Matthew Hooton: Calling time on the failings of MMP

OPINION

Voters are angry, but their planned remedy will make them angrier. Ultimately, MMP is to blame. This is not a call to return to the unfair first past the post (FPP) system, but there has to be a better way.

According to the Herald’s Poll of Polls, the two main parties’ combined support remains the lowest in more than 20 years. Some individual polls put the purple vote at its lowest level since the Labour-National duopoly emerged during the Great Depression.

All credit to Act and the Greens, which the Herald’s Poll of Polls suggest would have won around 10 per cent and 8 per cent respectively had an election been held last weekend. NZ First, The Opportunities Party (Top) and Te Pāti Māori (TPM) are also trending up — TPM scoring a coup with Labour’s Meka Whaitiri defecting on Wednesday.

But a low purple vote is the lead indicator of an angry population, suggesting low confidence in the two venerable institutions that have shared power since before World War II. And why not? MMP (mixed-member proportional) means neither Chris Hipkins nor Christopher Luxon dares to offer more than platitudes.

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The slump in the purple vote means yet another election to be decided by small parties. Just 50,000 or so party votes would make the difference for NZ First or Top, or even fewer in a low-turnout election. It might be mere hundreds of electorate votes if NZ First’s Shane Jones or Top’s Raf Manji make strong runs in Northland and Ilam.

If not Manji or TPM president John Tamihere, then Winston Peters may again choose the Prime Minister, most probably Luxon. It’s a bad movie we’ve endured almost every three years for nearly 30 years.

The overwhelming majority of New Zealanders will be furious if the likes of Tamihere, Manji or Peters again decide the election, but we shouldn’t make it personal. They’re just playing MMP the way its rules encourage.

Act and Green voters will also be disappointed once again whichever one ends up as the second-largest party in the next government. MMP encourages them to make bold promises to niche markets, knowing they’ll never have to follow through. On the issues they truly care about — say, tax reform or effective climate-change policy — they both face the larger party (whichever one it is) telling them that if they don’t like propping up yet another blancmange government, they’re welcome to try their luck with the other side.

NZ First leader Winston Peters is merely playing MMP the way its rules encourage. Photo / Alex Burton

But MMP’s worst effect is on Labour and National. Those with ideas who previously energised the big parties no longer get involved, preferring the more passionate environments of Act, the Greens, TPM or even Top. Labour and National have become nothing more than vehicles to get their former parliamentary staffers seats in the House. The existence of list MPs makes it easier.

MMP then demands that Labour and National focus almost exclusively on the same median voter. If they can’t — like Don Brash, Andrew Little, the 2016 John Key, the post-Covid Jacinda Ardern and it seems Luxon — they’ll be replaced by someone who can, like the 2006 Key, Bill English in 2016, the 2017 Ardern and now Hipkins.

But Prime Ministers know the job comes with the proviso that they don’t do, say or even think anything that risks their bloc falling much below 50 per cent.

Again, don’t make it personal. No doubt Helen Clark, Key, English and Ardern wanted their prime ministerships to mean more than they did. Hipkins, too, surely dreams of more than sausage rolls with the King and policy bonfires, real or contrived.

But the brutal logic of the MMP system forbids it.

A quarter century of MMP sees New Zealand drifting, whether on productivity, education and training, health, climate change, defence, welfare dependency or tax reform, and an important minority of previous purple voters have had enough.

The top rate aside, nominal tax brackets are not too far removed from when Ardern and Hipkins were in primary school, even if inflation has surreptitiously produced something like Roger Douglas’ flat tax, although at 33, not 15 per cent.

No matter how many reports are published by left-wing think tanks, there will be no comprehensive capital gains or wealth tax. Likewise, the New Zealand Initiative or Taxpayers’ Union can generate policy ideas, but National can’t listen.

When tax cuts or extra welfare spending are possible, they must be targeted at the median voter, who now pays almost no tax in net terms even as they feel they still do.

It’s nigh-impossible to axe failing government programmes, or even do seasonal pruning, lest someone kick up a fuss on TV. The Wellington bureaucracy grows unrelentingly, with Wellington’s so-called professional-managerial class doing very well. Oppositions kick up a fuss, but no government dare ask exactly what all the new agencies, policy advisers and human resources and public relations staff do, in case the answer demands they be sacked.

Broadly, MMP has frozen the basic policy settings from 1996, while encouraging ever-more indulgences for the median voter, and thus a slow drift to the left — albeit one so constipated it doesn’t satisfy those who genuinely want reform in that direction.

Again, this is not to criticise Hipkins or Luxon or their predecessors. Their strategies are exactly those MMP demands. After all, it was first imposed on Germany to stop it from invading its neighbours and committing genocide — and then in New Zealand to stop another Douglas or Ruth Richardson from emerging, or their equivalents from the left.

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The two benefits of FPP were that every MP was an electorate MP and that the median voter wasn’t omnipotent. With Labour or National able to win elections with around 40 per cent of the vote, they targeted voters in the fourth or seventh deciles rather than just those in the fifth and sixth. It meant they had to differentiate their offerings rather than converge.

Those wanting to make a difference, who now join Act, the Greens, Top or TPM, would get involved in Labour or National but had to compromise with the less gung-ho rather than luxuriously promise what they know they cannot deliver.

We shouldn’t go back to FPP. An alternative has always been something like Japan’s STV (single transferable vote), requiring every MP to be an electorate MP but offering greater proportionality than FPP.

It’s not time to debate scrapping MMP now. But if Labour and National continue to offer nothing but identical platitudes, someone like Tamihere, Manji or Peters again chooses the Prime Minister, and we end up with either a weak Labour-Green or National-Act Government, still beholden to the median voter, isn’t it time to blow the whistle on a failed quarter-century experiment?

- Matthew Hooton has previously worked for the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland.