Brian Rudman: Expedient Brash takes a u-turn

As leader of the Act Party, Don Brash faces right-wing campaigners striving to bring down the voting system he now depends on. Photo / APN

It doesn't appear that Don Brash has noticed the awful collision about to occur between two of his various crusades. Nor realised how messy and self-defeating the encounter could be.

In a previous incarnation as leader of the National Party in 2005, Dr Brash pledged on behalf of the party that when it became the Government, it would hold a referendum on MMP, the voting system that he and others on the right of the political spectrum have always opposed.

At November's general election, this referendum will finally take place. But since he made that commitment, Dr Brash has moved on, recently seizing control of National's stern sister, the Act Party, a party that wouldn't exist except for the gift of proportionality that MMP provides.

Last weekend, as media reports revealed a group of National and Act supporters were busy drawing up their anti-MMP battle plans, Dr Brash was busy unveiling Act's candidate for the Eden electorate, former Auckland mayor and longtime National Cabinet minister John Banks.

Dr Brash is smart enough to appreciate he is personally unelectable, so he cast about for someone who is.

Mr Banks was quick to claim credit as Act's secret weapon, the only candidate in their motley crew who could win an electorate seat, thus dragging several other list MPs into Parliament on his coat tails. All courtesy of MMP, the voting system Dr Brash so dislikes that he organised a referendum in the hope it would be thrown out.

After his uncontested selection, Mr Banks was his typically cocky self, nominating himself a ministerial post in the "commerce" field as due reward for bringing in "five or six or seven or 10" Act MPs in his slipstream "to help reinforce the National Party Government".

He told National Radio afterwards that "clearly National won't get there on its own, certainly in 2014 and unlikely this year. It will need a coalition partner".

He archly suggested he and Dr Brash would be more palatable than Hone Harawira, Annette Sykes and John Minto.

Mr Banks' scenario harks back to the mid-1990s, when he and his National Party colleagues sat around agonising over how they would handle the advent of MMP.

Some, like current Foreign Minister Murray McCully, worried at the time that the party would split along its natural fault line between the conservative cow cockies and the liberal urbanites.

Others of a more Machiavellian bent - somehow Maurice Williamson comes to mind - argued for giving nature a helping hand.

The proposal was for the party to deliberately split itself in two to take advantage of the two-vote system that came with MMP.

One of the "National" parties would field a full slate of electorate candidates, while the shadow National Party would just field a list of candidates.

National supporters would vote their electorate vote for one party, and their list vote for the "front" party.

As a result, went the dream, there'd be National MPs hanging from the rafters of Parliament when it was all over.

Wiser heads prevailed, and that scenario never saw the light of day. But what Dr Brash and Mr Banks are now openly bragging about as their plan for Epsom is a similar gaming of the MMP system.

Two long-standing National Party members, one a former leader, ruthlessly take over the dying Act Party, go through an instant conversion of faith, and suddenly emerge as saviours, not just of Act, but of National as well. All courtesy of MMP.

Of course for Epsom voters, this is hardly new. In the 2005 and 2008 elections, National gave their supporters a broad nudge and wink to vote Act leader Rodney Hide as electorate MP and give their list vote for National, and they obliged, returning Mr Hide both times.

What is different this time is to have the scourge of MMP, Dr Brash, now using MMP to get him back into Parliament as the saviour of the nation.

It's all enough to give MMP a bad name. Which, with the referendum on its fate looming large, leaves supporters of the system and, more to the point, opponents of the system, in something of a quandary.

The campaigners against the system are also likely supporters of Act, who are actively exploiting MMP to their advantage. If there are fingers to be pointed in the upcoming campaign against MMP, it's the blatant exploitation of the system by the right to ensure Act keeps staggering into Parliament.

As a supporter of MMP, I would argue that getting a more proportional spread of views in Parliament outweighs such manipulations.

But just how opponents of MMP can endorse the jiggery-pokery going on in Epsom while campaigning against the system that makes it possible is another question.