Mixed-member proportional representation

If anyone wants to see him in action, there's a great documentary called Campaign.

It was the 1996, I think, first MMP election.

And it features Richard Preble.

I think young Mark Thomas was a national candidate.

Yeah, so back, I think it was 2008, where they didn't need to party Māori, what the Māori Party then, to govern with, but he recognised the fact that actually you need to kind of bring along, you know, coalition partners and things with you.

And that was a very successful, I think, partnership.

So yeah, Justin is absolutely right that, you know, I think, yeah, the majority, and we've never seen a majority government before under MMP, in 2020, I think, yeah, the decisions made there to sort of just rule alone kind of in many ways was actually really detrimental to Labour.

All right.

The key point to bear in mind is that New Zealanders do not, as a whole, have a good understanding of the electoral system.

After 30 years, the electorate still does not understand the mechanics of MMP.

That has shown up in survey after survey.

The most recent available survey from the New Zealand Initiative in 2020 showed that only 46%... 46% of people know both ways a party can get into Parliament.

So only 46% of people understand MMP, so most people don't understand it.

Isn't that terrifying? Or not? I think it's kind of terrifying.

But yeah, that's something else we can mention.

Anyway, so that's some of the stuff from me.

Winston was always probably going to be the strongest performer in this debate.

He certainly got the most words in, you know, and that's part of the art, isn't it? I think it's, you know, like I guess my thing around these things is that I'm not sure why we keep them so separate when it comes to these types of events because actually these parties are highly influential in an MMP environment.

Right,

right.

But I have been thinking a lot about the use of the term minor parties.

Esther Robinson wrote, I thought, a really great piece in The Post a couple of weeks ago which talked about this.

We are 30 years into MMP, so let's say we're in a more mature MMP environment.

The total, based on the last poll of party vote going to the so-called minor parties, is 43%.

We've, uh, l- almost 100 years.

For all of MMP, this is the lowest that you've seen the, the two biggest parties.

For all the time before that in which there was a f- first past the post system with, with two parties, you've never seen, um, since the 1920s, l- votes this low for supposedly the, the major parties.

And that speaks to this politics of disgruntlement, disgruntlement right now, right?

So you're talking like 25 points has been shed.

And that-

And the lowest it's ever been under MMP before is 62.

It's-

In terms of the political context, where the polling's at, I think just to give you a broad brush summary, looking at the poll of polls, which we maintain internally, it is incredibly tight.

Every MMP election is tight, but it's, it's hard to remember a ele- election that this far out felt so unclear-

Yeah

... about where it was gonna land.

I think so.

It's also unprecedented at the moment to have the two main parties polling below 30% at the same time.

I think that's, um, across the history of MMP, we haven't seen that in the last three decades-

Yeah

And this is, you know, this is going back almost 100 years.

For all of MMP, this is the lowest that you've seen the two biggest parties.

For all the time before that, in which there was a first-past-the-post system with two parties.

You've never seen, since the 1920s, votes this low for supposedly the major parties.

So you're talking like 25 points has been shed today.

And the lowest

it's ever been under MMP before is 62.

Yeah, it's

Yeah.

And Bernard, I would like you to talk perhaps at the very end of the show about this issue, or we can address it next week, perhaps, this issue of how to engineer a kind of right-wing coalition or a right-wing coalition through MMP and how that might work.

Yes, we're getting to the end game with the MMP, I think, where a cynicism and a sophistication in the way we use our two votes is starting to come through.

It was always a risk, and now it's really there.

And it's about a lot more money being able to be pumped into these campaigns and using non-traditional media to get messages out there.

Yeah, I mean, of course, it's entirely legitimate that they do.

But it's interesting.

Is it a hole, do you think, in MMP that was sort of unthought of?

And so they sent a not very subtle signal to their members that maybe they weren't even going to have a list this year.

For those of you who don't quite grasp what this means, in the MMP system, the party vote determines the percentage of MPs of the party that you get.

So if you get 50% of the vote, you are entitled to 50% of the seats in Parliament.

That will be 50 seats.

No, no, he stayed in office.

So this leads me to my next theory.

So maybe it's not 3D chess, maybe it's 4 or 5D chess, because the thinking is actually in this way, by having an illegitimate national-led government, we can undermine the credibility of MMP so much that eventually we'll return to first-past-the-post.

Look, I don't like MMP, but I do like certainty.