When The Tail Wags the Dog
The principle of proportional representation has inherent merit. It reflects a principle of justice. In a democracy, government should reflect the will of the people collectively expressed as much as possible. The diversity of "wills" should be represented to some degree in the deliberative and legislative chambers.
The principle becomes somewhat more necessary and compelling in a state where there is a unicameral parliament--such as we have in New Zealand, and where the executive branch of government is an extension of Parliament. Checks and balances are rather thin on the ground in Aotearoa.
The most effective check and balance is our being a very small country--both in terms of size and population. Politicians can never get far away from the people. The cut of a politician is generally quite well known by his local community. Elections are a powerful restraint upon politicians who stray too far from the general electoral consensus. (This, by the way, is a reason why we do not favour extending the electoral term beyond three years. There are insufficient checks upon governmental arrogance in New Zealand's constitutional arrangements as it is. Without more checks and balances we would not like to see the governmental term extended.)
We acknowledge that the whole idea of restraint of judicial, executive, and legislative powers is under threat in the West. This is ironic for countries whose history has been adorned by the blood lust of tyrants. Checks and balances and governments of limited power are concepts which arise out of a wider consensus and conviction about the fallen immoral and intrinsically corrupt nature of man. A foreign concept now. Through hard experience the West learned about the horrors of tyrants. It rejected the absolute authority of rulers because it fundamentally eschewed the possibility of human perfection--anywhere, anytime, of anyone in this fallen world. If you believe an absolute ruler is fundamentally corrupt and sinful, you will want to watch any such authority carefully, with scrupulous attention. Hence, the Western idea of limited government, protected by a constitutional system of checks and balances.
Today, however, the Christian notion of fallibility and sinfulness has long since gone the way of the dodo. Unbelief and secular humanism is comfortable with the idea of potential human perfection; never is this more the case when it comes to government. It is axiomatic today that if a government is doing something, its actions and principles must be inherently superior--both in morality and efficacy--to the actions of private citizens. Whilst ethical peccadilloes are the common experience of the man-in-the-street, it is generally agreed that governments are not so flawed. Somehow government is regarded as operating on a morally superior plane of existence.
Elections, then, in New Zealand perform a very helpful check and balance upon the inherent corruption of politicians. It is a good thing to have diversity of views represented proportionally in representative body of Parliament. Hence proportional representation is a good thing.
But there are some significant flaws in our current PR system. The first is the system of "list MPs" and party votes where people can become legislators without ever having to face voters and win their confidence. This opens up the door to elites and people with extremist views being able to force their peculiar prejudices upon an electorate that has never had a chance to approve them as people to represent them.
The invidious consequences of such a flawed system are now evident in the case of the NZ Labour Party. Its official membership can be counted on the fingers of one hand. It has no money, being unable to raise any. Its candidate list is thoroughly unrepresentative of New Zealand society in any proportional sense. Its inner workings are dominated by list MP's who do not face voters directly. We believe that such a bizarre circumstance can only exist by "virtue" of our current proportional representation system.
Secondly, an effective proportional system must recognise and reflect the reality of "trade-offs" in human action. Therefore, preferential voting is much to be, well, preferred. Let us say we cast a vote for party A. But, there are a few things about Party A that are unsupportable. On the other hand, Party B is fundamentally not as sound in our view, but it is a whole lot better than Party C and Party D. Preferential voting allows voters to make such expressions of their will be known. It is a system congruent with just about every other decision we make in this life. As one astute observer put it: life is full of problems. Making decisions is a matter of deciding which set of problems you are prepared to live with.
Preferential voting systems reflect just such a reality. Moreover, they usually result in one party having a clear majority--a majority where the balance of the electorate is prepared to live with the legislative consequences, even if they may not agree with everything. A majority of the electorate has said they are prepared to "live with" the problems that accompany a particular government. Preferential voting allows for just such an outcome--which is inherently more proportional and just than our current system.
Our current system has one more inherent and offensive weakness. It rarely provides a majority government. As a result, backroom deals need to be done with other parties, most of whom will be small parties, representing a very, very small minority of voters. Yet, through the negotiation process these small, minor, unrepresentative parties can extract huge concessions, inflicting their will upon an unwilling majority of voters. It is this injustice where makes the current system of proportional representation so odious to many in New Zealand. The country hates the undue influence of extremely small parties.
The current system of proportional representation clearly needs changing. We hope that the referendum soon to be held will be a first step in allowing appropriate changes to be made.
2 comments:
Are you suggesting transferable voting is preferable? If so then a small party could get 5% of the vote (summed over the candidates) and no members in parliament. I am less happy with this.
I am not certain what I want, but I feel many systems end up with 2 parties, and new parties never get the support (over the years) to become a major player. The US, UK and NZ have had 2 main parties for years.
Perhaps this is the eventual outcome of democracy, people get what they want despite it often being bad for them.
Yup. You are right. Every electoral system has lacunae and problems. Transferable voting may end up producing the situation you describe: 5 percent of the primary vote, but no seats in parliament.
But we don't believe this is a "deal breaker". Because of the transferable vote smaller parties can end up getting more of the primary vote than they otherwise would under the following kind of reasoning: ("I much prefer Party X, and I am going to vote for them, although I know they are not going to win; so my transferable vote will go to Y, my next best choice.")
Over time you would see smaller parties getting higher-then-otherwise primary votes, which then gives them the opportunity to enter into coalitions in advance with the party that gets their most popular transferred vote support (e.g. the Liberal coalition in Australia).
This would likely have occurred with Act and National, or Labour and Greens in NZ over time--provided both parties were able to gain broader support instead of the cult-of-personality. (The Greens have managed to do this; Act has not.) There is an argument that transferable voting indirectly encourages the emergence of substantial alternative parties over time, rather than "going-for-broke" under our current system which encourages a personality cult (Peters, Hide) style of leadership.
Again, all this with the caveat that no system is perfect; there are always trade-offs.
We believe that under a transferable vote system, the new Conservative Party would have a better chance long term to emerge into a genuine political force than under the current system. Under the current system it is likely to attract protest votes (never a stable base for a political party longer term). The focus will always be on the leader--the One--who can either win an electoral seat, or get over the five percent threshold. But what membership and infrastructural support does this new party have? Pretty much none.
Under the transferable vote system, new parties are much more likely to think longer term, and plan for a twenty year programme of growing their support base, articulating their political philosophies and beliefs, and organising. The transferable system allows people to contemplate an emerging party's ideology and even vote for it, without "wasting" their vote. This means that more political parties are likely to be ideologically grounded--which is a good thing in principle. Political discourse can then become more a debate over principles and beliefs than the nauseating ad hominem disgrace that we have seen in the past.
JT
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