopefully…

Josh Petyt

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 19:45:53 +1300

Sounds more democratic to me.

Public Address

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 19:45:53 +1300

Discussion from blog post.