Mojo’s election will cause a shake-up in the way things work around Parliament.  Shamefully, the proceedings of Parliament have been pretty much inaccessible to the Deaf Community until transcripts appear on the Parliamentary website , sometimes days after the event. Mojo being profoundly deaf means that will have to change to ensure her ability to participate.  That will have big positive spin-offs for the Deaf Community’s participation in the Parliamentary process.

The Greens in Parliament will now have the advantage of being able to cover every Select Committee, and our MPs will each be able to focus more strongly on a smaller number of spokesperson roles.

From an organisational perspective, the election result gives the Greens a great base to build on to further increase our party vote and become a significant player in a progressive Government in 2014.  We have lots of people who have for the first time ever not just voted Green but been involved in campaigning for the Greens.

A few statistical highlights are:

• Almost a quarter of a million voters (247,370) cast their party vote for the Greens

• In two electorates, Wellington Central and Te Tai Tonga, the Greens came second in the party vote

• In Waiariki the Green party vote increased by 221%

And perhaps the best news of all is that MMP is here to stay:

• In the referendum, 58% of valid votes supported sticking with MMP, with only 42% wanting to change to any other electoral system

• The strongest vote for any other electoral system was actually “informal” votes – i.e. more voters (33%) either declined to pick another electoral system preference or spoiled their ballot paper for that part of the referendum than voted for any of the alternatives to MMP that the referendum provided

With MMP secure, we can now consider ways to improve it and make it even more democratic and representative.

The Green Party does not have a deal with the Labour candidate, Charles Chauvel, nor does it intend to ask its supporters to vote for him in an attempt to defeat Peter Dunne in the Ōhariu seat.

This rumour has come about because Dunne is using it to mask his own desperate dependence on the National Party for his political survival, after steadily losing support in the electorate.

Voters can decide for themselves how to use their two ticks strategically, they don’t need to be instructed.

In Ōhariu, just like in every other electorate, we are only campaigning for Kiwis’ party vote.

I’m not telling people who to vote for as their electorate MP in Ōhariu but I am upfront with them – I like Charles and I think Dunne is done: he’s out-dated and voters are tiring of his brand of bland ‘any way the wind blows’ politics. This is evidenced by his falling popularity in the electorate over the last three elections, as well as his dismal party vote throughout the country.

Our position is very different from National’s deals in Epsom and Ōhariu where they are telling their supporters to vote for the Act and United Future Party’s candidates.

Firstly, we aren’t contesting electorate seats anywhere, only campaigning for party votes.

Secondly, if we received 46% party votes, like the National Party received in Ōhariu in 2008 or 62% of the party votes, like the National Party received in Epsom in 2008 – we may well campaign for electorate votes in those seats. We didn’t, so we’re not.

Clearly it’s a very different situation we are in. National’s decision to support other parties candidates in seats where they have the largest share of votes, and would normally contest and likely win, is all about putting these two parties on life-support, for their own ends.

Cameron Slater, most likely deliberately, has got it completely wrong on the MMP referendum. Slater blogs:

Some peo­ple are already sug­gest­ing that MMP should be reformed but that is not the ques­tion in this ref­er­en­dum. What we are being asked to do is choose MMP warts and all as it cur­rently stands, or vote for change. If we vote for change then we can choose one of four other systems.

If you like MMP just as it is then vote for that option, if you like any­thing else, includ­ing a changed MMP sys­tem then Vote for Change.

That’s utter crap! There are lots of voters who think aspects of MMP could be improved. But the referendum process specifically allows for a review of MMP to consider such potential improvements should MMP be endorsed – see sections 74 and 75 and 76 of the Electoral Referendum Act 2010.
…

A huge fail on the facts for Slater, and an indication that the anti-democratic forces the “Vote for Change ” people represent are going to play an evidence-averse dirty game.

Agreed, Toad.  It looks like those opposing MMP have decided they can’t win on the facts, so have resorted to lies and disinformation. And as John Armstrong pointed out this morning:

Vote for Change also argues that it wants a system that is fair to voters, not the politicians. Yet there is no fairer system to voters than MMP.

There is a wealth of information on the Electoral Commission website that is worth checking out – remember the future of our democracy is at stake here!

We think MMP is the fairest system as it makes everyone’s vote count equally no matter where they live in the country.

FPP on the other hand is a winner takes all system that often leaves the majority of voters without representation. It tends to create minority governments with absolute power (and despite what your friendly business moguls might say – SM is essentially the same as FPP).

Also worth remembering that if people vote to retain MMP – it will be reviewed so that any niggles with it can be ironed out.

Let’s keep a fair system, lets keep MMP!

Yesterday, I signed an extension our Greens’ Memorandum of Understanding with the Government to advance cleaning up toxic sites. I did this because, under MMP, we can make policy gains without voting for policies we disagree with or endorsing a Government whose overall programme is at odds with many of our core principles and policies.

After some negotiation, Dr Nick Smith has agreed to some critical steps necessary to adequately address this issue. Now, there is more money to stabilise the Tui Mine tailings dam on Mt Te Aroha and there will be a publicly accessible national register of priority sites. There will also be regional council registers that will be accessible for the public. They will use common software so everyone can get information about where sites are and how polluted they are.

We have agreed to have an independent peer review of the National Environment Standard for contaminated soils. This was announced Tuesday and will cover the risks to human health on contaminated sites. We want this to include environmental effects — not just immediate health risks. The Minister for the Environment has agreed to the independent peer review despite the Ministry for the Environment’s advice that it’s too difficult. Other countries have both human health and environmental standards for sites and associated impacts off site which affect the food chain. No contaminated site is an island.

We have also agreed to work on policy and legal changes around the issue of pre-1991 liability for cleaning up sites. Prior to that, original polluters didn’t have to pay to for cleaning up their toxic sites. That is just wrong. But it can be changed by amendment to the Resource Management Act.

People have asked me why the last Government didn’t address these issues. That’s a damn good question and I will be challenging whoever is the next Government to work with us to progress this work even further. Human life, our environment and our international reputation are at stake. As the wahine from Hauraki said at the Tui Mine event at Parliament yesterday, we destroy the environment, we destroy ourselves. Hauraki iwi want their mountain returned to them and they want it returned in a healthy state!

One person amongst many deserves credit for the progress we hope to make under this new agreement and that is Gordon Jackman. He first exposed this issue in 1991 while working for Greenpeace. I can truly say he has taught me everything I know about the issue as has given me the encouragement to take on this work!

The arguments for electoral reform were familiar to New Zealanders. A two-party choice no longer satisfies nearly all voters as it did a generation ago. Up to 25 per cent of voters are supporting other parties, but the system is not translating their votes into the same proportion of seats in Parliament.

MMP produced a bonus of a far more representative Parliament, in addition to enhancing the legitimacy of our democracy by not disenfranchising significant sections of voters.

Experience with MMP suggests voters for third parties are not interested in proportionate power, they want their vote represented in Parliament, not necessarily in the Government. Increasingly, the small parties have kept their distance from the governing party they support, preferring confidence and supply commitments to a formal coalition.

The Green Party have never given ‘confidence and supply’ to any Coalition Government [edit: other than the 1999-2002 Labour-Alliance one], yet has managed to work constructively with parties from all sides of the political spectrum.

All five elections under MMP have produced government by the party that was first past the post. Proportional representation has changed less than its advocates hoped or its opponents feared. Minority governments still rule, tails have not wagged dogs, stability remains. The previous Government lasted nine years; polls suggest most voters want the present Government to have a second term.

The word “Mixed” is overlooked when people criticise or attack MMP. MMP is not a pure ‘proportional representation’; it acknowledges our political heritage, which for many includes a focus on electorates and Electorate MPs. It also acknowledges the reality that voters in New Zealand focus on a ‘party’ and elect parties to office rather than individuals.

MMP is working well and could be better with some refinements. If it fails this year, it will be given a second chance against the preferred alternative. It deserves to survive – but voters are not theorists on electoral fairness, they want the system that produces the Government they want.

We have a system that works, for voters the process is be simplicity itself and it is ‘two ticks, one for an electorate MP and one for a party. There is little reason to upset the present arrangements – especially to return to FPP or one its surrogates such as has been proposed by Don Brash.

Under MMP the amount of votes a party gets determines how many seats it gets. It is a proportional system which means that there is no chance of an unfair or undemocratic election result.

MMP works. It has provided stable and effective Government since its introduction – where the majority of New Zealanders are represented in a coalition government.

If people vote to retain MMP – it will be reviewed so that any niggles with it can be ironed out.

MMP has also made our Parliament truly representative of the people this can be seen in that representation for women and Māori, Pasifika and Asian people has greatly increased since its introduction in 1996.

The big spending anti-MMP lobby has signaled it will launch its campaign in June – so there’s no room for complacency in the battle to keep a fair electoral system where your vote counts no matter where you live!

If you are interested in the battle to save democracy in NZ – check out the Campaign for MMP.

It is about Don Brash’s call for supplementary member electoral system (SM) to replace MMP.

It looks like Don and his rich right wing business buddies have decided that reselling FPP is too hard. So they have gone for supplementary member voting system which is very similar to FPP and is not a proportional system at all

What’s wrong with SM?

The amount of votes a Party gets does not determine the number of seats they have in Parliament –i.e it is not proportional.

If it isn’t proportional then it isn’t representative, and if it isn’t representative – it isn’t really fair or democratic (well not a fair version of democracy anyway).

So how does SM work? 

Under SM you have electorate seats that work under the old FPP system, so the person who gets the most votes wins (and all the other electorate votes don’t count for anything).  You then have a limited number of seats which are decided on a party vote.

So, for example, you could have 90 electorate seats determined under a first past the post model and 30 seats determined on the party vote.

Under this example if a party gets 10% of the vote but doesn’t win any electorate seats then they would get 3 seats (10% of the 30 seats determined on the list). 

That seem fair to you?

We think MMP is the fairest electoral system. It makes our Parliament truly representative of the people and brings with it a more diverse range of political voices – Māori, Pasifika, young, old, male, female – in a stable and effective environment.

If you are interested in more information on what’s happening with the MMP referendum- check out the Campaign for MMP.

I lived in Canada (Ottawa) for three years a while back – beautiful country, and great people.  I have an appreciation for the complexities of its domestic politics, and how proud Canada’s country’s foreign policy used to be through UN peacekeeping and human rights leadership.

This result comes on the back of a wave of Green successes in Britain, Australia, Germany and France. I believe the tides of change are coming and we’ll start making genuine progress on the many critical global issues facing our world.

That said, the wonderful Canadian result also highlights how deeply flawed their first-past-the post electoral system is. If they had a fair proportional system that provides for representation that matches the amount of support they have – the Greens would have 13 seats in Parliament.

In the 2008 election they had almost a million votes but no representation in Parliament.  That situation is intrinsically unfair.  It undermines the fundamental tenet of democracy – that people have someone to represent them in decision-making.

We believe it is vital that MMP is retained in New Zealand in this year’s referendum and that we not return to the unrepresentative FPP system.  MMP makes sure that a party’s share of power is directly proportional to the share of votes it wins, and there’s no chance of an unfair and undemocratic outcome.

Anyway, congratulations again to Elizabeth May.  I met and worked with Elizabeth at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference – one of the few good things to come out of the meeting for me.  We’ve stayed in contact ever since on this and I’m looking forward immensely to collaborating with her on this most vital of all issues, now that she will be spending much of her time in Ottawa.

This unidentified billboard has appeared in Cable Street: ugly, inaccurate and incomprehensible.  Perhaps that’s why no one was prepared to put their name to it. 

I can only guess that it is has been paid for by the First-Past-the-Post lobby that is pushing to get rid of proportional electoral systems.

It seems to lament the fact that a fair electoral system delivered a candidate with genuine majority support.  Or is it just using Kerry’s name as an oblique attack on MMP.

Its very hard to tell.  “Vote losers: get two votes’, “vote for a winner: get 1” makes no sense at all. 

It appears that some FPP supporter out there has more money than sense. You would think that if you are going to spend that kind of money on a billboard you would at least make it intelligible.

Their decision follows those of the sole Green Party House of Representatives MP Adam Bandt and former Tasmanian Green Andrew Wilkie (who was elected as an independent) to also support Labor forming a government.

It was always going to be a no-brainer, because under the peculiarities of Australian electoral law, the election resulted in sufficient Green Senators being elected – the election to the Senate is under the somewhat more proportional Single Transferable Vote (STV) system – take office next July that a Liberal-National Coalition Government would have been incredibly unstable and unlikely to pass any controversial legislation.

There are a few lessons to be learned from the recent Australian and UK elections though.  Despite the claims of their supporters, non-proportional systems such as the Australian Preferential Vote (PV) and the UK’s First Past the Post (FPP) don’t necessarily deliver decisive and stable Government. And non-proportional systems can give completely excessive bargaining power to a few renegade electorate MPs when there is a close result between the bigger parties.

Some in the UK want to move to the Australian PV electoral system.  But the Australian election results show that doesn’t necessarily deliver any more representative democracy than the UK’s horrendously undemocratic FPP.

Meanwhile, here in New Zealand, we have MMP – a proportional electoral system that has led to stable government for the last 14 years.  It could do with a tweak or two, considering that NZ First got more votes at the last election than ACT, but NZ First got no MPs and ACT got five. That doesn’t seem fair (despite my disgust for the appeal to bigotry that underpins NZ First).

Australia and the UK could well look to New Zealand as a model for an electoral system.  Sure, it’s not perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than they have, and it is flexible enough that we can still improve on it.  Maybe the Aussies and thePoms ned to look to how we do it.

Minister Simon Power was persuaded by the debate in the House to amend the legislation under discussion.

The right of the accused person to be present in Court during the whole of his trial (subject to practical constraints) was to be undermined by proposal in the Courts (Remote Participation) Bill.

When the dust settled MP after MP stood up to reflect on what happened.

Here’s our own Kennedy Graham:

It is great to see that the Government has listened to the Green, Labour and Maori parties and protected the right of defendants to be present at their own trial …I salute the Minister for his decision to accede to our entreaties.  The outcome is a victory for parliamentary democracy.

Labour’s Chris Hipkins said it was unusual for parties to all work together in this collaborative manner … the public like to see more of this …

National’s Chester Borrows said we worked together in a very collaborative way … there was a willingness to engage with … the enduring nature to it [the legislation] because it will work past those political divisions…

National’s Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi said a very good standard of democracy [was displayed]… good government always listens to logical reason.

Labour’s David Parker said it’s the sort of interchange that we should have in respect to pieces of legislation that the public wants us to do… We have actually built confidence in this institution this week.

It was the hope of supporters of MMP that Parliament would regain its function of deliberating on legislation drawing on broad community perspectives and engaging in constructive debate.

Wednesday was a further illustration of MMP delivering great democracy for New Zealanders.

The Report of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System (1986) rightly urged caution when considering political finance. The commissioners argued that “Nor is it fair if some in the community use their relative wealth to exercise disproportionate influence in determining who is to govern and what policies are to be pursued” …

 I urge the government and the select committee to reflect deeply about whether unfettered spending doesn’t risk undermining the integrity of our democracy. Transparency around who is spending does not go far enough on its own without also adopting an upper spending cap to keep the playing field as level as consistent with the protection of free speech. 

Despite the warning of the Royal Commission, unfettered spending was permitted for the 1993 electoral referendum.  An aggressive and expensive advertising campaign by big business interests eroded the substantial lead MMP had enjoyed for many months before the vote to a very close vote on the day.  

Had they succeeded in buying the 1993 referendum, the integrity of our democracy would have been seriously and perhaps irrevocably eroded. 

Hopefully the current Government will heed the warning of Dr Johansson and we learn from the 1993 referendum experience. 

The MPs on the Electoral Legislation Select Committee need to treat this threat to democracy seriously, and listen to New Zealanders urging spending limits for the 2011 electoral referendum.

Our submission guide

If the online form on the parliamentary web site doesn’t work, then use our one instead.

The bill to set up the MMP referendum is now at Select Committee. You have a chance to have your say by making a submission – do it now submissions close next week on Thursday 10 June.

If you are keen to make a submission, check out our guide.

The bill has a proposal that will undermine the contest of idea in the run-up to the Referendum

The proposal is that there is no campaign spending cap. This gives open slather to wealthy groups to buy the result they want.

MMP is a fair system for everyone. It is only right that there are campaign spending caps in place to ensure that the vote on the future of New Zealand’s democracy is also fair.

If you would like to get involved in keeping this cornerstone of our democracy, have a look at the Campaign for MMP website.

The Labour Party got 6% more of the vote than the Liberal Democrat Party but they got over 400% more seats- seem fair to you?

MMP is a much fairer system as pretty much everyone’s vote counts and so they have someone in Parliament who represents them (the obvious exception being votes for a party that doesn’t reach the 5% threshold. This counted out NZ First in the 2008 election, and if Britain had a similar system it would have counted out the BNP who only got 1.9%of the vote – not that I’m suggesting there are parallels between those parties

As you all know by now, there is a MMP referendum coming in 2011 and while the process is generally fair. There is a glaring omission in the lack of campaign spending caps as this means the pro-FPP groups will be able to spend as much as they want trying to buy a result.

 The MMP referendum Bill is currently before Select Committee – if you would like to make a submission on it, have a look at our guide.

 If you would like to be more involved more in the fight to save democracy, check out the Campaign for MMP website.

Secretariat
Electoral Legislation Committee
Parliament Buildings
Wellington

The Bill sets out the nuts and bolts for next year’s Referendum on MMP. The format of the ballot paper follows the 1992 Referendum: Part A, do you wish to retain MMP or not; and Part B, irrespective of how you voted in Part A, which alternative voting system would you prefer.

The choice for alternatives to MMP is from First Past the Post (the United Kingdom system – they are in the middle of an election campaign), Preferential Vote (the Aussie system for their House of Representatives) and Supplementary member (try Hungry for a current example – they’ve just held an election). These are all non-proportional systems.  The fourth option is the largely proportional Single Transferable Vote (STV, try Ireland for an example of how it works).

The Referendum will run concurrently with the next General Election, and if there is a need for a run-off between MMP and one of the four systems a further Referendum will be held at 2014 General Election. This is a sound timetable, giving adequate time for public information and public consultation.

The Bill states that a review of MMP must take place (under the auspices of the Electoral Commission) if people vote to retain MMP. It is important that people are aware of this option and the opportunity to improve on the current MMP system.

The review will look at thresholds (currently a party needs 5% of the popular vote or one electorate to get into Parliament), overhang (currently we have 2 extra seats in Parliament as the Maori Party has more electorate MPs than their percentage of the popular vote entitles them to) and issues like candidates standing both in an electorate and on the party list.

The merit of MMP is the ability to tweak. The German MMP was tweaked when the electorate seat threshold was changed from one to three seats.

The controversial aspect of the Bill is lack of a cap on advertising regime. There is no requirement for large advertisers to disclose how much they are spending. The rationale for this lack is to foster a robust debate – this is pretty weak.

There should be fairness for participants in the debate on MMP. The present lack of spending limits undermines the democratic process. It gives undue influence to those with lots of money. Rational debate should not be overwhelmed by lobby groups able to spend millions on television, radio and newspaper advertising. Remember the 2005 Exclusive Brethren campaign to discredit the Green Party, or the initial fight to get MMP when big business interests spent huge sums of money on full page newspaper and endless television advertisements.

MMP is the fairest electoral system. It allows everyone’s vote to count wherever we live and irrespective of what political party we support. It would be a tragedy to go back to the days where only a few people in marginal electorates decided elections and we get the Government we don’t deserve.

But how inefficient is it, really? How many votes are wasted in this manner? Well, someone with a statistics mind has come up with a way to measure this, and the results are quite scary.

It is clear that [FPP] is hugely inefficient at translating the will of the people into the result of a general election. The [UK FPP] system is only 25% efficient – whereas some sort of proportional representation system would approach 100% efficiency (for example the 2004 European Elections were about 96% efficient).

It betrays the fundamental principle of democracy:  one person one vote.

This startling conclusion was reached by calculating, for each electorate in the UK, how marginal that electorate is and the amount of people in that electorate. Marginality is calculated based on how many times the electorate has changed hands in the past. If it rarely changes hands then votes are worth less. Electorates with higher populations still only get one MP to represent them, so the votes of people who live there are worth less.

A web site has been created which will let you get the voter power index (VPI) for any electorate in the UK. I searched for ‘london’ and got Londonberry East which has a VPI of 0.1, meaning each voter has the equivalent of 0.1 votes. Glasgow North-West is 0.045. Stunning. These kinds of results start to make a lot of sense.

I’d be very interested to see if there was a correlation between VPI and income, crime, or any other social indicator. How would having no political power affect you?

The Greens will be supporting the Bill to Select Committee, despite concerns about the lack of spending caps for those campaigning in the referendum.  Hopefully that issue will be addressed by the Select Committee.

So it is timely to recall how much of a perverse affront to democracy the First Past the Post (FPP) electoral system New Zealanders threw out in 1993 was.

The United Kingdom still has an FPP electoral system, and is in the middle of an election campaign at the moment.  One recent poll put the Liberal Democrats on 33% of the vote, the Conservatives on 32%, and Labour on 26%.  But translate that poll result into seats in the UK Parliament and we get this absurdity:

The Liberal Democrats get only slightly more than half the seats Labour gets, despite being the highest polling party, and Labour gets the most seats despite trailing well behind in third place.

The same undemocratic FPP system here saw the National Party winning a majority of seats and forming governments without the need for a coalition partner in both 1978 and 1981, despite receiving fewer votes than the Labour Party in each of those elections.

Why on earth would anyone want to go back to that or to the similarly undemocratic Supplementary Member electoral system ?

Hat Tip: No Right Turn

Last week Metiria grilled Minister Power about caps in the House.