As a political veteran said to me after Morgan spun his TOP for the first time, "starting up your own political party is a lot harder than it looks."
The last time a rich man successfully threw his money and time at the political establishment and caused a revolution was back in 1983 when millionaire Wellington property tycoon Bob Jones fell out with his old mate, National Prime Minister Rob Muldoon and unleashed his New Zealand Party on a fed-up electorate.
Comparing Muldoon's heavy-handed interventionist policies to those he'd recently observed in the Soviet Union, the Jones Party quickly hit the polls on just under 20 per cent. His libertarian policies appealed mainly to the Right, but the way Jones deliberately riled Muldoon, appealed across the spectrum.
However, despite spending more on the campaign than any other party, and winning 12.2 per cent of the popular vote, NZ Party won no seats. The old First Past the Post electoral system saw to that. But by splitting the National vote, Jones ensured a Labour landslide and the birth of Rogernomics.
It's hard to see the Morgan Party pulling off a similar coup. New Zealand 2016 is a very different place. Despite the Opposition parties best efforts in recent years, the polls show little appetite for change - let alone revolution on the 1984 scale.
Even if there were such rumblings, Morgan's professorial manner, his preference to sit about and worry each issue to death, is hardly the stuff of electoral rough and tumble.
On his website he confesses that "I respect both [Labour and National], and I'm happy to work with either. I sit pretty comfortably with either. My priority is to break the inertia that naturally encumbers Establishment parties and get through some overdue reforms to ensure fairness regains its rightful place in our society."
These aren't the words of a leader about to go into battle to wrestle votes and power from said establishment.
Partly as a result of the patent unfairness of the NZ Party failing to get a voice in parliament, the subsequent royal commission on the electoral system recommended a proportional system of representation to give a voice to minority groups. In the end we ended up with the current MMP system with a 5 per cent threshold.
This hurdle was put in place to ease the fear that myriad of miniscule parties, each with a single representative or two, would upset the orderly business of government.
The 5 per cent threshhold has proven to be a tough hurdle, particularly for rich men and their vanity parties.
At the last general election, the Kim Dotcom-financed ($3 million-plus) Internet-Mana Party crashed. At the 2011 general election, Colin Craig's Conservative Party spent $1.88m (mostly from Craig), standing 52 candidates. It gained just 2.65 per cent of the party vote. In 2014, despite some big name candidates, the Conservatives polled just 3.98 per cent and subsequently self-destructed as a party.
Now it's Gareth Morgan's turn. First he has to make peace with the cat lovers. Then he's faced with the problem of explaining why people should vote for him when he already confesses to being "pretty comfortable" with both Labour and National.
