Politics: MMP - One (wo)man one vote doesn't need to apply to MPs

Thresholds and coattails

It is clear that the presence of a threshold has had a distortionary effect on the outcome of elections. If a party is popularly believed to be too small to reach the threshold it risks not getting votes at all. Because 5% is six members, the effect of one party getting 4.9% and another 5.1% is that one gets no seats and the other gets six. This is clearly wrong. The problem is exacerbated by the coattails provision that allows election of an electorate MP to bypass the threshold requirement. The varying fortunes of the NZ First and Act parties can be attributed to this rule.

Setting the threshold at 1% would allow parties of one.  What is wrong with that? Yes it might result in a greater number of ‘independents’. That would make it more important for the governing party to be able to explain its proposals to parliament.  It might make governing harder, but it might also make governing better. After all having one ‘third party’ in parliament gives that party disproportionate power.  Having ten independents (say) disperses that power but puts the onus on the government to persuade parliament the merits of its proposals.  It may also result in some three and four member parties. These have had a good record of achievement in parliament in the past.

If the threshold is reduced to 1%, the need for the coattails rule disappears, which I think would be a good thing.

The role of list MPs

It was a Westminster tradition that once a person is appointed to parliament they have the right- nay duty - to vote based on the information provided them.  This is what parliamentary debate was about, and the original reason for ‘locking the doors’ – so that only people who had heard the debate could vote.  While independence of thought amongst MPs is discouraged by the whips etc, there is a long history of people being elected to parliament but because of a disagreement with the party direction resigning from the party - yet staying on as an independent. 

The change in law by the Clark government to force list MPs to vote with the party was, in my opinion, an unfortunate denial of this principle.  Prior to that act, the list MP was appointed by a party, but could nevertheless follow their conscience. The principle being that the people we elect (or indirectly appoint) to parliament are our representatives and they have a responsibility to listen to the arguments of the executive and vote accordingly.

If an MP has to follow the directions of the party hierarchy, they are reduced to the role of lobby fodder.  If that is indeed their role, we don’t need them.  They are an expensive waste of taxpayer’s money.  Instead, we could simply give the leader of each party a card vote representing the number of votes cast for the party and they could go into the lobby with that.
If the purpose of MMP is to give parties voting strength in the lobby proportional to the votes in the election, let’s do away with the list MPs altogether, allow each electorate to elect multiple MPs but give each electorate MP a card vote equal to the votes they received.  I could elaborate, but I know this starts to get outside your terms of reference.

We should nevertheless re-assert the principle that all MPs have the right to vote as they chose, whether they are elected by the electorate or appointed by a party. Unless this principle is upheld, there is no point in paying him or her to be there.

Dual candidacy

There is a lot of comment along the lines that ‘we voted that person out so why can they come back in through the lists’. Yet often it seems to me that you get more than one good person contesting a seat, and it seems unfortunate that only one can be elected. Furthermore, if the electorate is split on party lines, it is unreasonable that only one view is represented in parliament. Having electorate candidates on the list overcomes the problem to some extent but as the submissions to this review attest, it produces problems of its own.  It seems nonsense to have an election where both the labour and the national candidate are likely to get elected on the list, so the electorate vote has no meaning.

One answer would be not to have a list at all, but for the party quota to be made up from the top polling ‘runner ups’. This would ensure that the people in parliament were those who received the most votes in the election.  But it would remove one of the great features of the current parliament – the diversity of representation.

I think we should accept that under MMP we have a national election and that the electorate result is now largely irrelevant.  Viewed in this light, dual candidacy is not an issue.  
The alternative (discussed above) takes us away from MMP altogether.

By Elections

By-elections are similarly irrelevant.  If the vacancy is left by a party member, the party should nominate a replacement from its list MPs. An election would then only be held if more than 5% (say) of electors objected via a petition.

Note that whereas in the general election, it is unimportant who is elected to be constituency mp, in a by election it is important.  A by-election can change the party shares within parliament.  Whether you agree with this or not, it is certainly anomalous

Overhang

The problem with the overhang seems to be created by having too many Maori seats, or not taking them into account properly in calculating the overhang, I am not sure which. The future problem seems to be created by creating too many electorates. Since under MMP, the electorate vote is largely irrelevant, the electorates don’t need to be equal sized, and we could have fewer of them.