Mike Hosking: Time to have a serious look at MMP

COMMENT: Having said yesterday there wasn't a move afoot to change MMP, turns out there could be a move afoot to change MMP.

Winston Peters no less, who is in another one of his phases where he dominates political headlines, is making noises about rebooting the last review of the system in which we currently operate.

In 2011 when they looked at it, a few recommendations were made, like a four per cent threshold instead of five per cent. The coat tailing provision scrapped, the overhang potential limited.

The previous government didn't put it to Parliament because they claimed they didn't have the numbers.

Would that be different now? Probably, and in that lies a potential danger: Governments that mess with electoral systems damage the system's credibility.

The same way governments messing with retirement savings plans do the same.
It hasn't stopped them on the latter, so don't hold your breath on the former.

Is MMP perfect? No. Is any system perfect? No. So theoretically that makes it open to change.

The coat tailing is your most interesting example. Whether a threshold is four, five, eight or two per cent, it's an arbitrary number.

Two per cent and every nutter in town is in Parliament, eight per cent and next to no one is. So would four per cent bring in more parties? Well, history says maybe.

Do we need more parties? Well, it depends on who they are, so there is no right, no wrong.

But coat tailing is when you win an electorate seat, and as a result the bonus is your threshold is down to about 2 per cent.

In other words if you win a seat, and about 2 per cent of the vote, you have two MPs. Any other party would need well in excess of 5 per cent of the vote, to achieve the same thing.

That places an extraordinary weight on an electorate seat - is it worth that weight? Open to a lot of debate I would have thought.

And in this debate is part of the overall problem - tinkering might not in fact be the real issue. The real issue might well be the system itself.

Would MMP survive a real test if the blowtorch was put back on it? Should parties like the Greens and New Zealand First even exist in Parliament if they can't literally win a seat?

This current Government is dominated by a majority of list MPs. They have no constituents, they hold no local clinics, because they represent very few actual voters at an electorate level.

Is that the sort of democracy we want? If the Parliament is the people's voice represented by a local MP, how then can that be the case, when so few represent anyone but their party?

And if you subscribe to that view, isn't a local MP vastly more important and valuable? And therefore the coat tailing justifiable?

And surely the biggest MMP issue of all is the current example.

A party with seven per cent chooses who runs the country. If that isn't worth reviewing, I don't know what is.