And so it came to pass. The self-serving, bad-mannered, boorish, duplicitous, Winston Peters has once more fooled some of the people, thereby visiting an unwanted prospect on all of the people.
Stephen Franks has a piece by his colleague, Rob Olgilvie, well worth a read:
Why just king-maker? Why not king?
A Written New Zealand Constitution?
3 hours ago
7 comments:
If he backs away from trying to get the "Maori" seats abolished he'll prove that your description of him is correct.
Interesting article, but too complicated for my simple take on life.
Either National or Labour should withdraw from the race and offer the other party a clear run to the finish post. I doubt any coalition with Winston and his cronies will last very long, so its just a matter of time before it implodes. Then the party which did not engage in the farce can move in and claim the moral high ground in a fresh election unencumbered by also rans.
But on the other hand, watching the lolly scramble, while unseemly, will be most entertaining.
But we as a nation had the chance to get rid of the crazy MMP system five years ago. We did not. Now we have, for the third time, Winston choosing the govt and holding the whole country to ransom. We were daft, and this is an outrage. NZ politics must look a joke to the rest of the world. Our votes mean nothing in the end.
What'd you prefer: a couple of weeks negotiation and a government with majority support, or an administration elected with three million fewer votes that the opposition?
Funnily enough, had the recommendations of that review been adopted (abolish coat-tailing, dropping the threshold to 4% or even 3%) then ACT and the Conservatives would both be in parliament today, the Greens could have, well, been Green rather than Trotskyites, and the political calculus would be rather different.
While we cling to the idea of a Her Magesty's Government and HM loyal opposition, minor parties will continue to hold the country to ransom. These concepts are out of place under proportional representation. THe problem is not MMP itself, but that we try to use it to form a majority government. If the two major parties were to agree not to oppose for the sake of opposing, but to consider Bills on thier merits we might see MMP work as intended. It might seem strange at first, but it would be in each party's long term interest. If Labour let National form a minority government this time round, it would gain some influence in the short term (it could present the conditions under which it would agree to a Bill and publicise its successes, but it couldnt block a Bill the Greens or NZF supported) and it would have a better chance of being able to form a government itself without undesirable compromises in the future.
MMP is not the best form of proportional representation, we got it because the Government of the day tried to screw the scrum by putting multiple PR options against FPP in the hope of splitting the PR vote, but the public rallied behind the version of PR recommended by the Royal Commission as the version most likely to succeed. Unfortunately the terms of reference of the Royal Commission were to ensure that parties were represented proportionately rather than viewpoints. I would have preferred to see multi-member constituencies with elected members taking to parliament voting power proportional to the number of votes they recieved. We wouldnt need list MPs as lobby fodder and Winston could have stood as himself. But because of the need to vote tactically, we never got the chance to debate the best form of PR.
He already has...
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