Expect Self-Interest to Emerge Full Blown

We Can Trust the Pollies to Get It Right

There will be a brief flurry of interest in the Referendum held on the 26th November, 2011 as the votes are counted and the results come in.  It would seem that the public favours keeping Mixed Member Proportional Representation and giving the politicians the opportunity to tweak it.

We think it timely to remind ourselves that our system of MMP reproduces the German system.  No system is perfect; the MMP system--with all its quirks and frustrations--has worked reasonably well.  Its faults are well known.  But now the MP's will get to tweak it and make it better.  We now enter a potentially dangerous phase.



The early suggestion for "improvement" is to make the system more purely proportional.  This involves lowering, or even doing away with, the five precent threshold, which folk in the Commentariat gravely tell us, is unfair.  The Conservative Party, for example,  scored just over 2% of the vote in the recent election, but has no representation in Parliament.  This is deemed "unfair".  Maybe.  But what is fair?

The original pure proportional representation system was first applied in Germany, during the notoriously unstable Weimar Republic.  Here (as is now being touted for New Zealand) representation in the Bundestag was based on national percentage of the vote--provided your percentage could qualify you to get at least one human being in a seat in the parliament.  Putting is simply, if applied in NZ, since the Conservative Party got around 2.7% of the vote, and assuming the Parliamentary chamber consisted of 100 members, that would mean that the CP would get 2 members (maybe rounded up to one more, representing the 0.7%). Each person would have only one vote, not two as we currently have.

Sounds delectably fair, right?

Pure proportional representation led--in the hapless Weimar Republic--to notoriously unstable government.  (It has never been tried anywhere else) There is no doubt that this contributed in part to the rise of the Nazi Party.  Amidst all the instability, confusion, inability to govern, and a dysfunctional parliament, the hard-lines of the Nazi Party gradually seemed more attractive.  Stability became more important than pure proportional representation when the price of the latter was the inability of the parliament to function. 


According to this academic paper

. . .  (pure) proportional representation encouraged the formation of new parties and splinter parties. This, as Joseph Goebbels argued, gave Nazi officials enormous freedoms when they were members of an ostensibly insignificant part on the right, something which proved to be particularly helpful in the establishment of the National Socialist movement  (Evans, 2004, p.451, quoting Goebbels, 1935, p.61).

What we have witnessed in the split within the Maori Party, and the rise of Mana, is the potential instability in proportional representation systems.  There are now two parties are now claiming to represent Maori.  But why not four, or ten, or a party for each tribe?  Under pure proportional representation this would be encouraged.  The current instability of MMP would be magnified many times over.  Trying to form a government, let alone govern in such circumstances, would be next to impossible.  Throw in a debt crisis or two and voila, the good old Kiwi bloke would long for someone to come forward who would "kick the bastards in the guts". 

MMP is bad enough, with severe weaknesses.  We need to be vigilant that in the "tweaking" that will now go on, we do not let the inmates take over the asylum.