Dialogue: We have no more need of a leg to Labour's left

By JOHN ROUGHAN

The thing I love about MMP is that it's designed for a people with three legs. I'm not sure yet whether we need three legs, or even if we have the ability to grow a third, but it is enormous fun finding out.

Like most of our kin, Australians, Americans, Canadians and Britons, of course, we got along quite happily on two legs, a left and a right, for 100 years of fully fledged democracy.

But by 1993, the centenary of women's suffrage, as it happened, the country felt itself lurching too far to the right and reached for a German variant of proportional representation to slow things down.

Naturally, the keenest advocates of that change were on the left - political scientists and splinter parties, particularly the Alliance. The Alliance campaigned like no other for MMP, running trailers around the streets, putting as much advertising into the referendums as into its 1993 election campaign.

Activists and academics seemed to think that proportional representation would neatly distinguish politics along their conceptual axis of left and right.

The theory was that you, the voter, would pinpoint where you sat on the left-right continuum and, with the contest no longer confined to Labour and National, you would find your precise ideological taste somewhere in the range from the Alliance to Act.

The trouble with the theory, as the Alliance has discovered, is that the vast majority of voters don't see themselves sitting somewhere on a left-right continuum. They walk on two legs and instinctively maintain a balance.

It was only when they felt themselves veering too far to the right under both Labour and National that they changed the electoral system and turned in significant numbers to the Alliance and New Zealand First.

It is almost forgotten now, but from 1993 to 1996 the Alliance polled well enough to seriously challenge Labour's primacy on the left. And New Zealand First did even better, using fear of immigration to grab the balance of power at the 1996 election, the first under MMP.

Then the strangest thing happened. No sooner had Winston Peters pulled the National Government back left a bit than just about all his voters deserted him. Political theory decided they had wanted him to go into coalition with Labour, though Herald-DigiPoll surveys did not entirely support that.

The next coalition had more going for it because the Alliance had announced before the election that, given the chance, it would choose Labour. But, can you credit it, the same thing happened.

No sooner had Labour and the Alliance settled cosily into the Beehive than the Alliance started to go the way of NZ First. Ungrateful voters evidently decided that since the Alliance had chosen Labour, so could they.

The Alliance plummeted in the polls and Labour soared. Soon Jim Anderton was in the same position that Peters had been in three years before. Only his seat stood between the party and oblivion, and his seat could bring only two or three others into the next Parliament.

Anderton is older than Peters and seems content to see out his career in this Government. So unlike Peters, who left the Coalition with as many MPs as he could save, the Alliance leader has remained and pushed the party overboard.

It has been a painful few months for leftists who followed Anderton (never very left) out of Labour during its rightward lurch. And hardly less perplexing for political theorists. MMP wasn't supposed to be like this. They are beginning to talk about the "curse of coalition".

More likely it is the curse of two-legged politics. The contest between left and right, wages and capital, equity and energy, Labour and National, may encompass the main tensions in any society. But surely not all.

It is quite possible there is another dimension to our politics; we simply haven't found it yet.

The one thing we ought to have learned from the demise of NZ First and now the Alliance is that voters have no lasting need of parties that are variants or extremes of left and right, or sitting in the middle of that axis.

National and Labour have that territory covered for most of us most of the time.

Our third leg, if we need one, is likely to be grounded in social terrain that otherwise finds no adequate expression in the Marxist divide.

Green politics could be that dimension, as long as it stands apart from the main contest. So far the Greens in Parliament have put themselves so firmly on the left that they too have cause to fear the fate of the Alliance.

Another obvious dimension to this country's politics would be an independent Maori caucus. If Maori have any need of political power in their own right, MMP is ready-made for it.

Maori, of course, are divided by the same occupational, educational and philosophical differences as everyone else, and tribal differences of their own.

But if they can resolve those debates in their own forum and present a united front to Parliament, they would be a force to reckon with.

And in Germany the durable third leg proved to be a liberal party, like Act without the racism, that survived in coalitions with larger parties of the left and right. But Act's distinction here depends on National reverting to conservatism.

It may be that New Zealanders have no need of a third leg, in which case we have no need of MMP. One or two more coalitions may suffer the curse before we can say for sure.