With respect to the current government, I guess you’re talking about NZ’s Worst and United Futile. I disagree that they are wagging the dog, they seem pretty ineffectual to me. Except for blocking any action on climate change, which is an achievement I suppose.

Don’t go with you on the “majority should rule” stuff Bro - is there really any difference between having your human rights suppressed by one omnipotent dictator or monarch, or having them suppressed by a Government whose power is endorsed by 50.01% of the population. Feels just the same on the receiving end.

If the majority should rule absolutely, then I guess you’d endorse everything that has been done by every Government over the past 11 years, because each of those Governments represents a majority (unfortunately). From many of your comments on this blog, I don’t think you actually agree with that.

Don’t count your chickens just yet, the latest TV one poll (Colmar Brunton I think) has the Greens at 6%.

I do agree that the one in ten should have a say but the say they have should reflect the % they achieved at the last election, this is clearly not the case in NZ, I am all for democracy, what we have is the tail wagging the dog and the voters have had enough.

If the Nat support levels matched those of the Greens then the answer to your next question would be yes, in any democracy the majority should rule.

BB - an “electorate” is an arbitrary geographical grouping of voters. Do you really think that just because a candidate cannot be the highest polling in an arbirary geographical grouping of voters, he or she doesn’t represent anybody?

The latest Mogan poll put the Green support nationwide at 9.5%. Do you really believe it is democratic to have an electoral system that results in a party that has the support of almost 1 in 10 voters has no representation in Parliament? Ever considered emmigrating to France or the United States - the undemocratic systems in those countries are better aligned to your rather perverse concept of democracy.

Hey, what say 40% of the population supported the Greens and 9.5 supported the National Party. Would you still have the same position then, if the party that most closely identified with your issues would be wiped out at a FPP election?

I’m sure Bro would like the French system… it ensures that issues such as the environment, animal rights etc. can never get a national hearing because we don’t get any Green MPs, despite having a similar level of support to NZ Green Party.

It does not matter how you try and worm around this the fact remains that not ONE of the Green MP’s was elected, they all go in through the party vote.

As I said before tell me one electorate in NZ that would elect Keith Locke?, after watching the man on Eye to Eye last Sat morning I can see why, I guess that explains why he is best hidden well down the party list.

I see a huge problem with a party (any party) that only just reaches the 5% threshold having a major say in how this country is run, it does not matter how you look at it, it is not democratic.

This is one of the problems with the Green ticket, I know of quite a few people who would vote Green but they cannot stomach the views of Nandor when it comes to drugs, or Sue Bradford because of the S59 bill.
If we are going to persist with this undemocratic MMP system then we need to find a way that lets us (the voter) kick those people we do not want/like out of the house.

I’d actually see all the Green MPs as more democratically elected than electorate MPs

I would suggest that you have three MPs who do not represent (even 5%) the thoughts of NZers, please tell me how that is democratic.

Firstly: I don’t think it’s necessary for a person to be directly elected for them to be democratically elected. People have access to party lists, if they do their research they should know what they’re getting into, in a general sense. If we’re genuinely tired of having indirect elections then we should petition for another referendum.

Secondly: Yes, they WERE elected into parliament by voters. Everyone who voted green provided explicit support for every member present on the Green Party list, with the proviso that those members had to remain in support of their party in order to remain MPs. Our party votes are the closest thing we get to voting along issue lines in New Zealand, and I would consider it a tragedy of democracy if we were to abandon the idea altogether.

If an issue or set of issues matters enough to voters that 5% of them would sacrifice their party vote to deal with it, then I see no problem with them getting a hand in decisions even though the other 95% of the country didn’t vote for them. Democracy is about everyone being represented, not the biggest majority dictating terms to the rest of us.

Granted, I do have some issues with MMP. My first issue is that the 5% cutoff is too arbitrary. Better to remove it and have the cutoff point as however many votes are required to constitute a single list seat.

My second issue is the system it uses to elect electorate MPs. It’s an unexpressive mess and needs replacing.

Ideally, I’d love to see two-vote elections- one with direct votes for electorate candidates using Range Voting, and one with the current party votes.

(Range voting for direct candidate elections still has some issues, but it’s by far the fairest proposal for a voting system I’ve seen so far, and the least vulnerable to strategic voting. In fact if we assume everyone votes strategically under Range Voting, it essentially becomes another system called Approval Voting, which is like the current system we use, but where you can tick as many candidates as you like. Range Voting is what judging comittees in the Olympics use to make rankings for events like diving or gymnastics)

Today is the first round of the presidential election. Nine candidates, including ours, Dominique Voynet. The two leading candidates from tonight’s count (results in about 12 hours) will go to a second round next Sunday. This means that the non-mainstream candidates have no chance, it’s a flag-flying excercise which enables the various political currents (far right, far left — three varieties of Trotskyists! — Green, Communist etc) to measure their popularity and jockey for position before the following legislative elections.

Traditionally, you get the mainstream candidates from the left and right going through to the second round. Last time, in 2002, the far-right Le Pen went through to the run-off against Chirac, knocking out the centre-left Jospin.

In fact, there is no chance of a repeat of 2002. (I’m sticking my neck out here. Feel free to laugh at me tomorrow if I’m wrong.) According to the media, there are four candidates who could be finalists : Nicolas Sarkozy, the authoritarian populist who is the candidate of the mainstream right; Segolene Royal, candidate of the Socialist Party; Francois Bayrou, of the centre-right, re-branded as a centrist who is going to abolish the boundaries between left and right; and grandpa Jean-Marie Le Pen, demagogue of the hard right. Opinion polls are notoriously hard to do in France, and often shockingly inaccurate when measured against election results, so most people are genuinely unsure of the outcome, but I’m picking a clear relative majority for the two mainstreamers over the other two.

The result of this is that the left is dead scared of a repeat, and large numbers of people who would have voted reluctantly for the centre left candidate in the second round, after their favoured candidate is eliminated, are going to vote for her in the first round. This includes the majority of Green supporters. If this feels sort of familiar to NZ Greens… yes, it’s similar to what happened in the last election, with Green supporters switching to Labour to ensure they came out ahead of National.

So the majority of our electorate, who place Green values first but approve of our attitude of critical engagement with the mainstream left, will temporarily abandon us today.

The Utopian wing of our electorate, who are not sensitive to the tactical vote issue, will, in large part, be attracted to Jose Bove, the anti-globalisation guru, who is close to the Greens (there was a movement to draft him as our candidate but he didn’t want to be). He’s a great guy and a great trade unionist and agitator, but a p*ss-poor politician, in my view.

The consequence of the Greens getting hammered, will be poor representation in the next Parliament. This is because of the structure of the electoral process, where legislative elections follow on a few weeks after the presidentials. This is designed to ensure a governing majority for the new president, and has the effect of bipolarising the parliament into left and right blocs. Because we don’t have proportional representation, this obliges us to cut a deal with the Socialist Party, the dominant force of the left, to get a handful of reserved districts where they support our candidates (this enabled us to win three seats in 2002, out of … 600).

Dominique Voynet is likely to get about 2% today. Compare this with the last regional elections, a couple of years ago — which are proportional representation — where we got 8 to 10%, and participate in the executive in about three quarters of France’s 22 regions. Globally our level of support is about the same as that of the NZ or German Greens … just thank your lucky stars you have a genuinely democratic system in NZ, and cherish it.

Rant over! I’m off to vote, and then do a tour of inspection of the local polling booths.