New electorate boundaries announced
The Representation Commission has announced new electorate boundaries. There will be 63 general seats and 7 Maori seats for the 2008 election. This also means that the cap on spending for political parties party vote campaigns goes to $2.4million if they stand in all seats. If the Nats don’t stand in the Maori seats, their cap will be $2.26 million. Not going to have much effect on the Greens as I don’t think we’ll be spending that much!
Even so I am a big supporter of caps on spending otherwise it ends up as a race between who can spend the most money, as we see in the US and Australia.
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September 25th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
So this is an increase in the number of electorates. It’s likely to make the next Parliament less proportional than the current one. Has the Green Party (or others) protested about this? Like a frog (!) in a pot of slowing boiling water, the electoral system seems to be slowly but surely becoming less technically democratic. Is there a mechanism to correct this?
I think there’s a good argument for decreasing the number of electorate MPs - if not getting rid of them entirely - and increasing the number of list MPs. I’m not saying that NZ’s experience of list MPs has been all good, but the electorate MPs are merely like over-paid social workers.
Of course we need to get rid of the anti-democratic 5% MMP threshold as well. I know that in the past the Greens haven’t necessarily been that worried about the 5% threshold because it’s acted in your favour by restricting new competition, but you never know, you might start polling belong 5% before long…
Bryce
http://www.liberation.org.nz
September 25th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Its outrageous - like tax creep for politicians! A back door way of increasing their number when the rest of NZ wants to decrease them!!
I hope Helen has pissed off Pt Chev poeple
September 25th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
“This also means that the cap on spending for political parties party vote campaigns goes to $2.4million if they stand in all seats. If the Nats don’t stand in the Maori seats, their cap will be $2.26 million.”
And do you support this Russel?
Or should be just set the cap at some figure that’s the same for everyone?
September 25th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
A 2.4 million dollar cap.
Excluding government funded advertising (WFF was valued at $15 million) and they used PS money to advertise the budget - and anyone remember the bus shelter posters that supposedly advertised the budget, but managed not to even have the word “budget” on the bright red posters. (Gee, red, isn’t that Labour’s colours?)
Any spending cap should include some oversight on government paid advertising.