Letters: Under MMP, what does a mandate for change look like?

What does a mandate look like under the MMP voting system? Photo / Bevan Conley

Letters to the Editor

I am surprised to see yet another letter (Virginia Buckland, Herald on Sunday, December 3), on the lack of “broad mandate” that governments, or in this case the National Party, have to govern, when they received less than some arbitrary percentage of votes in the election.

I am unclear as to what percentage Virginia Buckland would consider a broad enough mandate to justify “sweeping and immediate changes”. But I think there would be plenty of sniping, if the new Government only introduced minor and tentative changes.

It seems several writers on this subject have a fundamental misunderstanding of how MMP is intended to work. Its intention was surely to get away from the old First Past Post system, which generally resulted in one party getting a clear majority of MPs. So it is almost inevitable that even the most successful party will not get over 50 per cent of the votes.

In this case, National got around 38 per cent. Labour only got around 27 per cent, and other parties all much lower.

That’s about as clear a mandate as you normally get with MMP, unless you think of the very unusual result in 2020 when Labour got around 50 per cent. But even then, you could say half of voters did not agree with its policies at the time. Even less apparently agreed with the use it made of the mandate it was given.

Also arguing that National’s coalition partner’s policies do not have a mandate, because they only got 5 or 10 per cent of votes, is pointless.

The system is the system, and the rules are the rules. I assume the whole point of MMP (whether you like it or not) is to encourage the formation of coalition governments so smaller parties, representing smaller interest groups in the population, get a chance to have their views taken into account and contribute to overall government policy. Obviously those smaller parties will not join a coalition unless they get some of their policies adopted.

Chris Chivers, Waiake.

On the other hand ...

The coalition Government’s mandate to dump a list of legislation brought in by the previous Government is highly questionable. Claire Trevett (NZ Herald, December 2) wrote “nobody can argue the Government doesn’t have a mandate for its great repeal: the three parties had campaigned heavily on most of them”.

Election results show that together the coalition partners won 52.8 per cent of the vote – hardly a landslide, or a mandate for major change.

Repealing the amendment to the Smokefree Environments Act 1990 is attracting an angry and totally justified response from across our health sector and internationally - 22,000 have already signed a petition to reverse the repeal, in a matter of days.

This decision raises many questions about how legislation passed through years of public consultation, thorough assessment of evidence, and huge cost to public funds including lengthy select committee process, can be ‘gone by lunchtime’ without warning. None of the three parties “campaigned heavily” on this issue. There was no public debate, with any mention of the matter by the minor parties well-hidden in party documents. Health Minister Shane Reti was publicly supportive, with some reservations on details.

He must reconsider this unpopular decision.

Candace Bagnall, Te Henga.

Can do better

Christopher Luxon — Primer 1 School Report Epsom Primary: 1 plus 1 equals 3. 18 plus 17 equals 36. Teacher: Christopher could do better.

Bruce Tubb, Devonport.

What about worms?

We put our rubbish bin out once every 8+ weeks and our recycling once every 4-6 weeks as we have a worm farm and a compost bin. We have received the food scraps bin but do not need it (even though we have to pay for it).

When we lived in Roseville, in Sydney, between 1994 and 2009 a council worker asked us if we would like a free worm farm to participate in a trial. Unbeknown to us the council had been weighing the rubbish collected in our suburb. They continued to weigh the rubbish of the people who had accepted the worm farms. The outcome of the trial was that the average weight of the rubbish of the people participating in the trial dropped 30 per cent. Another outcome (for us) was that the worm farm produced a fertiliser liquid (worm tea) and worm castings that helped fertilise our garden.

Maybe the councils could look into this as a more sustainable and less labour-intensive option than current proposals.

Bruce James Goldstone, Titirangi.